Almon Fuller (1816-1881) was a shoemaker at Wyalusing, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, from 1835 until 1856, when he moved his family to Camptown, Pennsylvania, and became a small farmer. Almon Fuller's daybooks describe the operation of a small shoemaking shop in northeastern Pennsylvania during the 1830s.

The Antietam Woolen Manufacturing Company was a small textile mill in Funkstown, Maryland, and operated a domestic store in Hagerstown. The collection contains an incomplete record of a small textile mill company in the early nineteenth century. The records include bills, orders, accounts, inventories, and cost estimates. Of particular interest are a series of reports on visits to similar mills operated by Du Pont, Bauduy & Company near Wilmington, Delaware, and by Fisher & Gougher in Germantown, Pennsylvania, with notes on workers, machinery, and administrative methods.

The Atlantic Dynamite Company was one of the largest manufacturers of dynamite in the United States between 1882 and 1904. These are four volumes containing entries listing employees, hours worked, and wages paid at a dynamite plant at Kenvil, New Jersey.

Betts & Seal was an iron foundry in Wilmington, Delaware that operated under that name from 1857 to 1867, but was established in 1828. The Betts family of Wilmington, Delaware, produced three generations of innovative founders and machinists. The records of Betts & Seal cover the operation of the foundry from 1828 to 1867. The result is a rare time-capsule look at the workings of a small but innovative foundry during the first phase of American industrialization.

Carnegie Steel Company was a large steel manufacturer primarily founded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) in 1892, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lucy Furnaces were blast furnaces that initially produced iron, but switched to steel. This item is a time book registering the hours worked by Carnegie Steel Company Lucy Furnaces employees in 1904.

Dowling & Kennedy were railroad contractors. The partnership of Dowling & Kennedy and its predecessor, Reynolds, Dowling & Company, were typical of the many small firms that subcontracted to grade sections of railroad rights of way for large general contractors. This collection contains account books, vouchers, and statements covering the receipt of monies from the general contractor and its expenditure for labor and supplies. There are also timebooks, payrolls, and correspondence.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company that began as a gunpowder manufacturer in 1802. In 1939, the DuPont Company created the Seaford Plant near Seaford, Delaware, to be the world's first nylon plant. The bulk of the records in this collection relate to the planning of the Seaford Plant's 50th anniversary celebration events; however, there is a small amount of documentation related to the introduction of nylon, as well as operation and wage statistics from the 1940s through the 1960s that would be of interest to researchers interested in textiles, manufacturing, or labor practices.

Hercules Inc. was a manufacturer of chemicals and munitions based in Wilmington, Delaware. The records consist of a sample of employee personnel records, or service record cards, that date from circa 1914 to 1933, as well as copies of the company pension and retirement savings plans that date from 1982 to 1990. The cards typically contain information on personal characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, age, physical appearance, and family, and also on occupation, wage rates, promotion, discipline, and reasons for discharge. The plants are scattered around the country and thus provide an interesting regional sample of the industrial workforce during the 1910s and 1920s. Pension and retirement savings plans are for both Hercules Incorporated and Simmonds Precision Products, Inc.

John Krider (1813-1886) was one of Philadelphia's most prominent gunsmiths during the nineteenth century. This collection consists of fifty-nine account books (1840-1939), including wage accounts (1853-1857), accounts for the repairs of guns (1904-1909), records of daily powder sales (1891-1893), and the treasurer's record for an unidentified gun club.

John Zimmermann & Sons, Inc. was a manufacturer of upholstery fabrics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for more than fifty years. This collection consists primarily of financial records from the company's founding through its sale to Merion Securities, Inc. It contains rich payroll and pension data of potential interest to labor historians. The collection also contains records from Zimmermann Mills, Inc. and J-Z, Inc., a division of Merion Securities. These materials are also primarily financial in nature.

Kennard-Pyle Company was a department store known for its women's clothing. By the late twentieth century, it was one of Delaware's oldest independent clothing retailers.

The Klots Throwing Company was one of the largest silk manufacturers in the United States, incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1894. The collection consists of only fragmentary records from the Mills at Scranton, Carbondale, Archbald, and Forest City in the Lackawanna Valley.

Lukens Steel Company was a medium-sized producer of specialty steel products and one of the top three U.S. producers of steel plate. The Lukens Steel Company records documents all aspects of the business from the early nineteenth century through the 1970s.

The Mount Carbon Railroad Company was incorporated in Pennsylvania on April 20, 1829, for the purpose of building a railroad from the Schuylkill Canal at Mount Carbon up Norwegian Creek to the forks and thence to Wadesville on the East Branch and Mount Laffee on the West Branch. The collection consist of thirteen laborers receipts issued for the construction of the railroad in 1829 and 1830 by William R. Hopkins, superintendent.

The National Industrial Conference Board, later renamed The Conference Board, formed in 1916 as a response by the business community to continued labor unrest and growing public criticism. Their records are an important source for understanding the business community's response to most political and socioeconomic issues. NOTE: The box inventory for this finding aid is not yet online, a full inventory is available onsite in the Reading Room only.

The Phillips family were prominent Philadelphia merchants and manufacturers over four generations. The records consist of four volumes of merchant and importer William Phillips (1771-1845), a daybook from the textile firm of Lewis, Phillips & Co., and an unrelated receipt book of Philadelphia wine merchant Francis Coppinger, dating from 1794 to 1795.

The Reading Company, chartered in 1871 as the Excelsior Enterprise Company, became the holding company for the system of railroads, canals, and coal mines assembled by its predecessor, Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company, between 1833 and 1896. The records are a fragmentary group from the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company; its successor, the Philadelphia & Reading Railway Company; and its subsidiary, the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company. They are primarily registers of employees and wage rates for employees in the Reading, Pennsylvania, repair shops of all three companies.

The Reading Company, chartered in 1871 as the Excelsior Enterprise Company, became the holding company for the system of railroads, canals and coal mines assembled by the predecessor Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company between 1833 and 1896. The Reading Company employment and real estate records comprise a largely incomplete and extremely fragmentary synthetic collection of material related to the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company and its successors. The collection comprises incomplete employment records largely dating from the first half of the twentieth century, records related to the employee pension program and the Relief Association, a small amount of contracts, and deeds and agreements reflecting the company's process of land acquisition following initial main line construction in the 1830s and through to the early twentieth century.

The records of the Steel Industry Wage Bureau document the process of establishing wage rates and job descriptions in the U.S. steel industry.

Virgil Baldwin Day (1915-2003) was a leading figure in American industrial relations from the 1950’s through the end of the 1970’s. Day worked for the General Electric Company from 1947 to 1973 rising to Vice-President of Relations Services in 1961. He was heavily involved in the company's negotiations with labor unions during the “Boulwarism” era at General Electric, and he was instrumental in the company's communications with its workforce. Day also served on a number of national boards and committees that were concerned with labor matters including an appointment to president Richard Nixon’s federal Pay Board in 1971. Day’s high-profile roles made him an in-demand lecturer on topics such as collective bargaining, equal opportunity employment, personnel management, and wage stabilization. The Virgil B. Day papers include correspondence, memos, reports, and clippings that document Day's career at General Electric and his work for the boards and committees he served. The collection also includes many of Day’s speeches which provide insight into the labor issues of his time.

The Industrial Research Unit of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania mission was to "study the economic and social problems of business." Herbert Roof Northrup (1918-2007) was chairman of the Department of Industry and director of the Industrial Research Unit. The records consist of surveys, notes, interviews and background materials for the studies produced by the Industrial Research Unit and its predecessor from 1941 to 1990 and collected and maintained by Northrup. The bulk of the files are from the 1970s and 1980s.

The William Shinn & Co. installed stamped sheetmetal ceilings, cornices, skylights, roofing, and ductwork and employed about a dozen workers and apprentices. It was founded in 1907 in Wilmington, Delaware by William Shinn (1883-1947), a tinsmith and cornice worker, and his brother John A. Shinn (1886-1955). The records are a very small sample of accounting items documenting the operation of a handicraft contracting business.