David Hey's woolen mill stood on Cresheim Creek in Mount Airy, Philadelphia — in a deep hollow west of the Germantown Avenue bridge, on the stretch of the creek that now runs through the parkland below Chestnut Hill. Cresheim Creek flows into Wissahickon Creek inside today's Wissahickon Valley Park, so Hey's mill stood on Wissahickon water. He called it the Cedardale Valley Woolen Mill. He bought it, with a second mill seat beside it, from the France brothers in the 1860s — and when a creek history was written in 1889, his was the last mill on Cresheim Creek still working; it was still running in January 1897. That is why he belongs in this collection, stated first, the way this project states it in every story.
His life is a climb with both ends documented. He was a Yorkshireman who came to Philadelphia and started, in 1855, as a rag dealer — buying the city's cast-off woolen clothes. Rags sound like the bottom of the world. In his trade, they were the raw material: sorted rags were torn back into fibre and re-spun into cheap woollen yarn called shoddy. Hey spent twelve years climbing that trade — rag dealer, merchant, woolen merchant — until, in 1867, the city directory shows him running both ends of it at once: a rag firm in South Philadelphia buying the raw material, and a family firm of woolen manufacturers on Cresheim Creek turning it into yarn. He lost one of his two mills to fire and kept the land; he rebuilt the other after it burned. And when he died in 1901, his estate papers — read in full for this article — put a number on the whole life: $39,679.81, most of it owed to him by his own son-in-law.
One honest note, because this project prints its limits: no single record says in one sentence, "the rag dealer bought the mills." The identification rests on converging records — one David Hey in one city in one continuous trade, steady addresses across six directory years, the directory itself placing his firm's mills at Chestnut Hill, the creek history naming him as the buyer, his obituary saying he ran Cedar Dale Mills for years, and the 1900 census finding a retired woolen-yarn maker of his name in the ward beside the creek. It is a strong case, printed at that grade. The deeds that would prove it outright are physical records, and this project works online only — so the purchase stays bracketed (1859–1867) and the grade stays as stated, wherever they matter.
What "shoddy" actually was
Shoddy was recycled wool, a century before recycling was a slogan. Old stockings, blankets, uniforms, and tailors' clippings were sorted by colour and quality, cleaned, and torn back into fibre by toothed machines — the tearing machine's trade nickname was the "devil" — then blended with some new wool and spun into yarn for cheap, warm cloth. It was honest, necessary work that clothed people who could not afford new wool, and a Yorkshire specialty — Hey's home county — carried to Philadelphia by Yorkshire immigrants. The word's slide into meaning "cheap and nasty" came later. Hey's mill made the middle product: an 1888 insurance survey lists what Cedardale made in two words, "Yarn-Woolen." He sold yarn, not finished cloth.
A rag dealer's climb, 1855–1867
Philadelphia's directories give Hey's rise line by line, and the addresses barely move — this was accumulation, not wandering:
- 1855: "Hey David, rag dealer, 551 9th ab Federal" — one shop in South Philadelphia.
- 1858: two shops — 256 North Front, on the wholesale corridor, and 1149 South 9th.
- 1860: "rags," at 1157 South 9th. The census that year found him (spelled "David Hoy") in the same South Philadelphia ward, his occupation read from the census image as "Dry Goods Merchant." Directory says rags, census says dry goods merchant; both print as read, unsmoothed.
- 1862: "merchant," shops at 1156 and 1159 South 9th, home at 10th and Ellsworth.
- 1865: "woollen merchant," at 1155 and 1157 South 9th, home at 1125 South 9th. Ten years from rag dealer to woolen merchant, at the same few addresses.
Then 1867, the hinge year. One directory page holds his whole business: his own line as a rag dealer at 256 North Front; his partnership Hey & Ridsdale (David Hey and John Ridsdale), rag merchants at 1155 South 9th; and David Hey & Brothers, woolen manufacturers at Chestnut Hill. The rag shop bought what the mill used. Nobody had written this part of his life down before — the only online account of David Hey before this project was a family-tree page that starts near his death.
The brothers — and the name the computer got wrong
The 1867 firm was a family firm: David Hey & Brothers, and the directory names the brothers — David, John, Levi, and Richard Hey — with Levi and Richard each listed on their own as woolen manufacturers at Chestnut Hill. The third brother was nearly lost to a machine: the directory's text, read by computer, garbled his name, so the researchers went back to the printed page itself and read it letter by letter: Levi — confirmed by his own listing on the same page.
Were they really brothers? David's will names his daughters, not his brothers, so for a long time the firm's name was the only evidence. Then the newspaper pull found a second witness: when Richard Hey was buried in March 1894, the Philadelphia Inquirer said plainly that "he and his brother David operated the shoddy mill on Cresheim creek, now owned and operated by David Hey." One brotherhood, at least, is in print — and the same sentence confirms the mill was still David's, and still running, in 1894. John and Levi's brotherhood still rests on the firm's name, printed at that grade. (David Hey is also not Moses Hey of Manayunk — a different man at a different mill, never mixed with him here.)
Four years later, the record does something unexplained. In 1871, the city end looks the same — Hey & Ridsdale, rags, same addresses — but the creek firm is suddenly styled John Hey & Brother, partners Richard and John, David's name off it entirely. No source says why — a reorganisation, a split between the brothers, a directory's shorthand — and this article doesn't guess. What later records show is David owning both mill seats and running the mill into the 1890s. Both facts stand, side by side.
The two France mills
The seats Hey bought stood in a deep hollow west of the Germantown Avenue bridge, near where Cresheim Valley Drive meets Navajo Street today. A creek history written in 1889 — Hotchkin's, told by lifelong resident David Hinkle — walks the creek mill by mill; two of the seats were the France brothers':
- A grist mill (a mill that grinds grain) built by Hinkle's father, later run by the France brothers as a shoddy mill, then sold to Hey, who "carried on the same business."
- A carpet factory the Frances built or ran above it, also sold to Hey, who "changed it to a shoddy mill."
When did he buy them? The directories bracket it: the France brothers are still listed as carpet manufacturers on Cresheim Road in 1859, and Hey's firm stands at Chestnut Hill by 1867 — sometime in those eight years, at prices no online record gives. One more date puzzle belongs to the seats, not to Hey: the creek history dates the France carpet factory to "about 1849," but an 1843 county map already marks a "France's Carpet Factory" at the creek. Both dates are printed; the deeds that would settle it are physical-only, so the question stays open. Which seat was "Cedardale"? The working mill — the ex-carpet mill — is the one the 1888 insurance survey calls the Cedardale Valley Woolen Mill: a reasoned match between the creek history's sequence and the survey, not a label any single document spells out.
Three fires
Fire was the shoddy trade's standing weather — shredded rags, oily fibre, dusty picker rooms. The creek history remembers one undated fire at Hey's mills. The newspapers, pulled for this article, dated it — and found two more.
February 8, 1865 — the rag warehouse. In Philadelphia's great coal-oil fire, Hey's city rag warehouse burned, a $10,000 loss. That was the South Philadelphia end of the business, not a creek mill — the three fires are kept separate here on purpose.
May 21, 1875 — "A Mill in Ruins." The Inquirer's report is the fullest single document of Hey's working life. His shoddy mill on Cresheim Road, Mount Airy — stone, 90 by 35 feet — was totally destroyed. The loss: $18,000 (machinery $10,000, stock $5,000, building $3,000), against only $7,000 of insurance. The manager, J. Stoebley, was badly burned getting goods out. About 25 hands lost their work. And the report notes, almost in passing, that Hey had another mill nearby nearly ready — the two-seat position in one sentence. This is the fire that fits the creek history's undated one: a Cresheim shoddy mill, destroyed outright, never rebuilt, its land still Hey's in 1889 — while the second mill carried on. The fit is printed as a fit, with its limits: the creek history names no date, and the fire report names no France seat. He never rebuilt the ruined mill, and never sold its land either.
July 7, 1880 — Cedardale burns, and is rebuilt. Five years on, fire started in the picker room of the Cedardale Valley Woolen Mill itself — where the tearing machines worked, the most dangerous room in the building. The whole property was lost; the insurance was $20,000, most of it on the machinery. This time Hey did rebuild: when insurance surveyors drew the mill in 1888, its main building carried the note "rebuilt 1880."
The mill the insurance men drew
On August 8, 1888, surveyors for the Hexamer insurance company drew Hey's mill building by building — the fullest picture of his works that survives. The Cedardale Valley Woolen Mill, David Hey, on Cresheim Creek: main building rebuilt 1880; a second building put up in 1875; four older buildings already about thirty years old — France-era walls, still at work. The mill ran on steam, except the picker house, which still ran on water power — the old creek turning the most dangerous room. Its product: woolen yarn. The survey gives no count of workers, and none is invented here — the record's only hands-count is the 1875 report's "about 25," at the other mill.
A year later, the 1889 creek history fixed his standing in the valley: every other mill on Cresheim Creek had stopped, all bought up by the Houston estate that was turning west Chestnut Hill into suburbs. The burned mill: "Mr. Hey still owns the property." The working one: he "still uses it" as a shoddy mill. Hey's was the last mill on the creek still turning — the end of a milling age on the Cresheim that had run since the early 1700s.
When did the mill stop?
Later than people say. A modern watershed history states, generally, that by about 1890 none of the area's mills were operating — but for Hey's mill the dated records say otherwise. The 1894 burial notice calls it "now owned and operated by David Hey." In January 1897, a man named William Raynor dropped dead of heart disease while working in David Hey's mill — sad news for Raynor's family, and proof the mill was still running, with men at work, in 1897. A photograph of the standing "Cedar Dale Woolen Mills" is dated 1895. The 1900 census lists Hey, 76, a widower in Ward 22, as a "Manuf. of Woolen Yarn"; his death record calls him a "Retired Manufactuer" [spelled so]. So the mill's end sits somewhere in 1897–1901 — the exact year is in no source found, and none is printed. Two smaller late items fill out the picture: in 1892 the Germantown & Chestnut Hill Railroad bought 1.5 acres from him (snippet grade — the price was not read, and the fact is flagged at that grade wherever it appears), and in July 1901 the city paid him for a sewer line across his property. He was a Ward 22 landholder to the end.
His death — and the three ages
David Hey died on December 1, 1901, at Wayne Avenue and Queen Lane, Germantown, and was buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery. Then the records start disagreeing about his age — printed here, not picked over:
- His death certificate says 78, born 1823, and gives the cause as chronic interstitial nephritis (a kidney disease).
- A newspaper obituary index says 77 — as does the arithmetic from his February 1824 Yorkshire baptism.
- His obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer, read in full, says "aged 76 years" — and adds that he died "of general debility."
Seventy-six, seventy-seven, or seventy-eight: all three are printed, none is preferred. The baptism register in Yorkshire that would settle the birth year has been cited but not read, and it is named as the decider.
The Inquirer obituary is warm and full of life — England at 25, an early factory fire and rebuild, the factory moved to Mount Airy "twenty years ago," a trolley accident three years before his death that broke his health, a Unitarian Church trusteeship, a lifelong Republican, four daughters surviving. Two of its details carry flags, as the full biography flags them. It says he made "jute" on South Front Street — against his whole record of wool and shoddy, that word stands as the obituary's word, not an adopted fact. And its "twenty years ago" (about 1881) sits beside the documented 1860s mill purchase without being forced to agree.
A second obituary, in the Philadelphia Times of December 3, 1901, holds the article's biggest open thread — and survives only as a summary. The Times is not in the newspaper collection this project pulls from (checked, not assumed), and the full text is paywalled elsewhere, so the summary is all that can be read: four daughters, a mercantile business established, "operated Cedar Dale Mills for many years" — and one striking claim, that Hey was "partner in the wool house of W.T. Tilden." Partner? The next section is what his own estate papers actually say about Tilden.
The estate: $39,679.81, and the son-in-law who owed it
Hey's will is dated November 5, 1897, four years before his death. It names his four daughters. It does not name his mill — the closest it comes is two words, "my mill," in his one surviving instruction to his executors: "close up my mill and other business" within two or three years, with power to sell any real estate. It leaves $5,000 to his daughter Mary Elizabeth Hey and splits the rest in four equal quarters among the daughters: Mary Elizabeth Hey; Selina Ellen Tilden; Ida Jane Lodge; and Emma Bratton, whose share was held in trust for her life, then her children, with a part set aside for a granddaughter, Selena G. Bratton.
Then, on January 8, 1902, two appraisers filed the estate's inventory — the most revealing document of his life. The estate totalled $39,679.81. But look at what it was made of. His furniture and household goods: $356.25. Everything in the mill: $471.00 — and the inventory lists the mill's insides piece by piece (horses; a blacksmith's and wheelwright's shop; waste and shoddy by an ice house; cloth and weaving rooms; mixing and picker rooms; the carding machines, upper and lower; spinning mules; engines; boilers; a water wheel; a fire pump). One surprise: the inventory lists goods and credits only — no real estate at all. The mills themselves, held for three decades, do not appear in his own estate's inventory. It gives the mill by its road address — "Mills, Germantown Avenue, near Mermaid Lane" — the same seat the creek story knows from the water side.
The estate's real substance was money owed to him. At Germantown Trust Company: $2,100.92 in cash. And then the obituary summary's name, twice over: cash due from W. T. Tilden — $18,751.64 — and a bond and mortgage from Tilden on two properties at 252 and 254 North Front Street — $18,000, two doors down from Hey's old rag shop at 256 North Front. Altogether, some $36,000 of the estate was Tilden paper.
So what was W. T. Tilden to David Hey? The estate papers answer in primary records, and the answer is printed exactly as they give it: Tilden was Hey's son-in-law (married to Selina Ellen), his executor (one of three, on a $127,000 bond), and the estate's biggest debtor. What the records do not contain is the obituary summary's word "partner." No directory lists a W. T. Tilden wool house; the big manufacturers' guides of 1857 and 1867 were both checked and hold no Tilden wool business (the later one has only a druggists' advertisement under the name); and no partnership agreement sits in the estate file. "Partner in the wool house" therefore stands as it began — one newspaper summary's uncorroborated line — printed beside the documented truth, never merged with it. Son-in-law, executor, debtor: that much is record. Partner: that much is not.
One more probate thread ends as an honest gap. The estate's final account — what everything actually realised when settled — sits in a book (Account Book 137, page 401) with no copy available online at all: the catalogue was searched thoroughly, the bound book was never filmed, and the loose estate file that saved the will and inventory holds no account. Its total is a printed gap in every version: the number exists, in a book, in Philadelphia — and under this project's online-only rule, it stays unread rather than guessed.
And the will itself holds one last wrinkle. It survives in two copies, and they disagree. The city's recorded copy names the executors "Thomas Tilden" and "John J. Hodge," a daughter "Jane Hodge," and dates the probate December 5, 1901. The original loose file — the one this biography follows — names "W. T. Tilden" and "John T. Lodge," a daughter "Ida Jane Lodge," and dates it December 9. Whether one man was read two ways by two clerks, the records as read do not say. Both readings are printed; neither is quietly corrected away.
Why David Hey matters
He is the whole shoddy trade in one lifetime: the Yorkshire immigrant who started by buying Philadelphia's worn-out clothes and ended by owning the last working mills on Cresheim Creek — rags in at one end of the city, yarn out at the other. He kept a valley's 180-year milling age going for three decades after its better days, through two mill fires and a burned warehouse, and when the creek's story closed, it closed with him. Almost none of this was written down anywhere before now — the only online account of David Hey was a family-tree stub. The directories, the fire reports, the insurance survey, and his own estate papers held the story the whole time.
Timeline
- 1824 — Baptized at Heptonstall, Yorkshire (February), son of Joseph and Nancey Hey. His death certificate will say born 1823 — the conflict prints, unsettled.
- c. 1850 — Comes to the United States; his obituary says he arrived from England at 25.
- 1855 — First directory line: rag dealer, 551 South 9th, Philadelphia.
- 1858–1865 — The climb: two rag shops (1858); "rags" (1860); "merchant" (1862); "woollen merchant" (1865); shops settled at 1155–1157 South 9th.
- 1859–1867 — Buys the two France mills on Cresheim Creek (the bracket the directories give; the deeds are physical-only records).
- 1865 (Feb 8) — Fire #1: his city rag warehouse, $10,000 lost in the coal-oil fire.
- 1867 — Hey & Ridsdale, rag merchants, and David Hey & Brothers (David, John, Levi, Richard), woolen manufacturers at Chestnut Hill — both ends of the trade in one year.
- 1871 — The creek firm appears as John Hey & Brother (Richard & John); David's name is off it. No source explains why.
- 1875 (May 21) — Fire #2: his Cresheim Road shoddy mill destroyed — $18,000 lost, $7,000 insured, the manager badly burned, about 25 hands out of work. Never rebuilt; he kept the land.
- 1880 (Jul 7) — Fire #3: the Cedardale mill burns from the picker room ($20,000 insured) — and is rebuilt.
- 1887 — Gone from the rag trade's listings; his old partner Ridsdale stands alone at the rag addresses.
- 1888 (Aug 8) — The Hexamer insurance survey draws the Cedardale Valley Woolen Mill: woolen yarn, steam power, picker house on water power.
- 1889 — The creek history finds his the last working mill on Cresheim Creek.
- 1894 — Richard Hey's burial notice: the mill "now owned and operated by David Hey."
- 1897 — The mill still running in January (a worker dies at his post). In November, Hey signs his will: "close up my mill and other business."
- 1901 (Jul 24) — The city pays him for a sewer line across his property.
- 1901 (Dec 1) — Dies at Wayne Avenue and Queen Lane, Germantown, aged 76, 77, or 78 — the records give all three.
- 1902 (Jan 8) — His estate inventory is filed: $39,679.81, the mill's contents listed piece by piece, and some $36,000 of it owed by his son-in-law and executor, W. T. Tilden.
A note on the pictures
No portrait of David Hey was found in any source, and none is known to exist. Under this project's rules none may be invented or substituted, and this article was not held for a photo. The insurance survey drawings of his mill were read for this article but are not reproduced: the site that hosts them requires permission to copy or publish its materials, so they stand as read-and-cited only. One real photograph of his mill does survive — the standing "Cedar Dale Woolen Mills," dated 1895, in the Germantown Historical Society's collection — but its rights are unverified, so it is named, not shown. The full photo log stands in Hey's IMAGES.md in the project files.
