Remembering Conshohocken and West Conshohocken Read Online Free PDF Page A

the lines were under construction. Ten years later, in 1919, many Italians found work for Montgomery County building the new concrete Matsonford Bridge. Many of the families gathered from the old country and began opening up businesses in the lower part of town along Maple Street from Elm to Fifth Avenue. That section of Conshohocken—formerly known as “Cork Row” because of the heavy Irish population—became known as “Little Italy.” According to the 1970 census, more than 30 percent of the borough’s population at that time was Italian.
    Germans had been working the Pennsylvania farms long before 1800, but when the Industrial Revolution swept through Montgomery County from 1870 to 1910, German immigrants from the western part of their country migrated to this country with industrial skills and dreams of purchasing land. Conshohocken became home to many German immigrants who, like other immigrants, found work in the glass factories, steel mills, woolen mills and Lee’s Surgical Supply Factory.
    The African American population had remained small in Montgomery County. In 1885, of the 97,000 county residents, only 1,763 were African American. While it is believed that Ned Hector was Conshohocken’s very first African American resident, thirty-five years after his death in 1870 the borough had 25 African American residents.
    By 1881, St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, located on the corner of East Eighth Avenue and Harry Street, was constructed to accommodate the growing African American population. In the early 1920s, Reverend Marshall Lee began recruiting members of the black community from the South, where Lee’s father had been a slave for many years. Lee found jobs for many of the men at the Alan Wood Steel Company, where Lee himself was employed.
    Today, Conshohocken’s doors remain open. This former steel town was built by immigrants and continues to welcome anyone, from any country, looking for the American dream. As of 2009, the Irish made up 25 percent of Conshohocken’s population, followed by the Italians with 20 percent. The Polish and Germans made up 13 percent of the borough’s population while African Americans and English made up 8 percent, with more than a dozen other ethnic groups making up the rest of the town’s nine thousand residents.
T HE B RIDGE —M ATSON ’ S F ORD , T HAT I S
    The bridge that spans the Schuylkill River connecting the boroughs of Conshohocken and West Conshohocken goes back before the Revolutionary War, when it was a ford made of large rocks constructed by Peter Matson. In the nearly three hundred years since that ford was built, the two boroughs have shared five different bridges: a covered bridge, the steel bridge that followed, a temporary span, the original concrete arched bridge and, of course, today’s modern crossing.
    In order to trace the name of the Matsonford Bridge, we go back in history to 1688. Nils (sometimes spelled Neels) Matson and his wife, Margaret, were granted land here. Nils and Margaret had eleven children. Nils’s son Peter Matson owned 178 acres along the banks of the Schuylkill River extending from Upper Merion Township into Lower Merion, and he would later purchase additional property. Peter had two sons: Isaac, his eldest son, and Peter Jr. When the elder Peter passed away in December 1778, his son Isaac inherited what was known as the upper plantation, containing 120 acres, formerly owned by Henry Pawling. Peter Jr. inherited the plantation at the ford where his family had lived, containing 178 acres.
    Peter Matson Sr. settled along the river in 1741 after securing a deed that described the land as being part of the Manor of Mount Joy and adjoined lands of Thomas Griffith, Thomas and Susan Jones and John Sturgis. Matson built his house on a knoll overlooking the river; the house was demolished in 1920 to make way for the ten-arch concrete bridge.

    The iron bridge was