Definition
A mechanical pursuit is an occupation or trade involving the working or shaping of materials by hand or with tools, typically in connection with manufacturing, fabrication, or industrial production. The term appears primarily in statutory and tax contexts, where its meaning was defined by reference to the nature of the work performed rather than the scale or character of the enterprise.
Two related senses appear in historical usage:
1. As a trade or occupation: A mechanical pursuit describes the work of an artisan or mechanic who contracts, shapes, or transforms physical materials through manual skill or craft. In this sense, it is the individual's occupation that qualifies, not merely the industry in which they work.
2. As a business classification: A mechanical pursuit may also describe a business operation closely allied to or incidental to manufacturing. Under this reading, an enterprise qualifies not because its workers are individually craftsmen, but because the enterprise as a whole is engaged in the transformation of raw or intermediate materials—such as the mining and processing of iron.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Mechanical" as an adjective refers to things relating to machines or machinery, or to actions performed without thought or creativity. "Pursuit" means an activity or occupation to which one gives time.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's defined "mechanical" as relating to the art of constructing machines, or as characteristic of a worker in the manual arts; skilled in the use of tools or instruments. A "pursuit" was an employment, business, or occupation regularly followed.
The legal use of "mechanical pursuit" tracks the historical common meaning more closely than the modern one. Today, "mechanical" has shifted toward machinery and automation, creating a gap: a modern reader might assume mechanical pursuit refers to work involving machines, when historically the term encompassed hand-tool craft and manual fabrication work, with or without machinery. The legal significance lay in the nature of the labor—shaping and working materials—not in any particular relationship to mechanized equipment.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter "mechanical pursuit" almost exclusively in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century state statutory and tax exemption contexts. The term was a classification device used in statutes that extended exemptions—from property taxation, occupational licensing fees, or other regulatory burdens—to persons engaged in certain productive trades. Understanding the term is therefore prerequisite to interpreting whether a given individual or business fell within such an exemption.
Two traps are worth noting. First, the term's meaning was not settled at a single point. Courts applied it both narrowly (the individual craftsman working with hands and tools) and more broadly (the enterprise engaged in materials-based production, such as iron mining). Researchers must determine from context whether the court or legislature was using the individual-occupation sense or the business-classification sense.
Second, the term is jurisdictionally colored. State courts construed it to fit their own statutory purposes, and the definitions in Minnesota and Louisiana cases do not simply port across jurisdictions. A Bouvier citation referencing a Minnesota or Louisiana decision tells you how that state's courts resolved the question; it does not establish universal meaning.
For corpus researchers, the natural neighboring terms in historical sources are "mechanical business," "mechanic's lien," "trade," and "manufacturing." Statutes that use "mechanical pursuit" as a classification term will typically enumerate allied categories—agricultural pursuits, professional pursuits, mercantile pursuits—and those adjacencies help define the term's scope by contrast. When researching tax exemption statutes in particular, searching the surrounding statutory scheme for those parallel terms is often more efficient than attempting to define "mechanical pursuit" in isolation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the most direct historical treatment. Bouvier synthesizes two judicial applications: the Minnesota rule that iron mining constitutes a mechanical business (treating extraction and materials-processing as falling within the category), and the Louisiana rule that a mechanic who contracts and shapes materials with his hands is engaged in a mechanical pursuit for purposes of a tax-exemption statute.
These two cases point in somewhat different directions. The Minnesota application is expansive—extending the concept to an extractive industry on the theory that mining is closely allied to manufacturing. The Louisiana application is more occupational and craft-focused, centering on the individual's manual labor and skill. Bouvier presents both without resolving the tension, which accurately reflects the state of the case law: the term's scope was genuinely contested and context-dependent.
What historical dictionaries including Bouvier do not address is the term's relationship to later industrial classification schemes or to the broader history of mechanic's lien statutes, where "mechanical" work plays a structurally similar definitional role. Researchers who need to trace how "mechanical" work was defined for lien-law purposes will find that the lien-law cases form a parallel and often richer body of authority.
Jurisdictional Note
The documented case law construing "mechanical pursuit" arises from Minnesota and Louisiana. Given that the term appeared in state taxation and exemption statutes, its scope varied with each state's statutory text and purpose. Researchers should not assume that a definition drawn from one state's courts applies in another without independent verification.