Fletcher W. Hewes & Henry Gannett, Selected Industries in Twenty Principal Cities, p. 1 of 2 (1883)

This page is from Scribner's Statistical Atlas of the United States, published in 1883 under the direction of Fletcher W. Hewes and Henry Gannett, It is the first of two pages showing twenty major manufacturing cities in the United States and their leading products. There are six cities shown on this page, and the remaining 14 are shown on the second page of the series. The graphs illustrate how some cities specialized in particular industries, sometimes becoming a central manufacturing and economic hub for a particular product. For example, Chicago, IL, leads the slaughtering and meat packing industry, with over $85 million in production value. As noted in the Statistical Atlas, the amount of capital invested in the slaughtering and meat packing industry in Chicago made up nearly a quarter of the total capital invested in this industry across the entire nation (p. xcviii). New York, NY, led in men's clothing, whereas Brooklyn, NY, led in refining sugar and molasses through companies like the American Sugar Refinery, which later became the The Domino Sugar Refinery. Pittsburgh, PA, had a major role in the iron and steel industry, which grew in correlation with the urban and industrial United States. Between 1870 and 1880 alone, the capital invested in iron and steel nearly doubled, growing from $121 million to over $230 million in the ten year period. The number of people employed in this industry also saw an 81.78% increase over those ten years (p. xcvi).