ABSTRACT
While manufacturing and iron production began in England's American colonies during the 17th century and crafts began to turn into industries in the 18th century. It is during the 19th century when fullblown industry and accompanying commerce appeared, just behind the industrial revolution in England. The history of rural industry is much less familiar to most Americans than the urban factory. If the garden of the New World as a kind of Promised Land was a root metaphor during the 18th century in America, it was challenged as the metaphor of the machine infiltrated and become a dominant cultural symbol. Changes wrought by the "machine in the garden" were the changes of the industrializing society. Paul Shackel is interested in how the inhabitants of Harpers Ferry tried to reconcile the conflict between the garden and the machine that is, between competing cultural metaphors and ways of life and how workers coped with deskilling and loss of their craft to mechanization.
