Conshohocken - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

CONSHOHOCKEN, a borough of Montgomery county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on the Schuylkill river, 12 m. N.W. of Philadelphia. Pop. (1890) 5470; (1900) 5762, of whom 932 were foreign-born. It is served by the Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia & Reading railways. The borough is built on land which rises gradually from the river-bank for about 4 m. and then becomes quite, level, but the surrounding country is for the most part occupied by hills, several of which rise to considerable height. It has a variety of manufacturing establishments, among which are cotton and woollen mills, rolling mills, steel mills, foundries, boiler shops, tube works, and works for making surgical instruments and artificial stone. The place was first settled about 1820, and was for several years known as Matson's Ford; in 1830 it was laid out as a town and received its present name, an Indian word meaning "pleasant valley." It was incorporated in 1850. Immediately across the Schuylkill is West Conshohocken (pop. in 1900, 1958), where carpets and woollen goods are manufactured.

Considerant, Victor Prosper (1808-1893), French socialist, was born at Salins (Jura) on the lath of October 1808. Educated at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, he entered the French army as an engineer, rising to the rank of captain. Becoming imbued, however, with the phalansterian ideas of Francois Fourier, he resigned his commission in 1831, in order to devote himself to advancing the doctrines of his master. On the death of Fourier in 1837 he became the acknowledged head of the movement, and took charge of La Phalange, the organ of Fourierism. He also established phalanges at Conde-surVesgres and elsewhere, but they had little success and soon died of inanition. During this period he published his Destinee sociale (1834-1838), undoubtedly the most able and most important work of the Fourierist school. After the revolution of 1848 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly for the department of Loiret, and in 1849 to the Legislative Assembly for the department of the Seine. Considerant's share in the "demonstration" under the leadership of Ledru-Rollin on the 13th of June 1849 caused his compulsory flight to Belgium. Thence he went (1852) to Texas, but soon returned to Brussels, where he suffered a short imprisonment for alleged conspiracy against the peace of a neighbouring state. On his release he again set out for Texas, and founded at San Antonio the communistic colony of La Reunion. This experiment met with little more success than his former attempts, and in 1869 he returned to Paris, where he lived in retirement, needy and forgotten, till his death in 1893. The most important of Considerant's other writings were Exposition du systeme de Fourier (1845), Principes du socialisme (1847), Theorie du droit de propriete et du droit au travail (1848).