MANUFACTURING VILLAGES IN NEW ENGLAND BEFORE 1840:

"I don't know how much I shall thank you," wrote Samuel Fiske of Southbridge, Massachusetts, to a friend who had migrated to Indiana in 1837, "for . . . 'insinuating' that you have all the energy, life, and youth in the vast Valley, and that poor, old, insignificant New England has nothing but old men (and women forsooth) left to mourn her desolation." True, many "of those young men who may be expected to become members of the action, enterprising, business community" were leaving Southbridge and other New England towns for either the West or that "commercial Maelstrom of the Western Hemsiphere"—New York. "But as there are yet a few of the older ones and some pretty substantial, staminal ones [left here] too—we shall not disdain at present."

As hundreds of thousands of emigrants during the early nineteenth century left stony New England farms to seek better opportunities elsewhere, there were those who did fear that a great region was beginning to lose its moral, political, and economic influence within the nation. As it turned out, however, those who left helped to stamp the mark of New England on many of the new states farther to the west. Moreover, so many New Englanders gained political prominence elsewhere that at one time during the 1830's one-third of the members of the United States Senate and one-fourth of the Representatives had been born in Connecticut alone. Meanwhile, those who stayed behind retained sufficient energy to launch a number of movements for social reform and to lay the foundations of New England's important manufacturing industries. Indeed, the same year that Fiske wrote to his friend in Indiana, Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced himself "as gay as a canary bird with this new knowledge" that "the destiny of New England is to be the manufacturing country of America."

Evidence of the emergence of an important manufacturing region was to be found in many New England towns, including such Quinebaug Valley communities as Southbridge, Sturbridge, and Thompson, Connecticut. Samuel Fiske was himself resident agent of the Hamilton Woolen Company at Globe Village in Southbridge, which in 1837 turned out $150,000 worth of woolen cloth, had 125 employees, and was in the process of constructing a six-story brick mill. The Hamilton Company was successor to a series of struggling enterprises that had begun with the establishment in 1812 of a small yarn-spinning operation in an old oil mill near the bridge that carried the road from Sturbridge over the Quinebaug. Elsewhere along the river, there were three cotton mills in Southbridge in 1837, which hired a total of 172 workers and produced more than one million yards of goods.

Farther upstream in Sturbridge, the waters of the Quinebaug had been used since 1829 to turn the machinery of a cotton manufactory organized principally by two other Fiskes—Josiah and Henry. In 1837, the growing young village of Fiskdale boasted two cotton factories and machinery valued in the town's tax book at $40,000. This machinery consisted of 2,560 spindles, eighty looms, "and preparations" in one mill and eighteen spinning frames with 2,304 spindles, twelve spinning mules with 3,072 spindles, three spoolers, two warpers, one lapper and picker, five dressers, three dressing frames, two speeders, eight stretchers, and 145 looms in the other. These mills, along with four smaller ones in other parts of Sturbridge, that year produced $117,000 worth of cotton goods and had 188 employees.

Downstream from Southbridge, there were a number of small textile mills along the Quinebaug in Thompson, Connecticut. As early as 1819, Pease and Niles's Gazetteer had remarked that "A Manufacturing spirit has disclosed itself in this town; it has been directed principally to cotton manufactures." In 1845, the Connecticut secretary of state reported that nine cotton mills in Thompson were turning out almost three million yards of cloth per year and hiring more than 450 workers.

A number of industries besides textiles grew in importance in New England during the early nineteenth century. In 1837, some 39,000 Massachusetts residents produced more than fourteen million dollars worth of boots and shoes. Lynn was the state's leading shoemaking center, but the industry was scattered across the state, and in North Brookfield 850 men and women worked either part- or full-time to produce more than a half million pairs of shoes that year. Paper making also was an important New England industry, and there were chairmaking and carriage and wagon-making businesses in a number of localities. In 1837, some 600 one-horse wagons were made in Belchertown, Massachusetts. Connecticut was known for its clocks and metal products, as well as its textiles.

The development of the textile industry, in which New England took an early lead (in 1831, more than 500 of a reported 801 cotton mills in the United States were in the six New England states) that it was to hold for many decades, was perhaps most symbolic during the years before 1840 of the impact of industrialization on long-established ways of living. In Massachusetts, more men and women were employed in the shoe industry than in the making of cotton and woolen goods. But although capitalists had assumed a leading role in that industry and some division of labor had been attained before 1840, most of the work still was "put out" to individuals, who continued to practice traditional methods of hand production in their shops at home. Paper making, by contrast with shoe making and a number of other industries underwent considerable mechanization before 1840. But the textile industry before 1840 not only became highly mechanized; it also removed from the New England home one of the principal tasks of formerly self-sufficient farm families—the making of cloth—and brought together unprecedented numbers of people to work in new factories. In 1791, when Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was gathering information for his famous Report on Manufactures, correspondents such as Chauncey Whittelsey of Middletown, Connecticut, informed him that "our farmers are mostly clothed by the produce of their farms, improved by the labour of their families." Forty years later, when another Secretary of the Treasury undertook a survey of manufactures in the United States, his New England informants made it clear that homemade linens had been largely replaced by factory-made cottons and that the amount of wool being sold to woolen mills was steadily growing, while the amount of wool being made into cloth by farm families was decidedly on the decline.

To some observers, these changes portended nothing less than a social revolution. Senator Isaac Hill of New Hampshire, who was appalled by the implications arising from industrial growth, complained in 1832 that "the farmers' daughters are obliged to herd together in fifties, hundreds, and thousands in the manufacturing establishments, or, if they remain at home, no longer find that profitable and wholesome employment [cloth making] which was so highly beneficial to the prosperity and to the morals of the whole community." Farm women who ceased to spin and weave, however, were able to turn to the making of palm-leaf and straw hats and other home manufactures to add to their families' incomes. And the chance to work for a few years in the factories opened to many other New England farm girls a welcome opportunity for independence which had not been available to their mothers or grandmothers, who had had few choices other than early marriage or domestic service. As had been true at home, hours in the factories were long and the work was hard. But as one former mill girl recalled of the early years of the textile industry, when much of the labor was performed by Yankee farm girls,

It was like a young man's pleasure in entering upon business for himself. Girls had never tried that experiment before, and they liked it. It brought out in them a dormant strength of character which the world did not previously see, but now fully acknowledges.

The story of the early New England textile industry is one of gradual mechanization. Fulling machines of various types had performed the service of shrinking woolen cloth for New England householders as early as the seventeenth century. By 1790, most New England wool-finishing mills were performing the additional finishing services of dyeing, napping, and shearing the cloth. Picking and carding machines, developed in England during the mid- and late 18th century, were effectively introduced to New England during the 1790's and by 1810 more than 700 of them were in operation in small mills throughout the region, thereby relieving housewives of yet another tedious step in the preparation of wool for spinning.

Spinning and weaving were the last two major steps in cloth production to become mechanized. Several unsuccessful attempts to build Arkwright cotton spinning equipment were made in the United States prior to 1790, when Samuel Slater, working for Almy & Brown of Providence, successfully reproduced machinery with which he had worked in England. A small number of cotton and woolen spinning mills were erected in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut during the decade and a half following 1790. Then, during the embargo of 1807-09 and the War of 1812, scores of them came into existence. "Three or four years ago," according to an article in the Massachusetts Spy in 1817,

almost every body who had any disposable money, or could obtain it on credit, was eager to invest it in manufacturing establishments. The destruction of foreign commerce by the war, and the consequent scarcity of foreign manufactures, offered the temptation of profits too great to be resisted Farmers who had all their lives been independent, comfortable, and contented with their small but certain gains, were all at once seized with the desire of becoming rich. . . . Scarcely a town in the County [Worcester] in which a 'factory' was not put in operation—in some towns, two, three and more.

In 1812, according to one estimate, there were nearly seventy small cotton mills, with about 50,000 spindles, within a thirty-mile radius of Providence alone; by 1815, the number of such mills had about doubled.

The war years saw the establishment of the first spinning mill in Globe Village and the opening of the first cotton mill in Sturbridge, which was located in Westville, a short distance upstream from Globe Village. Known as the Sturbridge Manufacturing Company, this firm was typical of many such early ventures in its diminutive size (it was capitalized at less than $6,000) and in its owners' lack of experience in manufacturing. The shares were divided among eleven men, mostly residents of the neighborhood, who paid for a considerable part of their stock in the form of materials and labor in the construction of the stone raceway and the three-story wooden factory, which measured thirty by forty-five feet. One of the shareholders provided the water privilege and land for the mill, while two others constructed the 128 spindles of which the mill's spinning equipment originally consisted. The company's first agent was the Reverend Zenas L. Leonard, the Baptist minister in Sturbridge.

Many of these early ventures failed after the war, when more cheaply priced British goods again entered the American market. But the textile industry gradually was reorganized under more experienced management and with greater capital resources. Outside capital began to flow into previously locally owned firms. The Boston firm of Tiffany, Sayles, and Hitchcock, which had served as agents for the sale of the woolen goods produced at Globe Village, in 1829 took over the enterprise there and in 1831 formed the Hamilton Woolen Company. Josiah Fiske, the leading figure in the formation of the mills at Fiskdale, was a native of Sturbridge who graduated from Brown University and became a successful lawyer in Wrentham, Massachusetts, where he retained his official residence until his death in 1838. He apparently interested other Wrentham people in the Fiskdale enterprise, for the Wrentham Manufacturing Company is listed in the Sturbridge tax records as owning several of the houses in Fiskdale and Hiram P. Fisher of Wrentham owned the store there. Investors from Boston and Cambridge also became involved in the Fiskdale mills during the 1830's.

A further aid to the post-war resurgence of the textile industry was the widespread adoption in cotton mills after about 1820 and in woolens a few years later of the power loom, which had first been successfully introduced in the United States at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814. The weaving of factory-spun yarn previously had been done on hand looms by weavers working either at home or in the mills. It now became possible to mechanize all phases of textile manufacturing, bring them together under the same roof, and greatly increase the scale of production.

Nearly all of the textile mills built in New England before 1840 were powered by water, rather than steam. The earliest mills were small, required only limited amounts of power, and usually were erected along rather small rivers and streams. But between 1820 and 1840 the most significant development in the industry was the successful harnessing of major sources of power at the sites of such future industrial centers as Lowell, Manchester, and Chicopee. Lowell, the most famous of the early textile-producing centers, was scarcely inhabited in 1820; by 1840, the town had a population of more than 20,000 and was on the iteneraries of traveling Presidents and of many foreign visitors, who found in Lowell a refreshing contrast to England's manufacturing cities and a brief hope that the less desirable aspect of industrialization could be avoided in the New World.

Until well past 1840, however, hundreds of textile factories of varying sizes continued to function in small communities in many parts of New England—particularly in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and southern New Hampshire. Of fifty-five towns in Worcester County, twenty-six had at least one woolen mill and twenty-four had one or more cotton mills in 1837. Twelve of the thirteen towns in Windham County, Connecticut, had at least one cotton mill in 1845, and nine towns had one or more woolen mills.

New villages developed around these rural mills. In many towns, such considerations as centrality or proximity to routes of travel or to good farming land seem to have determined the location of pre-industrial centers of population. Many "center" villages were situated on relatively high ground and at some distance from running streams. The factories which were built along the region's streams and rivers during the early nineteenth century were often several miles from any established village. And since the factory workers had to have housing near their places of employment, it often became necessary, as one contemporary observer put it, to call "into almost instantaneous life a bustling village." The sites of many such villages previously had been either uninhabited or utilized only by grist, saw, or other small mills. Fiskdale, prior to the late 1820's, was a "romantic retreat," containing only a gristmill and the residences of a few farmers. Globe Village, prior to 1812, had contained a clothier's works, gristmill, oil mill, sawmill, and perhaps three dwellings; in 1836, in addition to the mill buildings of the Hamilton Woolen Company, a store, and a hotel, there were about twenty houses there.

Most New England factory villages were owned in large part by the companies that controlled the water privileges and operated the mills. The early inhabitants were usually transients, who remained only a few years at most and who "have no accumulated capital, and whose earnings are barely sufficient to provide them from one year's end to another with the means of living. . . . They are unable even to supply themselves with comfortable houses, or even to lay out their village in a tasteful or ornamental manner." Thus the corporation, which, "for a long term of years have the only permanent interest" in the village, owned most of the houses and the store—where wages were paid partly in goods—and often was instrumental in providing schools and churches, as well. According to the Sturbridge tax recrods for 1838, Fiskdale, in addition to two five-story cotton mills—one of brick and the other of stone—consisted of a sixteen-tenement stone dwelling, a boarding house, six wooden dwellings, a shoemaker's shop, and a store, all of which belonged to the village's manufacturing interests. The wooden dwellings ranged from Fiske's own "second" home and the agent's house to small tenements, which usually were let to two workers and their families. In the school district of which Fiskdale was a part, there were at about the same time seven additional houses, at least three farms, and a tannery. The Baptist meetinghouse which now stands at the head of the green in Old Sturbridge Village was moved to Fiskdale in 1838 from its original location near the Sturbridge common.

Although they were not uniformly attractive in appearance, the early factory villages were by no means the run-down, squalid communities with which industrialization has come to be associated in the minds of later generations. George Davis, in his Historical Sketch of Sturbridge and Southbridge (1856) described the mill buildings in Fiskdale as presenting "an imposing and handsome appearance. The dwelling houses of the village are also handsome, well arranged, and the most of them thoroughly built. . . . This village is so located as to present a handsome appearance, and, like many others on the Quinaboag, is beautified with very attractive scenery." According to Davis, Globe Village "presents, in population, buildings, and many convenient and tasteful improvements, the happy results of the manufacturing enterprise. . . . Whether you take your position on any of the eminences around this village, or in the midst of it, the eye is met by a blended variety of natural and artificial beauties."

Factory villages frequently replaced older settlements as the important, thriving centers of New England towns. The Ware (Massachusetts) Factory Village, the site of which was developed during the 1820's from "a desolate wilderness . . . into a populous village, by the 1840's had replaced the town's old center—situated farther to the west—as the center of population, commerce, and religious and governmental activities. The change was not always as dramatic as this, however. The growth of manufacturing in other parts of Thompson, for example, proved a boon to the old village on Thompson Hill, which "continued brisk and lively."

The stages and cotton-teams passing daily over its turnpikes furnished abundant patronage for its excellent taverns; factory operatives sought needed supplies at its numerous stores. . . . The jeweler's store established by Mr. Edward Shaw of Providence in 1830, was a very great novelty and attraction, factory girls delighting in its shining array of ornaments and trinkets, and men coming miles from all the surrounding country to buy new watches or have their old ones regulated. Coburn's well-known store was succeeded after a time by a very extensive millinery establishment. . . . Albert Whipple and James O. Mills enjoyed much celebrity and custom as fashionable tailors. Messrs. Baldwin, Hutchins, Kinney and Bates engaged in the manufacture of carriages and furniture.

The Thompson Bank, which has been restored in Old Sturbridge Village, was erected in 1834-35 in the hill village. As was true of the Southbridge Bank, which was also situated in that town's old center, manufacturers were involved in the establishment of the Thompson Bank and were among its leading customers. Manufacturers short of cash needed to meet their payrolls or to purchase supplies, for example, would have the bank discount bills owed them by their customers.

The growth of manufacturing and the development of factory villages had a marked effect on farming in New England. In the overwhelmingly agricultural United States of the late eighteenth century, fluctuating foreign demands had determined the extent to which most of the region's farmers could produce for markets. With the growth of the woolen industry, however, farmers throughout New England began to specialize in the growing of wool. Moreover, farmers living in the vicinity of factory villages also acquired nearby markets for dairy products, vegetables, and other foodstuffs. Ebenezer Ammidown of Southbridge in 1826 offered for sale a farm "within two miles of the village, and the numerous flourishing manufacturing Establishments, which furnish a ready and profitable market for all the Produce of said Farm, whether consisting of Wool, Butter and Cheese, or other commodities." As new domestic markets for their products became available, many New England farmers thus turned to a more commercial and less self-sufficient form of agriculture.

A number of the small textile mills of the early nineteenth century failed after a few decades of operation, and many of the small villages that once surrounded them soon disappeared. Other communities, including Fiskdale and Harrisville, New Hampshire, produced textiles until the twentieth century, but never grew out of the village stage. Still others, including Southbridge, Palmer, Ware, and Webster, Massachusetts; Willimantic, Connecticut; Claremont and Peterborough, New Hampshire; and Saco, Maine, grew into small manufacturing cities. But today, of course, the great days of the textile industry are only a memory in most of these towns.

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Roger Parks

November 10, 1967