Ann Baker Carson: Philadelphia Business Woman

Second Street, Philadelphia, about 1800

Birch's Views of Philadelphia

Ann Baker Carson Smith (1785-1824) was another of Philadelphia's female business owners. Ann Baker's father was an alcoholic sailor who could not support his family of seven children and eliminated one hungry face at the family dinner table by forcing her at fifteen to marry an ill-tempered, alcoholic ship captain who rarely contributed financially whether he was on a voyage to India or back in Philadelphia. 

With some education in needlework she used her sewing skills to support her four children at one point. Biographers Susan E. Klepp and Susan Branson find that Ann Carson hired female employees. Like other women she organized "domestic 'manufactories'. They were labor contractors who sometimes hired live-in seamstresses to help make shirts and other clothing, or who cut the cloth at home and distributed garment pieces to out-workers."

The Baker women were self-reliant, earning money through reputable occupations. Her mother took in boarders; sister Sarah Baker managed a school. In 1807 Ann opened a store, a china shop that supported herself, four children, her mother and siblings.

A China shop 100 years later

As Ann wrote her autobiography "Nature did not create me for a non entity."

"My mother, from habit and her early marriage, was considered by my father incapable of conducting any business...my father's pride forbidding the idea of his daughters' learning any trade.

Selling shoes 100 years later

Had he permitted my mother to keep a shoe, grocery or grog shop, now at this time our family might have been opulent." (How reliable a narrator is she?) 

Ann wrote that she boarded with Mrs. R on Third Street, 

across from the Mansion House hotel on the left here. 

She and her family changed residence many times.

In 1807: "I had now been one year without receiving any means of support [from Captain Carson]. I had never been accustomed to any employment, except needle-work for myself and family." But she made plans "all of which my mother opposed."

Queensware was the everyday china

"My mind was active and enterprising...not to be intimidated by her imbecile doubts and false pride....I sold all my superfluous furniture and as Capt. C had brought me a considerable quantity of china...which at this time was getting scarce [due to international trade wars] I determined to enter into the sale of china and queens-ware [stoneware].

Second Street, many decades later

I therefore rented a house in Second-street [for $500 per annum], a part of the city well calculated for business....Heaven smiled upon my endeavors and prosperity crowned my exertions."

Ann was not left a non entity. She became a notorious celebrity and died in prison in 1824. While Captain Carson was missing she remarried, wedding Richard Smith. Carson showed up years later; the two husbands got into a fight and husband #2 shot husband #1. She was jailed as an accessory to murder.

Walnut Street Prison from Birch's Views

Things went downhill from there.... Furious with a newspaper editor who refused to lobby the Governor for a pardon she hired kidnappers to persuade him to change his mind. Caught in the plot to kidnap the editor and/or the governor and/or their sons, she went to jail and so did her long-suffering mother. Husband #2 was hung. Back on the streets she was caught in a counterfeiting plot. She died of typhoid in the Walnut Street Prison.

Ann's autobiography was published in several versions under several titles, many of which explain a good deal about the plot:

Whether she wrote it or editor Mary Clarke ghostwrote it for her is confusing. She was probably not that reliable a narrator in any case---Ann seems to have gone off the deep end when her favorite husband was arrested. But her discussion of opening a china shop during the Non-Intercourse Act---the embargo that made imported china a valuable commodity--- rings true and as her biographers have noted gives us a little insight into women's entrepreneurship and the attitudes they had to overcome.

(Her mother might have given her more advice about a Non-Intercourse Act.) Bad choices in men appear to have been her downfall but she was, as she said, enterprising.

Read “A Working Woman: The Autobiography of Ann Baker Carson,” by Susan E. Klepp and Susan Branson in Life in Early Philadelphia, edited by Billy Smith. Here's a preview:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Cn5hogDb11IC&pg=PA156&dq=memoirs+ann+baker+carson&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhsL3C2oThAhXp1IMKHV82ADwQ6AEIQTAE#v=onepage&q=memoirs%20ann%20baker%20carson&f=false

The Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs Ann Carson (always a good title for a memoir--insert your name here) hasn't been digitized. but see a pdf of Susan Branson's analysis of the whole kidnapping disaster by searching for the words:

Susan Branson He Swore His Life

"'He swore His Life was in Danger From Me':. The Attempted Kidnapping of Governor Simon Snyder". Susan Branson. University of Texas at Dallas.