Matthias W. Baldwin

Matthias W. Baldwin was born December 10, 1795, in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. He was the youngest of five children born to a prosperous carriage builder named William Baldwin. Following his father's death in 1799, executors of the Baldwin estate proved unequal to the task, however, and his widow and children were left in difficult financial circumstances owing to their poor management.

Although he received a very satisfactory common school education, Baldwin's inclination and aptitude related to mechanical tinkering from an early age. Toys would be deconstructed and reassembled to learn their inner workings and spare bits and pieces of machinery would be put to new use in a makeshift workshop inside his mother's home.

In 1811 the 16-year-old Baldwin was made an apprentice jewelry maker to the Woolworth Brothers of Frankford, Pennsylvania (now part of the City of Philadelphia). Apprenticeship in these days was a virtually coercive relationship marked by long hours of labor and miserable compensation. In 1817, shortly before the fixed term of his indenture was completed, Baldwin moved together with his mother to Philadelphia. There the budding jewelry maker was employed by the firm of Fletcher & Gardner, one of the leading jewelry manufacturers of the city.

Baldwin proved to be a valuable journeyman employee over the next two years. In 1819 Baldwin quit Fletcher & Gardner and began to work as an independent silversmith. Baldwin quickly proved himself a skilled and innovative craftsman and developed a revolutionary new technique for making gold plate. Rather than the painstaking application of gold leaf to base metal, Baldwin's method of manufacture made use of soldering a piece of gold to the base metal and rolling the two together until the requisite thickness was attained. Baldwin's technique came to gain wide acceptance as the industry standard although, unfortunately for him, it was never protected through the acquisition of a patent.

Baldwin was a devout member of the Presbyterian Church and a consistent donor to religious and secular charitable causes throughout his life. In 1824 he was a founder of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1833.

In 1835, he donated money to establish a school for African-American children in Philadelphia and continued to pay the teachers' salaries out of his own pocket for years thereafter. Baldwin was an outspoken supporter for the abolition of slavery in the United States, a position that was used against him and his firm by competitors eager to sell locomotives to railroads based in the slaveholding South.

Baldwin was a member of the 1837 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention and emerged as a defender of voting rights for the state's black male citizens.

Baldwin married a distant cousin in 1827, Sarah C. Baldwin. Together, they had three children.

One of his last philanthropic efforts was the donation of 10% of his company's income to the Civil War Christian Mission in the early 1860s.