Background
Cephas Grier Childs was born on September 08, 1793 in Plumstead Township, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of a farmer, Cephas Childs, and his wife, Agnes Grier, at an early age he lost both his parents.
Cephas Grier Childs was born on September 08, 1793 in Plumstead Township, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of a farmer, Cephas Childs, and his wife, Agnes Grier, at an early age he lost both his parents.
Cephas was placed with a wholesale grocer in Philadelphia, and in 1812 was apprenticed to Gideon Fairman, an eminent engraver in the same city.
In 1813 Childs enlisted in the Washington Guards, a Philadelphia military organization, and served during the remainder of the War of 1812. For the next twenty years he was prominently identified with military organizations in Philadelphia, and in 1834 was commissioned colonel of the 128th Regiment of Pennsylvania Militia. He began business on his own account as an engraver in 1818, and first exhibited his work in the Academy of the Fine Arts in 1824. Between 1827 and 1830 he engraved and published Childs’s Views in Philadelphia. In 1829 he became a founder of the lithographic establishment of Pendleton, Kearny & Childs, Philadelphia, and the following year formed a partnership with Henry Inman, a portrait painter, for the production of lithographs. During a visit to Europe in 1831 in the interest of this business, he suffered an accident on shipboard the results of which forced him to discontinue his engraving.
On his return from Europe in 1832 he took renewed interest in his lithograph house, which continued as Childs & Inman until 1833, when with George Lehman the firm became Childs & Lehman. In 1832 Childs became an editor of the Commercial Herald, Philadelphia, and, when this was merged with the North American in 1840, he became the commercial editor. With Walter Colton he purchased the North American, in 1842, but sold his interest in 1845. He was proprietor and editor of the Commercial List and Philadelphia Price Current, from 1835 to 1852, and did not retire from the commercial editorship of the North American until 1847.
He was president of the New Creek Coal Company from 1855 to 1864, with the exception of a short interval in 1858-1859. From 1839 to 1851 he was secretary of the board of directors of the Philadelphia Board of Trade, of which body he was a charter member. He also was a director of the Bank of Northern Liberties and of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, to which he bequeathed several important paintings by American artists.