The American Picker

I don't know much about my great great grandfather Patrick J. Smith, except what I can glean from the civil records.  There is no one now alive who knew him personally.  The best I can do is try to fill in gaps between the "bones" of the recorded milestones of his life.

Patrick was born in Ireland, but came to the US in 1857 at the age of 5. He married Ann L. Smith in 1870 at 18 years old.  Of 9 children, 6 survived, including my great grandmother Ann.

By 1880 he was 28 years old, newly naturalized, and  in a partnership with a guy named William Langley.  They set up Langley & Smith at 69 & 71 Middle Street. At a time when nearly everyone in Lowell worked in the Textile Mills, Patrick certainly seemed to find his own way. Langley was an older man, aged 61, and it's possible that Patrick started with him as a clerk and was groomed to take over the business on Langley's retirement.  On his census, Patrick referred to his occupation as "Works a Junk Shop".  Eventually Old Man Langley retired sometime before the turn of the century and moved back up to New Hampshire where he died of heart disease in 1904 at the age of 85 years.

Ad from the Lowell City Directory of 1880. 

Sometime in the 1890's Patrick had taken on the shop as his own - Patrick J. Smith.  As far as I can tell, he continued the business model that he and Langley had used..  Mostly scrap material from trade processes of the day, such as from builders, tailors, and especially the cotton and woolen mills.  The shop started out on Middle Street, but eventually moved to Market Street, before the turn of the century.

The industrialization of America was still well underway.

In the 1800s, it seemed most everything had a second life. Capitalizing on the trade of used goods, a fairly sophisticated reuse and recycling system evolved to feed raw materials to the sprouting roots of industrialism.

All over the country, even middle-class people traded rags to peddlers in exchange for tea kettles or buttons," Strasser writes. "The regional, national and even international trade in rags was brisk because they were in high demand for papermaking ... Grease and gelatin could be extracted from bones. Otherwise, bones were made into knife handles, ground for fertilizer or burned into charcoal for use in sugar refining. Bottles were generally refilled."  

Materials left over from factory production combined with that generation's tendency to employ the "make do or do without" sentiments, scrap dealers were flourishing.

While the businesses ranged from large brokerages with teams of laborers to one-man operations with little equipment beside a bag to collect goods, the successful scrap traders shared the skills of identifying potentially valuable materials and identifying markets for those materials.

Nonetheless, the scrap business remained a risky proposition ruled by the cyclical dictates of supply and demand. Scrap dealers played the odds, stockpiling material when prices dropped and selling when demand drove prices up. 

In 1900 Patrick and his family lived on 27 Washington Street, Lowell. By this time his son Thomas F. joined him and so he added "& Son" to the business name.

 

 Advertisement in the Lowell City Directory 1899

 But as the twentieth century wore on, the scrap game changed:

A defining feature of the industry during the second half of the twentieth century was a shift in the large brokerages and yards from family-owned businesses to corporate-owned businesses. While industry veterans credited factors from increased government regulation of trade practices and environmental health and safety conditions to lack of interest from the younger generations to stay in the family business for the shift, the scale of the industry and its investment costs grew substantially after 1950

Neighboring Saddle shop on Market Street, Lowell at 

the same time as Patrick's shop, 1889

 

I don't know when Patrick stopped working.  In 1920, on the last census that I find him, he's still managing "a junk yard" at the age of 72.  But by now his son Thomas was working as a clerk in a saloon, so the father/son business did not continue for long.  Toward the end he was living with his daughter and son-in-law, along with his wife and some of his grandchildren from his daughter Anne.

I believe that Patrick J. died in 1924 in Lowell, probably working until the end. A death certificate states that he died of Acute Bronchitits.