1850 County-Industry Tabulations

While the Census published tabulations for county-by-industry manufacturing activity in 1860, 1870, and 1880, the only tabulations in 1850 were for overall county manufacturing output, capital, and employment. As many relevant economic questions are at the level of the county-industry, we created our own tabulations, to be as close as possible to the data we digitized from later Censuses. It is worth noting that the establishment level data is not complete, as we could not find records from Georgia nor Louisiana. We believe that we have complete coverage of the other places. In particular, the correlation at the county level between our tabulations and the 19th century ones is around .99 for the three overlapping variables.

In the included files, we include the sum of enterprise level activity at the broadest, leontief, granular, and detailed level, corresponding to the industry classifications in the microdata. Broadly, this was fairly straightforward, with two choices.

First, some of the manuscripts were unreadable (with “?” in the digitized data). We imputed 0 for the missing digits. Second, the 1850 Census collected data on the average number of male and female workers, and on their average total monthly wages. In order to be comparable with the other county-industry reports, which had annual totals, we multiplied by 12, though we know from other Censuses that some enterprises did not operate full time (see, for instance, Atack, Bateman, and Margo (2004) “Skill Intensity and Rising Wage Dispersion in Nineteenth-Century American Manufacturing.”)

1860-1880 County-Industry Tabulations

We additionally digitized county- and industry-level manufacturing data for 1860, 1870, and 1880 from the original published tabulations of the Census of Manufactures. In 1860, the Census of Manufactures also included data for enterprises outside of manufacturing—specifically fisheries and mining—which are incorporated in our dataset.

The county–industry tabulations list many industries in each decade, with some variation across years, which we concorded to enable consistent analysis. We standardized industry names within each county to match those from the national industry tabulations: 639 industries in 1860, 412 in 1870, and 331 in 1880 (over 1,100 distinct names in total). We then aggregated these into 193 cross-decade categories, and further into 31 broad industry groups.

Beginning in 1870, the county–industry data exclude certain “neighborhood industries,” such as blacksmithing, and other small industries with total revenues below $10,000. To account for these, we added an “other” industry category—representing less than 1% of total revenue—that captures named but otherwise uncategorized minor industries.