By the time the bank moved into Strickland's building, the bank's character had already begun to change. The original organizers had been among the city's most successful craftsmen (most employed many apprentices and journeymen and several had sidelines as merchants as well as their trades), but most still had started as apprentices and worked alongside their employees, but starting with the 1814 charter, directors no longer had to be active mechanics, and a few merchants, "gentlemen," and professional bankers began to join the board. As industrial manufacturing replaced handicraft, factory owners and managers replaced the remaining artisans and master craftsmen. The bank continued to specialize in funding the manufacturing industries and Philadelphia mechanics, continued to lead the world in building and maintaining the equipment that it required, but by the time it became part of the new federal banking system as Mechanics National Bank, it answered to mechanics’ employers, not the mechanics themselves.