In this project, UChicago and NYU economists Richard Hornbeck, Anders Humlum, and Martin Rotemberg have led efforts to digitize the surviving historical records on American manufacturing establishments during the second Industrial Revolution, making it easily accessible to researchers and the general public.
The underlying data comes from the Census of Manufactures in 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. As with the population and agricultural censuses, this effort relied on numerous enumerators (primarily U.S. Marshals and their assistants) who visited manufacturing establishments throughout the country. This effort resulted in establishment-level manufacturing information from an important period in American economic development.
Explore the data in the map below. For more information on the project, the scholars’ research, and to access the data, visit CMFdata.org.
Explore the Data
In each decade of the historical Census of Manufactures, each enumerator asked a standardized set of questions. Once finished, these original manuscripts were sent back to the Census Bureau office where the data were aggregated into county and county by industry statistics (which are also available on CMFdata.org). Once that work was completed, the US Census Bureau sent the manuscripts back to the states, where they ended up in various locations. In this project the scholars gathered all known surviving manuscripts, digitized them, and processed the entered data for release.
