New York Maritime History Ten Eyck Pier Construction and Labor Accounts circa 1802

New York City Pier Documents

Manuscripts & Autographs

Ten Eyck, Andrew. Pier construction papers, circa 1802, document the financial and labor administration of an early New York waterfront building project through eleven contemporary bills, receipts, accounts, payroll records, and payment notes. The archive records a construction system at the level of daily transactions, revealing how materials were acquired, workers compensated, and payments transferred between Andrew Ten Eyck and Thomas Ten Eyck. Purchases of bolts and spikes connect the financial record directly to the material requirements of pier building, while the payroll entries provide primary-source evidence for research into skilled and unskilled labor, contracting practices, private infrastructure development, and the commercial use of New York’s waterfront during the early Republic. Members of the extended Ten Eyck family held commercial, landed, and civic interests in New York, although the individuals represented here cannot be identified conclusively from the supplied documents alone.

Eleven manuscript documents, New York, circa 1802, comprising bills, receipts, accounts, financial memoranda, payroll records, and notes acknowledging payments from Thomas Ten Eyck to Andrew Ten Eyck. The documents collectively identify expenditures for construction hardware, including bolts and spikes, alongside wages paid to workers engaged in building the pier. Their evidentiary value lies in the relationship between the records: material purchases establish the physical inputs, payroll entries identify labor as a separate project cost, and the payment notes trace the movement of funds between the two named participants. Together they demonstrate the process by which a privately managed waterfront improvement was financed and executed, preserving the otherwise routine accounting evidence through which urban construction operated in practice.

Individual documents are described at the level supported by the supplied information: [1–11] Ten Eyck, Andrew, and Ten Eyck, Thomas. Bills, receipts, accounts, payroll records, and payment notes concerning construction of a New York pier. New York, circa 1802. The group records purchases of bolts, spikes, and related building necessities; compensation of project workers; and several payments made by Thomas Ten Eyck to Andrew Ten Eyck. Exact document-by-document dates, page counts, dimensions, and contents were not provided and are therefore not assigned conjecturally. Average handling wear, with expected folds, edge wear, and localized soiling consistent with working financial papers; very good overall. A coherent record of the procurement, wage accounting, and private payment practices underlying an early nineteenth-century New York waterfront construction project.

Item #5890

Price: $225.00