In our neighborhood, between 1834 and 1866, there was a locomotive builder that dominated local, regional, and national production. By 1840, 30% of its production was being exported. By 1850 it was the largest locomotive builder in the United States. This company formed the nucleus for the 19th century equivalent of today's Silicon Valley, an Iron Valley if you will. The company had a 30-year run and then was abandoned to be cannibalized by the Baldwin Locomotive Works and William Sellers.

The Norris Locomotive Works had its peak in the 1850's when it turned out one hundred locomotives per year and employed 1100 workers. It started when civil engineer, inventor, and explorer Stephen H. Long (1784-1864, Wikipedia entry here) began fiddling around trying to improve British steam locomotives, with no success. He was joined in 1833 by new Philadelphian William Norris, a dry-goods merchant with no engineering background but a good sales pitch. They organized in a stable as the American Steam Carriage Company next to Rush and Muhlenberg's Bush Hill Iron Shop at 16th and Buttonwood Streets (at that time Schuylkill 7th and Fairview Streets). They broke a hole into Rush and Muhlenberg's iron shop next door and ran a line-shaft for power into their six-man enterprise. In 1835 Colonel Long abandoned the business, which then became William Norris Locomotive Works. Norris, like immediate factory neighbor Matthias Baldwin, knew the future was in railroads. He had hired a real mechanical engineer, Joseph Harrison, in 1834, and copied other locomotive designs. Harrison left before their first locomotive, the William Penn, rolled out in October, 1835.
 
Norris began in an environment in which the first rail lines were being established. One of these, the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, would leave its station at Broad and Vine and head west to the town of Columbia on the Susquehanna River. The biggest problem for the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad in 1832 was getting out of Philadelphia. The Columbia Bridge, built in 1834, addressed the problem of getting west across the Schuylkill River. The next immediate problem was getting up the 2,800-foot long 7% grade from the river to the top of the Belmont Plateau. A stationary engine at the top of the hill was set up to pull train cars up the incline using a hemp rope, a slow process. The breakthrough came on July 10, 1836, when the Norris locomotive George Washington was able to pull a ten-ton load up the incline, a feat heretofore thought impossible. Business for Norris suddenly looked promising. In 1836 Norris purchased six acres of the Bush Hill estate for his factory complex straddling 17th Street from Hamilton to Spring Garden Streets. He built a three-story erecting shop and turned out each locomotive in a month, employing 300 workers, and he gradually expanded along both sides of 17th Street. To read a brief article from 1841 on the Norris Works, see outside link here.