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Health during Industrialization

Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania State Prison System

This article considers the relationship among race, stature, and proximity to Pennsylvania's nineteenth-century dairy-producing regions. Previous studies demonstrate a positive relationship between stature and access to dairy products. However, Pennsylvania's dairy-producing region was also close to urbanized Philadelphia. Here a new dataset is used from the Pennsylvania state prison system to track the heights of black and white males incarcerated from 1829 to 1909. It is documented that both blacks and whites living in southeastern Pennsylvania near both dairy-producing counties and urbanized Philadelphia were consistently shorter than individuals born and incarcerated elsewhere, indicating that the effects of urbanization dominated proximity to dairy production. Black inmates were consistently shorter than their white counterparts. The well-known midcentury height decline is confirmed among white men and is extended to blacks as well.