Rhode Island History: Vol. 80, No. 1

Rhode Island History

Rhode Island History

Published by The Rhode Island Historical Society

110 Benevolent Street

Providence, Rhode Island 02906–3152

Robert H. Sloan, Jr., chair

Luther W. Spoehr, vice chair

Mark F. Harriman, treasurer

Peter J. Miniati, secretary

C. Morgan Grefe, executive director

Publications c ommittee

Marcus Nevius, chair

Charlotte Carrington-Farmer

Catherine DeCesare

J. Stanley Lemons

Craig Marin

Seth Rockman

Luther Spoehr

Evelyn Sterne

staff

Richard J. Ring, editor

J. D. Kay, digital imaging specialist

Silvia Rees, publications assistant

3 Introduction and An Interview with Anne Conway r ichard J. r ing

13 The Rise and Fall of the Ballou Textile Empire g erald m . c arbone

47 Forgotten Textile Mills of North Kingstown, Rhode Island: The Sanford Brothers’ Mills Jeroen van den h urk

o PP osite : Entrance to the Museum of Work & Culture, photo by Carol Dandrade

cover: Facade of the Museum of Work & Culture

back cover: Detail of The Mill Floor, photo by Deb Boucher

i nside back cover: Detail of the 1929 Parlor, photo by Carol Dandrade

Rhode Island History is a peer-reviewed journal published two times a year by the Rhode Island Historical Society at 110 Benevolent Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02906-3152. Postage is paid at Providence, Rhode Island. Society members receive each issue as a membership benefit. Institutional subscriptions to Rhode Island History are $25.00 annually. Individual copies of current and back issues are available from the Society for $12.50 (price includes postage and handling).

Our articles are discoverable on ebscohost research databases. Manuscripts and other correspondence should be sent to editor@rihs.org.

The Rhode Island Historical Society assumes no responsibility for the opinions of contributors.

© The Rhode Island Historical Society Rhode Island History (issn 0035–4619)

Introduction

As the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS) turns 200 in 2022, its Museum of Work & Culture (MoWC) turns twenty-five. To contemplate the former is a stretch for the average imagination; understanding the life and times of 1822 eludes our immediate grasp. The past, as the saying goes, is a foreign country, but twenty-five years is well within living memory—some might say it seems like yesterday, or perhaps the day before. Anniversaries, however, provide us with natural moments of reflection, and, frankly, if we have learned anything in our 200th anniversary year, it is that if we don’t chronicle our past, others will never know how, from the insider perspective, our organizations developed.

The following is not a comprehensive history but rather a brief sketch of the MoWC at twenty-five, just to jog the memory. It is assembled from letters, articles, and early interviews—the tools of the history trade. We have included a short interview with Director Anne Conway in which she thinks back on her personal reminiscences and shares her vision of future projects and programs for this extraordinary community museum.

The Concept

Following the City of Woonsocket’s centennial celebration in 1988, during which Mayor Charles C. Baldelli (in office 1985–89) identified the community’s need to preserve Woonsocket’s heritage, community mem-

bers rallied around the idea of a museum that would preserve and share the city’s history and culture.1 As with the development of any museum, it took years of planning and effort between the idea and the reality. In fact, it took the support of three mayors nearly ten years to see the project to its fruition. Baldelli, “along with the city Planning and Development Director, N. David Bouley, proceeded to convince the members of the Corridor Commission to support the proposed plan to locate a labor museum in Woonsocket.” Baldelli felt that the museum “had to become an integral part of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor.” Baldelli’s successor, Mayor Francis L. Lanctot (in office 1989–96), agreed that the community needed a permanent space to honor the city’s unique cultural and industrial heritage.

Energized by the support of local elected officials, a committee formed in 1989 quickly hired Christopher Chadbourne & Associates, a renowned exhibit design firm based in Boston, and the Hadley Corporation, an exhibit design firm from Buffalo, New York. The gathering of information and artifacts commenced. In 1990, Governor Edward DiPrete promised $270,000 of bond funds, but hard economic times delayed payment. Undaunted, the Woonsocket Industrial Development Corporation, the City of Woonsocket, and the RIHS agreed in 1992 to accelerate the lagging process, notwithstanding Rhode Island’s banking crisis. According to Albert Klyberg, at that time the director, “The Rhode Island Historical Society was honored by the people of Woonsocket with a request that it sponsor a grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant became the

a bove : Farmhouse, exterior, photo by Deb Boucher left: Farmhouse, interior, photo by Deb Boucher

catalyst for the Museum of Work & Culture and [the exhibition] La Survivance. In response to the grant, contributions were made by the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, area businesses and foundations, organized labor, and individuals.”2

A total of $3 million was raised to renovate the cityowned Barnai Worsted Company mill and to construct nine permanent exhibits and a changing gallery.

The Building

One of the first decisions the committee had to make was the selection of a historic building in which to locate this museum dedicated to their industrial and immigrant past. The initial site discussed was the Falls Yarn Mill, an early rubblestone mill built in 1850 and overlooking the river, but as plans evolved, the focus shifted next door to the old Barnai Worsted Company Dye Works, built circa 1915.3 Barnai Worsted manufactured woolen goods for hard-wearing military garments, as well as for men’s fine-fashion clothing. But by 1924, the original Barnai partners were bankrupt, and after a succession of owners and managers, Bar-

nai Worsted joined other New England textile producers that sought cheap labor in the South, relocating to South Carolina in the late 1960s. In 1968, the Lincoln Textile Company, a manufacturer of women’s wear, purchased the site to use as its dye house, employing about thirty-five workers. After more than two decades of use, increasingly restrictive environmental regulations led to its closure in 1990. It was just four years later that the museum committee selected the building for its project, and the rehabilitation of the property commenced in 1996 when the group hired E. W. Burman Company for exterior and interior reconfiguration and renovation work. Susan D. Menard, the first woman to hold the office of mayor in Woonsocket (in office 1995–2009), had predicted its opening during her first term, and indeed the doors opened on October 10, 1997.

The Museum

In its first year, the MoWC welcomed 16,000 visitors. The permanent exhibits on the first floor in 1998 were The Farmhouse, Precious Blood Church4, the Mill

Mill Floor (detail), photo by Deb Boucher

Independent Textile Union Hall, photo by Ellen D. Kawadler

Catholic Schoolroom, photo by Deb Boucher

Floor, and Baseball and Mill Life (which depicted the lives of players on mill-owned baseball teams and featured memorabilia from local sports hero and member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Napoleon Lajoie). On the second floor were the gallery for changing exhibits, the Independent Textile Union Hall for lectures, an exhibit on FDR and the New Deal, the Catholic School Classroom, Main Street, the Triple Decker (exterior only), and the Slater Club.

In 2000, the museum installed a figure, more of a statue than a mannequin, of Sister Emilie in the Catholic school classroom to more equitably represent the religious (nuns and brothers, as well as priests) from eleven orders who taught in the more than two dozen Catholic schools in the area since 1869. These schools were not only in Woonsocket but also in Burrillville, Harrisville, Pascoag, Mapleville, Cumberland, Albion, Manville, and Nasonville in Rhode Island and Blackstone and Bellingham in Massachusetts. A raffle to support the project raised $25,000 and thus was born the MoWC’s successful annual appeal and raffle for general operations.

In 2002, the museum staff added the 1929 parlor interior to the exhibit within the Triple Decker exterior, funded by a $25,000 grant from the National Heritage Corridor Commission. And in 2004, a section of the mule spinner on the Mill Floor was removed and Finlay’s Corner was installed to create a space for hands-on education and living history presentations.

In 2005, after having been lost for years and only recently found on an East Greenwich horse farm, Rhode Island’s boxcar from the famous Merci Train

was sent to be restored. According to Menard, the newly restored car was now to serve as “a thank-you to all our veterans and a history lesson in this city.”

In 2007, at the museum’s tenth anniversary, a group of strongly committed community members formed the Museum of Work & Culture Preservation Foundation to support the MoWC. Yet more volunteers came together to collect and install a sixty-six-volume archive to commemorate the heritage of Catholic schools in Rhode Island. Lastly, the foundation announced the “treasury of life” initiative, offering a place for family mementos to be kept and displayed. Thus, at ten years in, the commitment of the community was as strong as ever, and the museum was digging even deeper into the personal stories of the peoples of not only Woonsocket but also the Blackstone River Valley as a whole.

The second decade of the MoWC saw a steady flow of programs, temporary exhibits, and new initiatives, including a self-guided tour in French (2011) and the creation of all-ability programming (2014). But, it was another anniversary, the twentieth, in which new technologies came to the fore. In 2017, the MoWC launched its third decade by installing the new permanent exhibit Mills Along the Blackstone, which includes a multi-touch table with interactive maps and histories of twenty-five mills, and the Mill Memory Bank, a kiosk containing video interviews and profiles of former mill workers from the area. Built on broad and deep research into the mills using personal stories, directories, newspapers, and maps, this hightech and high-touch exhibit was the first constructed with the ardent support of the MoWC Preservation

Main Street, Triple Decker, exterior, photo by Deb Boucher

1929 Parlor, photo by Deb Boucher

Foundation. From its unveiling, it was a success, entrancing visitors of all ages and abilities and affirming for the staff and volunteers that the stories told in the museum, as well as the museum building itself, were ideal for experimenting with bringing emerging museum approaches into conversation with traditional exhibit design.

Reaching Twenty-Five

This year, to mark the MoWC’s celebration at a quarter century, I interviewed5 my colleague Anne Conway, who started as the manager of the museum’s store when it opened in 1997 but soon became co-director with Raymond Bacon in 1999, and has been director since 2013. This, of course, means this fall also is Conway’s twenty-fifth anniversary with the museum and the RIHS.

Unfortunately, the day before this interview, we learned of the passing of former mayor Susan D. Menard, who had been so instrumental to the growth and success of the museum, so we began the session speaking of her. Conway shared that she had a close working relationship with Menard and that Menard always paid attention to the museum’s needs. “She’s the one who carried the museum project to the opening in 1997. She worked very closely with Al Klyberg to make sure the museum would receive proper funding,” Conway said. With Menard’s help and connections, Conway continued, “we received substantial support from CVS and from the unions [AFL-CIO and some smaller unions]. I knew her to be a very fair person, and I think she loved the museum; she was very dedicated to its success, and I am just...really, really sad.”

Conway’s experiences with the museum are so vast and varied, it was hard to know where to begin, so

I asked her about the very beginning: “In your own words—what do you remember, where were you when you first heard about the plans for the MoWC, how did you get involved, etc.?”

“I am from Quebec City,” Conway said. Her family was in the hospitality business, and Conway Tours (her future husband’s family business) was one of their clients, which is how she met her husband, Peter.

“When I got married, I was a student at Laval University and then transferred to Rhode Island College. I wanted to be a teacher and was pursuing a primary and special education degree. When I transferred to RIC, my English was very limited, and so I figured, why not teach French?”

Conway graduated with a degree in French literature, but to be certified in Rhode Island, she had to take further courses and also do her student teaching—this while also starting a family (she has three children). She recalled first hearing about the museum project around 1992 or 1993, about the time she had her third child. “As a matter of fact,” she recalled, “my first time at the RIHS was in 1993, when my husband was launching Gray Line of Rhode Island [a travel tour company], and he hosted a reception at the John Brown House with Buddy Cianci as a special guest.” After that, she began to read about the developing museum project in the Woonsocket Call. She ran into Al Klyberg at an event at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet and informed Al that she was very interested in a position at the MoWC. “I didn’t really care what position, I wanted a foot in the door,” she said. They were looking for a store manager, and since Conway grew up in a family business (her parents owned a motel just outside

of Quebec City that was popular with tourists) customer service was “in the blood,” so to speak.

“Not long after I started, I began to fill some of the [administrative] gaps. We were so new, and nobody really knew how the RIHS would administer a museum outside of Providence,” she said. “We did not have all of the technology that keeps us connected today.” Conway felt that they needed to connect to the community and that “we couldn’t just open our doors and wait until tourists came in...if we really wanted to have visitors, we needed to create programs, we needed to have fundraising events, and before I knew it, these were all things that I wanted to do for the museum.” Now we were getting into an area that Conway is clearly passionate about: her community. So, my next questions were, “What did you enjoy most about community engagement? In what ways did you pursue that goal?”

“I think it was, first of all, really getting to know the staff that had been hired and their connections,” she said. “Woonsocket is really a small town, and everybody knows someone, and it was just amazing—if I said, ‘You know what? It would be really great to work with a local graphic artist because we could use a rack card to promote the museum,’ and then one of our front desk clerks said, ‘Oh, my husband can do that, he is a graphic artist for CVS,’ and then you start knowing people there [CVS]. And then you would turn around and say, ‘You know it would be great to have music at this event,’ and [someone would say] ‘Oh, I know this woman, Jean McKenna-O’Donnell, who lives here in Woonsocket, she is a jazz singer, and her brother is the great Dave McKenna, the jazz musician,’ and so the

Treasury of Life, photo by Carol Dandrade

next thing you know we have both Jean and Dave performing at a museum event. It amazed me, the talents that we had there, and how much people were willing to share because it was a new museum and they wanted to see it succeed.”

But the MoWC is more than a museum about the community. It is a museum deeply connected to the City of Woonsocket, both historically and in the present. So I then asked Conway to describe the MoWC’s relationship with the city.

“I think the relationship with the city, throughout the different administrations, has only gotten stronger over the years,” she said. “I think it is also due to the fact that we have a very close relationship with the City Council and that they are always willing to help the museum...I always say, ‘The museum is Switzerland.’ That’s how I like to describe it....Every mayor that I have worked with has always been supportive of the museum, and the City Councils, too; they often see the museum as a great asset to the city.”

I asked if the museum had the same sort of support from the business community.

“Yes, the support of the business community through the years has been amazing,” Conway noted. “Not only are they willing to sponsor events and fundraisers, but the majority of our business owners personally attend museum events and programs. Many of them also serve on the Museum Preservation Foundation.”

Between the collaborations, the stories, and the projects, Conway’s work has touched so many areas, but I wanted to know what she most enjoyed.

“I’m project driven. When I have a goal in mind,

I love to be able to reach that goal...right now my team is working on completing two exhibits that we’re going to open in time for the museum’s 25th Anniversary Gala on October 15,” she said. “After an exhibit is ready and open, people can enjoy it—that is what I take the most pride in.” Looking ahead, I asked, what are your aspirations for the museum?

“I want the museum to continue to be a welcoming place for people of all provenance [origin], of all ages and ability; to continue to be a place where people can learn about an important chapter of Rhode Island’s history,” Conway said. “We also need to continue to be relevant for our visitors and patrons. One of my goals is to continue to bring exhibits in to expand the theme of the museum. We have a museum that has an amazing story base...we are very lucky that it was planned and structured so that we can take stories and make them more current. With immigration changing—when you think of the community, and what it was twenty-five or thirty years ago, and what it is today—the demographics have changed. I do want our fifth-graders who visit with their classmates to see themselves reflected in our museum.”

The New Exhibitions

Hollywood Comes to Woonsocket. Over the twentieth century, Woonsocket’s six theaters—the Laurier, the Bijou, the Rialto, the Music Hall, the Park, and the Stadium—hosted a dazzling variety of acts, including vaudeville, Francophone performers, blockbuster films, and a multitude of live performances. Over the

past seventy years, floods, fires, and economic hardship have taken a toll on the theaters and on Woonsocket. Today, only the Stadium Theatre and Chan’s “eggrolls and jazz” remain. Both of these venues have kept the city’s cultural scene alive. The Stadium Theatre now functions as a community arts center, and Chan’s continues to host acts with national profiles and local roots, such as Duke Robillard. Hollywood Comes to Woonsocket reveals the city’s history as a national and even international venue—from Harry Houdini’s demonstration of “Metamorphosis” in 1895 to the East Coast premiere of There’s Something about Mary in 1998.

Flowing Through Time: Nature, Industry, and Communities of the Blackstone River. This exhibit fosters an understanding of the stories and transformations of the Blackstone River, not only through its role in the industrial development of the area but also its relationship to different communities throughout time. The addition of environmental and ecological components tell a part of the story that history museums often do not address. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Zap the Blackstone in 2022, this exhibit also contains film footage and photographs of the groundbreaking river cleanup project spearheaded by 10,000 volunteers and several organizations in 1972.

n otes

1. The information in this section is from Raymond H. Bacon, “Toward the New Millennium, 1988–2000” in Woonsocket Rhode Island: A Centennial History 1888-2000, The Millennium Edition (Woonsocket, RI: Woonsocket Centennial Commission, 2000).

2. Albert Klyberg, Foreword to La Survivance: A Companion to the Exhibit at the Museum of Work & Culture by Anita Rafael (Providence, RI: RIHS, 1997).

3. This section excerpted from “The Museum Building” in La Survivance: A Companion to the Exhibit at the Museum of Work & Culture by Anita Rafael (Providence, RI: RIHS, 1997), 45.

4. The oldest French Canadian Catholic parish in Woonsocket, leveled by a storm in 1876, rebuilt in 1881.

5. Interview took place on September 21, 2022. All quotes are transcribed from the recording, and text in brackets are my additions for clarification.

GERALD M. CARBONE

The Rise and Fall of the Ballou Textile Empire

The news struck Woonsocket, Rhode Island, like “a thunderbolt from a clear sky.” The Ballou Manufacturing Company, owners of three local cotton mills and the town’s largest employer and biggest taxpayer, had gone bust. Almost nobody saw the firm’s failure coming. As the Woonsocket Daily Patriot put it when breaking the news on April 20, 1876: “people in general are taken by surprise.” Suppliers of coal and cotton had given no indication that Ballou Manufacturing was in trouble—the company had enough of those essential materials on hand to keep at least one of its mills running for another six weeks without a shipment.

“It is not for us to say how the great fabric of wealth, so recently before the gaze of this community, has been imperiled, and now seems to be dissolving in the mists of liquidation and uncertainty,” the Patriot opined. “But the fact—for as a fact we must accept it—is as sorrowful as surprising; and we feel assured that we speak the hearts of the entire town, when we say that the deepest, sincerest sympathy exists for the family upon which has fallen this great misfortune, just after the revered head of the family has disappeared in the grave—the grave so much feared by many, but so good, so protecting to the venerable and peaceful sleeper!”

The “revered head of the family,” George C. Ballou, had gone into his grave just 22 days before creditors pushed his heirs into insolvency. People around town knew him as “Uncle George,” the unpretentious, patriarchal head of the Globe Mill village, owner of the fac-

tory store, the boarding houses, farms, and a village sawmill.

“He used to be seen daily on our streets dressed in a working man’s costume,” reported the Woonsocket correspondent for the Providence Star, shortly after Ballou’s death of cancer in March 1876. “He passed away leaving a host of friends and not a single enemy behind him.”

Perhaps Ballou did not leave any enemies, but he did leave a “host” of creditors, among them competitors who coveted the large and previously prosperous textile empire he had left in control of David Ballou, his only son. Uncle George had been in his grave for less than a month when creditors, including a fellow mill owner who also was the state’s sitting governor, made their move to divvy up Ballou Manufacturing’s assets and subsume them as their own.

Like most nineteenth-century business failures, settlement of the Ballou Manufacturing Company’s debts took place outside of a formal bankruptcy structure, benefiting the largest creditors at the expense of smaller ones, with devastating consequences for the debtor. One large creditor, a textile company owned by Henry Lippitt, then the state’s sitting governor, took advantage of the unregulated disposition of debt to subsume the best of Ballou Manufacturing’s assets into its own portfolio. Governor Lippitt’s orchestration of the Ballou debt settlement highlighted the necessity of bankruptcy law reform that merchants and manufacturers eventually pushed through into law in 1898. The rise and fall of the Ballou textile empire demonstrates the importance of bankruptcy law in protecting not only debtors but also a majority of creditors.

o PP osite : Portrait of George Ballou, courtesy of the Woonsocket Historical Society

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson began their second year as president and vice president in the year that George C. Ballou was born, 1798. Ballou was part of the generation that in historian Joyce Appleby’s words “inherited the American Revolution,” and the trajectory of his life eventually fused into the widely different visions that Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, saw for their new republic: the farmer and the industrialist.

Well into adulthood, Ballou represented Jefferson’s ideal of the independent, yeoman farmer. He farmed land his family had been tilling since 1646, when Maturin Ballou became a “quarter-share man” in Roger Williams’s new town of Providence.

Over the ensuing 150 years, Maturin Ballou’s family tree had branched out with the growth of British North America into the new republic. Ballous became some of the earliest settlers in Vermont, the fourteenth state, and in the Ohio country. They made their mark in politics—at the time of George Ballou’s death in 1875, Ohio homesteader Eliza Ballou Garfield was on the cusp of moving into the White House with her son, James—in religion, in higher education, and in the publishing business. Hosea Ballou is known as “the father of universalism,” along with John Murray. His nephew, Hosea Ballou II, about the same age as George Ballou, also became an American Universalist minister and the first president of Tufts University. A grandnephew of Hosea Ballou became in 1872 a founder and the first editor of the Boston Globe, an accomplishment that at its time was overshadowed by his founding of the immensely popular magazine Ballou’s Pictorial.

George Ballou’s branch of the family tree remained firmly rooted in that stony Rhode Island farmland initially acquired by Maturin, their Huguenot ancestor, in 1646. Farmers in northwestern Rhode Island did not have the advantage of fertile coastal plain that the Narragansett planters enjoyed. In the colonial scheme of British North America, Rhode Island acted as “a kind of commissary” that shipped produce to the West Indian sugar plantations, but farmers in northern Rhode Island, such as the Ballous, generally grew food not for market but for themselves. For additional food, they ate salmon and shad teeming in the Blackstone River, and for a little income, they learned a trade.

George Ballou learned from his father, Oliver, the trade of house carpenter, a useful skill in what had become Cumberland, Rhode Island, a town on the wide, churning Blackstone River. Cumberland’s southern border was about one mile upriver from the Pawtucket Falls where, in 1790, Moses Brown, William Almy, and Samuel Slater established the first commercially successful water-powered cotton mill on the west side of the Atlantic, a development that would have a profound effect on the republic, on fish, and on the farming branch of the Ballous.

As a teenager, Slater learned the intricacies of using waterpower to spin raw cotton into thread. He apprenticed in Cromford, England, with Jedediah Strutt, a partner with Richard Arkwright in building the world’s first water-powered spinning mill. At the end of his apprenticeship, Slater surreptitiously slipped away from England, carrying his knowledge of mechanized carding and spinning to the United States, where he helped Moses Brown and a team of artisans, including

his eventual brother-in-law, David Wilkinson, in their efforts to build water-frame spinning machines to produce cotton thread.

The success of that first cotton spinning mill at Pawtucket spurred imitators, including George Ballous’s father, Oliver, and much older brother, Dexter Ballou. Dexter used the carpentry skills he had learned from his father to build five “carding machines” to prepare cotton for spinning by aligning its fibers into long strands. The father-son team also bought three spinning machines, then set the carding and spinning machines in motion by attaching them to a waterwheel powered by a narrow river with a high waterfall in the Cumberland village of Ashton. Their barriers for entry into textile manufacturing were relatively small— access to a stream, the skill to build carding machines, and a little capital to buy a few spinning machines— that was enough to set them up in the business.

George Ballou was just fifteen years old when his father and brother built their little mill along a tributary of the Blackstone in 1814. The Ballous built that mill during a time of “cotton fever” in the United States. The Napoleonic Wars prompted the United States to adopt a nonimportation act in 1807, an embargo against importing French and British goods. The embargo established American neutrality and protected US shipping from harassment by either of the warring powers on the pretext that American-flagged ships were carrying goods for the enemy. The nonimportation act stimulated domestic textile production by removing competition from English imports.

When the United States went to war with England in 1812, textile mills sprang up along rivers and trib-

utaries throughout New England as some mercantile capitalists began to move their money from the risks of wartime shipping into domestic manufacturing. The 1810 census of American manufacturing counted twenty-six textile mills in Rhode Island; by 1815, there were 169 mills just within a thirty-mile radius of Providence, including the Ashton Mill of Oliver and Dexter Ballou. President Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian removal opened previously occupied land in the fertile “Black Belt” area along the Mississippi; growers moved enslaved workers westward—away from growing tobacco, rice, and indigo along the southeastern seaboard to growing cotton on former Indian lands in Mississippi and Louisiana to feed the nation’s new textile mills and their growing appetite for cotton.

As cotton fever raged around him, George Ballou seemed content to continue his work as a carpenter, farming his ancestral lands. His father and brother moved their mill farther up the Blackstone to Woonsocket Falls in 1817, and another one of Oliver’s sons also set up a small mill there, but George continued to farm and practice his carpentry trade, showing no apparent eagerness to switch from farmer to manufacturer.

George’s father retired from the mill business in 1827, and Dexter, George’s brother, took over the mill at the Woonsocket Falls in western Cumberland. The village of Woonsocket owed its existence to those falls. The wide Blackstone River fell 31.5 feet at Woonsocket, in a thunderous cascade that carried the power of 2,000 horses.

With the exception of a couple years during King Philip’s War, a mill had been drawing waterpower

alongside those thundering falls since 1666, when Richard Arnold built a sawmill alongside the cascade. Much of the land in northwestern Rhode Island was rocky ledge, thickly forested, no good for farming but good for milling trees into lumber. The forest and the power from Woonsocket Falls fed the sawmill running on that site from the 1670s until Dexter Ballou and his father leased the land it stood on in 1822. They moved the sawmill across the river and built on the newly vacant lot a wooden mill, thirty-three feet by seventy feet, for spinning cotton. Their mill stood two stories high with a basement; they leased the top and bottom floors, confining their cotton spinning to just one long and narrow floor.

Another Ballou brother, Hosea, had purchased a right to draw water from a “power trench”—a narrow canal cut around the roaring Woonsocket Falls and channeled through a reinforced trench to provide waterpower to new mills. Entrepreneurs Daniel Lyman and Samuel Arnold began the hard work of cutting that trench in 1814, not to use it for powering their own mills but to sell its power to mill owners, a kind of early nineteenth-century utility company. This power trench began flowing in 1827, and it had a profound effect on shaping the Woonsocket landscape that continues to this day. The trench is now a dry gully cutting a swath through downtown, squeezed between Main Street on its north edge and by a tall wall reinforcing the trench on the south. The wall buttressing the power trench gives downtown Woonsocket a distinctive look when viewed from the south, making the city look like a medieval village built atop high ramparts.

Hosea Ballou owned a small mill farther up the Black-

Lyman-Arnold Power Trench, author’s collection

stone in Waterford Village, now Blackstone, Massachusetts, along the Rhode Island-Massachusetts border. Here he spun satinets, a strong cotton cloth with the sheen of satin. In 1826, Hosea convinced his brother, George, to join the Ballou family in pursuing the cotton mill business in Waterford. George did not pick up manufacturing until he was 28, this at a time when US life expectancy was only 41.

George quickly learned the intricacies of running the Waterford Mill, which freed Hosea to buy the first “privilege” for using waterpower along the LymanArnold power trench. Hosea built a small cotton mill where the Blackstone River first flowed into the trench, the Hanora Mill, made of locally pressed bricks. Dexter joined Hosea in running that mill in 1828 while maintaining his interest in the mill at the old sawmill site. As business partners, Dexter and Hosea formed an odd couple. Dexter was staid; Hosea was not.

Hosea was “much more poetic and convivial than either of his brothers,” according to Aiden Ballou, a Unitarian minister who published an extensive genealogy of the family in 1888. “Spicy songs delighted him, and many such he could sing with glee, as well as recite from memory. He liked a merry dance with strains of lively music, even down to old age....He had many agreeable social qualities and commendable characteristics, in spite of some wayward proclivities.”

Dexter, on the other hand, was “a prudent man,” a “natural mechanic, practical machinist, manufacturer, and man of affairs.” His worst vice was smoking cigars, which he did constantly. On his deathbed in 1848, he attributed his imminent death to the effects of chronic cigar smoking.

Hosea and Dexter did not last long as business partners. Dexter soon bought out his brother and built a mill of irregular chunks of rock, or “rubblestone,” along the power trench; he then built a second stone mill that fused Hosea’s brick mill into the stone mills in one large and growing textile mill powered by the Lyman-Arnold trench. Nearly 200 years later, Dexter’s Hanora Mill complex remains a significant presence in downtown Woonsocket, where it anchors the beginning of Main Street and provides 117 apartments to people with low incomes, most of them elderly.

In March 1829, Dexter’s two-story mill at the old sawmill site burned, a common fate for early textile mills, wooden buildings stuffed with flammable cotton and its combustible dust. A cluster of several small mills stood near the dam at Woonsocket Falls, and the conflagration consumed an adjacent satinet factory and a gristmill. As he gloomily surveyed the charred

wreckage, Dexter reportedly said, “Every shaft, pulley, and machine in the mill were personally set under my direction.” His $10,000 insurance policy covered a fraction of his loss (few if any early mills were insured for anywhere near 100 percent), so his friends started a subscription to help defray his losses. They raised more than $1,600, which Dexter promptly refused to accept.

Dexter, now ensconced in his mill built of rubblestone along the Lyman-Arnold Power Trench, gave his lease on the burned-out sawmill site to his younger brother, George. The youngest of the three manufacturing brothers, George might have been slow to get into the textile business, but once he did, he plunged in with a passion.

After just a year in the business, George had bought Hosea’s interest in Waterford/Blackstone; when the sawmill site burned in 1829, he moved this operation downriver to his brother’s burned-out mill. Carpenters framed over the burned-out hulk of Dexter’s old mill, and there George began spinning warp yarn, the stronger of the two yarns, warp and weft, used in weaving. To strengthen his warp, he “dressed” it in a hot, starchy solution, an operation that mill workers performed in a second-story space that he rented from Dexter in the Hanora Mill along the power trench. The two sites were literally within a stone’s throw of each other, one on each side of the hard-packed Main Street.

George Ballou maintained the unflappable attitude of a farmer, a trait earned through flood, drought, wilt, and insect predation, the natural, cyclical setbacks that any farmer must learn to take in stride. His contemporaries said of him: “If business went amiss, he

did not become gloomy; neither did he make himself, nor those around him, miserable. He simply thought, and often said, ‘I guess it will come out alright, by and by.’”

Like farming, the textile business was notorious for its boom and bust cycles. The year George leased the sawmill brought “the great smashup of 1829,” a global depression in the cotton business precipitated by an oversupply of cotton goods that drove down prices. In Rhode Island, the failure of banks run by textile magnates who overextended loans to their own businesses exacerbated the failure, causing one in seven local textile mills to close.

Globally, the Panic of 1837 was even worse than the great smashup. President Andrew Jackson opposed centralized banking and the Second Bank of the United States. He undermined the national banks with an executive order that moved the deposits of federal funds from the Second Bank into seven state banks of his choosing, banks that invested heavily in volatile cotton futures. Alarmed by instability in the American banking system, the Bank of England began raising rates for risky loans to American cotton brokers, merchants, and textile companies. Without credit to lubricate long-distance exchanges between Liverpool textile manufacturers and American cotton brokers, cotton supplies built up, the price of a bale fell below what manufacturers had paid for it, and it cost more money to make cotton goods than manufacturers could get for them.

Woonsocket was then a ramshackle village of a couple dozen houses and a few mills straddling the LymanArnold Power Trench. George weathered the economic

downturns. His brother, Dexter, had been through the Panics of 1816, 1819, and 1825, and had earned a reputation for remaining “cool, calm, and sagacious” through crises. Besides having Dexter’s guidance, George had capitalized his mill for only $1,500; he held little, if any, debt, and his former sawmill site was perfect for milling cotton. He spun strong yarn there with enough success to buy the land outright from an Arnold heir in 1839.

The 1830s proved to be a good time for George and his wife, Ruth Eliza Aldrich, childhood sweethearts who married young. They had arrived in Woonsocket with one daughter, Celia, and the harbored grief of the recent death of an infant son, Oliver. Ruth delivered two more daughters, Abigal and Alpha, and then in 1833 a son, David, a male heir for George’s millworks. They bought an unassuming house on Arnold Street, and here they raised a growing family within walking distance of the Ballou Mill, a happy, prosperous time

for “Uncle George,” who cultivated a gray, handlebar mustache and a goat-like beard that covered his chin. He settled into the city’s social life, joining the board of the Woonsocket National Bank and his local Masonic order, connections in which he thrived and held dear for the rest of his life.

On the night of January 22, 1846, a cry of fire sounded along Woonsocket’s Main Street. Flames licked around the eaves of the wooden Ballou Mill and spread to an adjacent mill and dye house. Flames burned so brightly that the cry of fire resonated throughout Worcester, twenty-six miles upriver. By morning, the mill was in ruins. Agents placed the loss at as much as $25,000, far more than George Ballou’s insurance policies for $14,000.

In his typically even-keeled way (“I guess things will come out alright bye and bye”), George set about

rebuilding his mill. This time he built it of stone and made it much bigger, 185 feet long and thirty-five feet wide. Until electric motors powered individual machines in the 1900s, mills always were longer than they were wide. A long shaft turned by waterwheel or steam engine ran the length of the building and transferred power through gears, wheels, and leather belts communally to machines installed alongside the shaft. The horsepower generated by waterwheels or steam engines dictated the length of the shaft—more power allowed a longer shaft that could power more machinery. The new Ballou Mill stood four stories tall and featured a big bell tower topped with a distinctive cupola that eventually became the centerpiece for the City of Woonsocket’s seal.

Had the fire burned him out a few years earlier, it would have cast George out of the textile business, at

Portrait of David Ballou, from the private collection of Fred Ballou

Ballou Mill as it appeared in 1848, from a 1902 postcard, RIHS Collections rhix173307

least temporarily. By 1846, he controlled a second mill, the larger Clinton Mill standing at the tail end of the power trench before the waters of the trench spilled noisily back into a bend of the Blackstone River. George invested in the Clinton Mill in 1845, a year before the fire. His partners included Dexter’s son, Oren Ballou, a nephew only a dozen years younger than George; two other men, James and Peleg Rhodes, also invested, though within a decade George would own this mill outright. The year 1846 began disastrously with the fire, but it ended well for George. Between the Clinton and rebuilt Ballou Mills, he controlled more than 10,000 water-frame spindles and about 300 looms weaving his cotton thread into print goods and “shirtings,” lightly woven fabric with the weight and texture ideal for making shirts, blouses, and dresses.

Besides the mills, he also bought in 1846 a new house across the river and perched atop the treeless Woonsocket Hill: the Stone House, a mansion built in 1835. Its portico featured six tall columns, four of them Doric, propping up a long balcony gilded with ornate ironwork. It commanded more than 100 feet of frontage along South Main Street on the Smithfield side of the river and was called the “grandest Greek revival building in Woonsocket [Village.]”

George’s two mills made him money, so by 1850 he felt confident in becoming financially involved in a third, the Globe Mill, built below the falls at the base of Woonsocket Hill. This was the investment that almost sunk him in the 1850s and eventually did play a key role, twenty-six years later, in the sudden collapse of the Ballou textile empire.

Credit was the lubricant that kept the gears of

the textile industry meshing. Northern textile firms did not ship heavy boxes of silver coin to the South; they bought cotton from distant factors, middlemen between the growers, with credit. Southern growers needed credit to buy land and enslaved people sold on the auction block to expand cotton production. Planters also used enslaved people as collateral to secure more credit.

Merchants who sold textiles advanced credit to manufacturers then collected their share of the sales, plus interest, when they sold their finished cloth. All along the chain connecting distant ports from grower to factor to shipper to railroad agent to the manufacturer and finally the merchant, a variety of different credit instruments kept the wheels turning. As Sven Beckert put it in Empire of Cotton, “Without credit, the empire of cotton would have crumbled—indeed, as any foreclosed planter knew only too well, the empire of cotton was at its heart an empire of credit.” There were many different kinds of credit— promissory notes, bills of exchange, endorsements. These types of notes, this “paper,” wove a complex network connecting people and companies from Woonsocket to New Orleans, to New York, and to London. Because credit was so important to oiling the engine of industry, almost every city or town in the United States and its Northwest Territories employed a network of credit spies. These anonymous agents reported on the character, abilities, and wealth of anyone operating a local business, from the smallest saloonkeeper

o PP osite : George Ballou’s Stone House mansion, author’s collection

to the largest factory owner in town—including George Ballou.

These credit spies, or agents, issued detailed reports to the R. G. Dun Mercantile Agency of New York City, forerunner of today’s Dun & Bradstreet. Until the mid-1870s, the anonymous Dun agents did not receive money for their reports. Most of them were lawyers, and they received referrals. If Dun had a client in New York, for example, who wanted to press a debt-related suit in Woonsocket, Dun would recommend its Woonsocket agent for the case.

The local agent sent written reports to New York or later to a branch office in the nearest big city; scriveners in branches copied reports before sending them to the New York office, where dozens of scriveners wielding sharp-tipped dip pens stood at a long row of tables and entered every report into big ledger books indexed by state and county. Businesses that subscribed to the Dun Mercantile Agency could send a representative into the Dun offices to hear reports on people with whom they might do business.

Robert G. Dun took over the nascent credit reporting bureau in 1849, seventy-four years before it merged with a competitor and became Dun & Bradstreet. Though the service was popular, having anonymous spies embedded in cities and towns made people feel uneasy. Thomas Meagher wrote a whole book railing against the system: “The substantial men in a community never sink to this work. It can only be performed...by the ill-atease, struggling, acrid spirits of the place—the meddlesome, mischief-making busy-bodies, whose moving springs are envy, greed, uncharitableness, or disappointed ambitions.” Doubtless men of that description

filled that role, but several former Dun agents became US presidents, according to the Dun Company, including Lincoln, Grant, McKinley, and Cleveland.

George Ballou’s name first appeared in a Dun ledger on July 18, 1854: “Owns valuable real estate,” the agent reported. “Was somewhat embarrassed by the failure of the Globe Co. in [18]50 but his paper now passes readily. Is an able manager—made a good deal of money in [18]53 and it is said he will finally be reimbursed by the Globe Co.”

George’s “valuable real estate” included the Ballou and Clinton Mills, tenement houses for his workers, the Stone House, and increasingly, cleared land on Woonsocket Hill that eventually grew to 400 acres.

The Dun report makes clear that George somehow became enmeshed with the Globe Mill Company by 1850. The standard narrative of the Globe Company is that three Woonsocket men (Thomas Arnold, Thomas Paine, and Marcel Shove) built the mill on the west bank of the river in 1827, it went bust in the great smashup of 1829, and George bought it outright in 1864. That narrative is clearly lacking—the mill did not stand vacant for nearly 40 years, but it is difficult and ultimately unimportant to fill in the gaps precisely. The Dun agent who wrote in 1854 that George “will be reimbursed by the Globe Company” implied that George had loaned money or supplies to owners of that mill. The Globe’s failure in 1850 set George back financially, but not for long: the 1860 Census of Industry shows George Ballou and Benjamin R. Vaughn owning the Globe Mill with 7,000 spindles and 200 looms producing more than two million yards of print cloth. At that point, the Globe was the smallest of three

mills—it contained 1,000 fewer spindles than the Ballou Mill, but it was more efficient with annual sales of $166,000 as opposed to $100,000 for the larger mill. To put that money in perspective, in 1860 the 155 women and girls working in the Clinton Mill averaged $12 per month for working six days a week, fourteen hours a day. The average female worker in Clinton Mill would have to work 694 punishing years to earn $100,000.

Woonsocket’s Dun agents continued to send glowing reports about George C. Ballou throughout the 1850s:

“Jan. 1856: Stands well. Rated worth $100,000$150,000.

July 1856: One of our “heaviest” manufacturers. Regarded good.

Sept. 1856: No. 1.

July 1857: No known change tho. the times must of course affect all manufacturers.”

“The times,” of course, referred to the Panic of 1857.

A chain of events stretching from the American West to Eastern Europe led to a wide, economic meltdown in 1857. The end of the Crimean War in 1856 reopened wheat supplies from Russia to Europe, depressing prices for western US wheat-growing land. Conflicting claims by states and the federal government on land granted to railroads clouded titles, further depressing values that the railroads had inflated in the first place. With competing title claims and depreciating values, skittish bondholders tried to cash out their bonds prematurely. Lending institutions that had sold the bonds turned to the railroads to pay their bondholders; the railroads did not have the cash or clear title to enough of the real estate to cover the loans.

The key difference between the Panic of 1857 and previous panics was the speed with which it spread. The newly invented telegraph carried news of the first failure, the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which had relied on inflated land values as collateral in loaning more money to railroads than the railroads

Globe Mill, from a postcard, RIHS Collections rhix174589

could pay. A bondholder run on the Bank of Pennsylvania soon followed, and telegraphed news of failures at the edge of the western frontier sparked runs on banks and investment houses, drying up credit.

The panic hit when George was in a vulnerable position. According to a local Dun agent, who wrote in February 1858, George: “Has met some serious lapses by endorsing for his brothers, who failed, also lost by common [illegible] means. Seriously diminished and mills stopped.”

“Endorsing” was a common form of credit, particularly among kinship networks. George “endorsed” the notes of family members, basically acting as a cosigner of loans they had taken with out-of-town factors or merchants, who would not have loaned to the “brothers” without a known quantity such as George Ballou backing the loan. Endorsement loans were not limited to family networks, but when seeking or granting an endorsement from nonfamily firms, both endorser and endorsee had to have implicit trust in each other.

The Dun agent did not specify which “brothers” George had endorsed. The ditty-loving Hosea still did some textile business in Pomfret, Connecticut; staid cigar-loving Dexter, Woonsocket’s true “textile pioneer” had died in 1849. His other brother, Harvey, had not gone into business, but Dexter’s son, Oren, was in the textile trade. Perhaps the agent confused the nephew, closer to George’s age than George was to Dexter’s, for a brother.

The failure of his “brothers” to pay back notes he had endorsed cost George nearly 20 percent of the wealth he had accrued over three decades. According to the Dun agent in October 1858, George “was worth $50,000 before

the hard times but lost $10,000 by one brother, less 25 percent, and $2,000 by another. Still well off and good.”

Lea P ing ahead 30 years to 1887—Henry Lippitt wanted a portrait of himself painted, so he hired a local artist, Charles Walter Stetson, to do it. The State of Rhode Island footed the bill because it wanted the portrait of Lippitt, by then a former governor, for its collection of governors’ portraits going back to Nicholas Cooke, the first postcolonial governor in 1775. Stetson, a founding member of the Providence Art Club, was a serious artist who hoped to go down in history as one of the greats. In some measure, he succeeded: he achieved renown as a “colorist” who painted fantastic, allegorical landscapes that fetch five-figure sums more than a century after his death.

To pay his bills, Stetson also accepted consignment work such as portrait painting. Though he felt that portraiture took time away from his real work, he was good at it. While he painted Lippitt’s portrait, he was enduring the painful dissolution of his marriage to a fellow artist and writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was suffering from postpartum depression. Gilman later fictionalized the breakup of their marriage in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story that became a seminal paper in feminist studies.

Stetson put his personal problems aside and delivered a portrait showing Lippitt as a thick-necked, heavily bearded man, glowering at the painter with a sidewise glance; his graying, handlebar mustache droops, walrus-like, above frowning lips. It is a good portrait, very lifelike; the one detail that seems out of scale is the piece of paper that Lippitt holds, showing

the plans for the Rhode Island Pavilion at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, which took place during Lippitt’s second and last term as governor.

One of Lippitt’s daughters did not like the finished portrait. Stetson responded: “I felt that in painting it I owed a duty to the State to be fulfilled by making it as accurate in form as possible and by giving his face and figure an expression which would indicate the powerful will and straightforwardness which have made him so marked a man and the greatest business man.”1 The portrait did not enter the state’s official collection of governors’ portraits, perhaps because of the Lippitt family’s objections.

The problem with Stetson’s work might have been that it too accurately caught Lippitt’s “powerful will and straightforwardness.” One of Lippitt’s sons, Robert “Linc” Lippitt, once wrote a comedic poem2 about his family that included this observation of his father:

My father has a mill sir

The best in all the town

I[t] never will blow up sir

And never can blow down

My Father ran for Governor sir

And most awfully he fought

And after election was over sir

They said that votes he bought

The man that ran against him sir

Never touched a drop

But election night it was said sir

That he got awfully hot

My Father is fussy sir

About every particular thing

On the floor he’ll pick up, sir

Every thing down to a pin

Like Stetson’s portrait, Linc’s limning of his father captures some of the essence of Henry Lippitt: his “fussiness,” or attention to detail, and his winning the governor’s office in 1875 through vote buying.

To be fair to Lippitt, bribing voters was common in late nineteenth-century Rhode Island. The state’s charter, passed in 1663, limited suffrage to men who owned $134 worth of property; for male immigrants, that property had to be real estate, a high barrier that essentially limited suffrage to native born men of means. Statewide, slightly more than 22,000 men voted in 1875, so tens of thousands of dollars spread across half of the voting men to “reimburse them for their time” (as Boss Brayton, the titular head of the state’s Republican Party, later put it) was a surefire method for winning a slate of offices.

The man “who got awfully hot” after losing to Lippitt in 1875 was fellow mill owner Rowland Hazard, who narrowly won the popular vote but failed to earn a plurality in a three-way race. The House of Representatives, liberally greased by a Republican Party machine with Boss Brayton as its public face, decided the issue for Lippitt. Rowland published a circular charging Lippitt with bribing voters; Lippitt denied it, and he had plausible deniability as the machine did it for him. Entrenched vote buying was one example of what the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens meant when he wrote in 1905 that “Rhode Island is a state for sale, and cheap.”

George Ballou and Henry Lippitt were briefly in business together in the early 1850s. Like Dexter and Hosea, they made for an odd couple. Twenty years separated them, George being born in 1798. George eschewed political office, reluctantly accepting oneyear terms as a state representative and state senator before bowing out; Henry lusted after high office, bankrolling the Republican Party’s 1872 campaign in a failed bid for the governor’s office, before becoming its standard-bearer in 1875 and 1876.

George dressed like a farmer and mingled with his workmen; though he bought a big, showy house, an estate inventory showed none of the trappings of wealth, no silver and only basic furnishings; a full bookcase was the most expensive item in it. Henry dressed in three-piece suits and wore a watch fob; he built a mansion on Hope Street in Providence and furnished it extravagantly, spending more than $32,500 on “furniture, draperies, carpets, silver, china, bronze accessories, and arts work to decorate the house.”3 At a time when women and girls working in Henry’s Social Mill averaged $160 per year, he bought a mirrored hallstand with walnut moldings for $625.4

George and Henry shared family roots extending to early 1600s Providence, but George and his brothers were the first generation in their family to go into the textile business; Henry, 20 years younger than George, was born into the business, a third-generation mill owner. His grandfather, Charles Lippitt, invested in Rhode Island’s third cotton mill, built in 1807. Henry’s father, Warren Lippitt, a sea captainturned-cotton-merchant, formally joined the Lippitt Manufacturing Company in 1840. Young Henry learned

the family business from the sales and supply side, first working as a clerk, then for a Providence cotton merchant, and then at age twenty forming a partnership in a commission business that arranged sales of baled cotton and cotton prints. At thirty, he joined his father and brother in buying a mill in Danielson, Connecticut, from Comfort Tiffany, whose son and grandson eventually earned fame through their decorative arts business, Tiffany & Company.

After their father’s death in 1850, Henry and his brother, Robert, sold the stock they had jointly owned with their father in Tiffany Mill, providing them with investment capital. Oren’s father, Dexter Ballou, the beloved pioneer of Woonsocket textile manufacturing, died in 1849, leaving his twenty-nine-year-old son in charge of the large Hanora and Social Mills. Oren’s uncle, George, joined him in running the Social Mills, and they invited the Lippitts, third generation mill owners, to invest with them in both the Social and Clinton Mills in Woonsocket.

In February 1854, George Ballou, without mentioning Oren, filed an amendment to change what was now his company’s name from Social Manufacturing to Clinton Manufacturing. One year later the Lippitts—and their new partner, Oren Ballou—wanted to create a clear distinction between Social Manufacturing and Clinton, submitting a petition to the General Assembly to make the distinction clear. The corporations—Social Manufacturing and Clinton Manufacturing—owned the Social Mills and Clinton Mills, respectively.

This flurry of paperwork revealed an important split between George Ballou and his nephew. By 1855,

the divide between Clinton and Social Manufacturing became clear: On one side stood George Ballou, running his three mills, including Clinton. On the other stood his nephew, Oren, now aligned with the Lippitts; they ran the Social Mill on the Mill River, a tributary of the Blackstone, and Dexter Ballou’s old mill, the Hanora complex along the power trench. The split between George and his nephew apparently was amicable; the two continued to do business with each other—George later endorsed notes for his nephew when he wanted capital to build sawmills in Michigan, and Social Manufacturing endorsed George’s notes when his company was raising capital to build a new mill next to its Globe Mill. The Dun agents felt both Clinton and Social were good, prosperous mills, right into the 1870s.

The clanging of bells and lugubrious howls of “steam gongs” erupted along the banks of the Blackstone early every morning but Sundays. At 5:30 a.m., every one of the dozens of mills in Woonsocket village called workers from their beds with whatever noisemaking devices they had, creating a cacophony of bells clanging and whistles shrieking in different keys, waking everybody in town before dawn.

Samuel S. Foss, publisher of the Woonsocket Patriot, lamented:

As manufacturing establishments require their help to go to work at certain hours, and each has its own method of summoning their help which results in a pandemonium of bells, whistles and steam gongs, why would it not be well worth for all to establish some central point for one of these instruments of

agony which would answer the purpose of the different varieties?

Nobody listened to poor “S. S.” Foss. Always in Woonsocket was the susurrus of the Blackstone River hissing over the dam at the falls and the lap of water slapping along the sides of the power trench running alongside Main Street. Steam locomotives chuffing into and out of the Woonsocket Depot blew their shrill whistles to announce arrivals and departures. Foss eventually prevailed upon the Providence and Worcester Railroad to silence their whistles, but he never could convince the factories to adopt one single source for raising their workers from bed.

For workers, the morning cacophony was a summons for another long, bone-aching day, generally twelve hours on weekdays, eight hours on Saturdays—sixtyeight-hour weeks spent in large, multistory mills of brick and granite. By midcentury the Ballou, Clinton, and Social Mills formed long, high walls looming above Main and Clinton Streets. Whether they appeared impressive or imposing with their tall towers, dormers, and cupolas depended on the viewer. John Quincy Adams saw early textile mills as “palaces of the poor,” drawing a stern rebuke from early labor leader Seth Luther, who called them “prisons in New England.” William Blake famously saw the emerging industrial landscape as blighted with “dark, satanic mills.”

When workers started a mill’s machinery, the racket was literally deafening. By 1860, Clinton Manufacturing’s five stories housed 15,000 spindles and 320 power looms driven by a waterwheel. The trochaic CLICKclack, CLICK-clack of hundreds of power looms, the

jingling whirl of 15,000 spindles, the groaning of the waterwheel incessantly turning from dawn to dusk rang in the ears of mill workers.

Women and girls constituted 71 percent of midcentury textile workers, a figure that roughly held at Clinton—155 of 300 workers were female. Their average monthly wage for four sixty-eight-hour weeks was $11.21, less than a nickel an hour.

Textile mills presented multiple dangers. Oil from the liberally lubricated machines made floors slick. Heavy “spinning mules” trundled back and forth without malice or mercy for anyone caught between them and the whirring spindles; gears, belts, combs, and vats of boiling dyes could kill or maim. The Woonsocket Patriot occasionally was spiced with news of gruesome mill accidents involving the dye vats, belts snagging clothing, and machinery crushing arms. Theodore Leach, about sixteen, had one of his hands lacerated by a machine at American Worsted; Sarah Williams, a ten-year-old girl working in Ballou Mill, required thoracic surgery after sucking a piece of thread into her lung while trying to thread a shuttle.

Women worked dangerous jobs for long hours and little pay because of a lack of options. The other line of work commonly available to them in the mid-1800s was serving as an in-house domestic, answering roundthe-clock to the beck and call of a mistress for little more than room and board. A tinkling bell in the middle of a cold night might summon a maid from bed to haul a bucket of coal from the basement bin to a thirdfloor bedroom to refresh a stove. Factory work offered defined if long hours, maybe a room of one’s own, and a little pocket money.

George Ballou told the 1860 census taker that his firm’s name was George C. Ballou & Son, formally bringing his thirty-year-old son into the family business. Ballou & Son employed 146 males and 304 females in their three cotton mills—Clinton, Ballou, and Globe. With the exception of Clinton Mill, the last mill at the eastern end of the power trench, all of their properties squatted along the Blackstone within a half-mile radius of the family’s stone mansion atop Woonsocket Hill.

“Good for all engagements making,” a Dun agent wrote of Ballou Mill in October 1860.

“Worth about $160,000,” the agent wrote of Clinton Mill. “Paid all through hard times.”

The 1860s looked promising for George and David in their partnership, and for Oren in his dealings with the Lippitts. The Social Mill, owned by the Lippitts and Oren, was nearly as big as all of George’s mills combined—125 males and 300 females worked in one, huge mill, tending 28,300 rattling spindles and 5,772 clacking looms. Lippitt Manufacturing also ran a large woolen mill across Main Street from Ballou Mill. Things looked good...until guns thundered on Fort Sumter and the Union was at war with the Confederate States of America, an enemy that held a near monopoly on the global supply of cotton.

The Civil War brought hardship to cotton manufacturers. The South naturally would not ship cotton to fuel the mills of its enemy, and the Union blockaded Southern ports to prevent the Confederacy from shipping its cotton to the mills of Europe. Without cotton to feed into the mills, tens of thousands of US cotton workers shifted their spinning and weaving skills from cot-

ton mills to woolen factories, such as Lippitt Woolen in Dexter Ballou’s old mill along the power trench. Woolen mills generally ran at full capacity, churning out uniforms and blankets for the Union Army, while cotton mills struggled with rising prices and limited supplies of cotton. In 1860, a pound of cotton sold in New York, on average, for $13.01. Three years later, a pound of cotton sold there at an average of $105.50. To bring in new cotton, the US Treasury Department issued blockade passes to Southern cotton growers that proved loyalty to the Union. Rhode Island’s young governor, William Sprague IV, owned the largest calico printing works in the United States, so he was keenly aware of the need for cotton to run his mills. He prevailed upon his future father-in-law, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, to grant blockade passes to his business partner, Harris Hoyt, so Hoyt could go South, buy cotton, and do some spying. Chase refused. Sprague pressed on with his plan anyway, crossing the line into treason.

Only thirty-two years old, Sprague already was a sitting governor and a veteran of the traumatic Battle of Bull Run. He had volunteered to lead an infantry brigade in the gallant belief that the war would be over in two days. After having his horse killed beneath him and seeing good friends die violently, Sprague returned to his office in the State House and to running his family’s vast textile empire.

In 1863, with the price of cotton at its peak, Sprague bought three ships and hired Hoyt to provision them with cargo to trade for cotton—guns, cartridges, caps, anti-malarial quinine, whiskey, and nonperishable foods.

One of Sprague’s ships made it to Havana, where Hoyt sold it to a straw buyer who changed its name to Cora, and registered it as British. Flying the Union Jack, it sailed past the Union blockade into the Mexican port of Matamoros. Hoyt transported his cargo of arms, medicine, and supplies into Houston, where he traded supplies that the Confederate Army needed for cotton that Sprague needed. Cora delivered Sprague’s cotton to New York. Sprague later was arraigned on six charges of treason, though after Lincoln’s assassination, the Johnson administration never followed through with prosecution.

Northern mill owners found legitimate ways to supply their mills, too—the United States imported cotton from Mexico, and the government supplied seed tools and capital to encourage large-scale cotton farming in Spain, Egypt, and India. The cotton grown across the Atlantic mostly stayed in the mills of England, France, and Germany, but that was the point—keeping countries formerly dependent on US-grown cotton from supporting the Confederacy by providing them with new sources of cotton.

Union forces won command of the Mississippi River in 1863, breaking the South’s embargo on cotton grown in the delta and shipped from New Orleans. With cotton smuggled, legally imported, and grown domestically in the delta, the larger Northern mills managed to eke through the early 1860s. Dun agents estimated George C. Ballou & Son’s worth at $200,000–$300,000 at the beginning of the Civil War and $100,000 at the end of it. The war’s end sparked a boom in cotton manufacturing. The Dun reports on Ballou & Son raved about George:

Dec. 22, 1865 Heavy manufacturers next to Ed Harris the richest man in Woonsocket. The manufacturing managed mostly by his son, David, who is a young but very smart businessman....Good for $125,000 in Cumberland and $95,000 in Smithfield, which is about half his estimated worth as he owns largely in the Clinton Mills and Lippitt Woolen Manufacturing Co. David...has his share of the profits and does the business of the concern. Credit of the firm is unlimited.

The agent likely confused Ballou’s relationship with Lippitt Manufacturing; the two companies distinctly disentangled their finances through the flurry of incorporations in the 1850s, but agents of the companies still endorsed one another’s notes.

By 1866, Dun ranked Ballou & Son as “Perfectly good for anything. Worth $300,000-$400,000.”

The war might have taught George and David a lesson about being wholly dependent on cotton. In 1868, they invested in American Worsted, manufacturing alpaca and mohair braids, a medium weight yarn used for trimmings, hats, and braided rugs. Ballou & Son built a new, relatively small mill for American Worsted in downtown Woonsocket. The worsted mill relied strictly on steam power turning 500 braiding machines tended by sixty workers.

Ballou & Son also diversified geographically, investing $50,000 to buy half interest in yet another cotton mill, the Peabody Mill in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the firm’s first investment outside of Woonsocket village. By 1870, all of their mills—Ballou, Clinton, Globe, American Worsted, and Peabody—were going great guns.

“They have made money in the past year; are doing a large business and own large amount of money,” a Dun agent enthused in May 1871. “They are worth about $500,000. Own all debts.”

A look at an 1870 map of Woonsocket shows how wealthy the Ballous had become. “Uncle George” owned the entire village of Globe, the mill, tenement houses, and company store; he and his son owned housing all around the Ballou Mill, including the house on Arnold Street where George and Ruth Eliza had raised their four children before buying the mansion. Edward Harris and Lippitt Manufacturing owned bigger mills, but the Ballous were the largest single taxpayer in what became in 1871 the Town of Woonsocket, encompassing six mill villages, three on either side of the Blackstone.

George owned 400 acres of cultivated farmland, much of it stretching out from the Stone House on the summit of Woonsocket Hill, northward to Cherry Brook and westward well into Smithfield. In 1869, at the age of 71, he relinquished day-to-day control of Ballou & Sons to David and turned to farming, his first love. He grew hay by the ton, barley and rye by the bushel, and potatoes by the wagonload. A stranger in town would never know that the old farmer with the white whiskers and goat-like beard driving a cartload of potatoes along Woonsocket Hill was one of the richest men in Woonsocket.

From the wide porch of his mansion atop the hill, he could peer below him to the north and see his farmlands stretching along the swale of Cherry Brook or turn to the south to scan the Blackstone Valley, where three of his four local mills clustered within a half mile of his hilltop home.

Of these three, the Globe Mill commanded most of his attention. In the early 1870s, George and David had big plans for that mill because they knew that the future favored large, efficient mills stuffed with the most advanced, labor-saving machinery. In 1860, Rhode Island cotton mills averaged 5,323 spindles per mill. In 1870, there were fourteen fewer mills, 139, but more spindles; each mill averaged 7,505 spindles. George would not live to see it, but by 1880, there were even fewer Rhode Island cotton mills, 115, and each one averaged 15,344 spindles. The average size of local cotton mills nearly tripled in two decades.

George and David, astute observers of the textile industry in the 1870s, decided to ride the cutting edge of the industry by building bigger. When completed, their new Globe Mill would stand five stories tall with 560 windows admitting natural light to illuminate more than 40,000 spindles. Contemporaneous accounts suggest that George wanted to build that mill as a legacy, “the crowning work” of his life. Exterior plans for the mill, built of stone, called for a coat of white paint covering its entire length and breadth, earning it the sobriquet “the Great White Mill.”

To raise capital for building the new Globe Mill, Ballou & Son reincorporated in May 1872 as Ballou Manufacturing, bringing George’s two sons-in-law, Cyrus Arnold and Peter H. Brown, on board as directors. They capitalized the new company at $500,000. For George Ballou, the Great White Mill turned out to be his Great White Whale, the obsession that crippled his family’s finances.

An agent from the R. G. Dun credit reporting bureau scratched out his semiannual report on Ballou & Son in

May 1873: “Are still building the [Globe] mill & company is very good in most quarters. There are some [illegible] who say they are undertaking more than they can handle and doubt the company. Yet [illegible] goes well...”

On August 4, the Globe Mill held its grand opening, with “Mr. George C. Ballou, in person” symbolically feeding the first cotton onto the moving apron, or belt, that carried shredded cotton into the “lapper” of the mill. The lapping machine bundled and folded the loose cotton into long flat “laps” or sheets of cotton that then went to the carding room, where carding machines cleaned and compressed the laps before twisting them into “roving,” long cotton strands about the thickness of clothesline rope. The roving coiled into “roving cans,” then moved to the drawing room, where drawing machines twisted the roving to the thickness of a pencil and wound it onto wooden bobbins that workers set onto the spindles of the spinning machines that spun them into yarn for weaving on the factory’s loud, clacking looms.

The symbolic mill opening must have been bittersweet for George; his wife and childhood sweetheart, Ruth Eliza, had died six months before he broke open the first cotton bale in the new Globe Mill, with its 540 windows, 35,100 spindles, and room to add 5,000 more. The Great White Mill was huge, one of the biggest cotton mills in the Blackstone Valley, and it literally could not have opened at a worse time.

On September 19, 1873, Jay Cooke & Co. announced the failure of its Philadelphia bank, precipitating the Panic of 1873. The proximate cause of the failure traced back to Austria-Hungary, but in the United

States, the main causes again were wheat and railroads, this time the Northern Pacific Railroad. A surplus of American wheat glutted European markets, undermining Austria-Hungary’s exports of flour and wheat-fed beef. Land prices fell across the Austrian Empire and banks in Vienna and Berlin that wrote mortgages on those lands began to fail, prompting the Bank of England to raise the rate of borrowing in an attempt to chill borrowing.

American railroads had recovered from the previous panic, but again they were floating bonds to expand rails, this time into the Pacific Northwest. The bonds offered high returns but had few assets to back them up until rails actually were in place and carrying trains.

Jay Cooke & Co., one of the nation’s largest financial institutions, had invested heavily in connecting the Great Lakes to Puget Sound by rail. When lending rates soared in England, the Northern Pacific could not obtain cash to meet short-term debts on its bonds. Cooke failed, and over the next few years, hundreds of American banks followed, making the Panic of 1873 the longest and most severe of the nineteenth century.

“A Gloom in all manufacturing and mercantile circles” settled over Rhode Island on October 31, 1873, a gloom that had nothing to do with Halloween. A commission appointed to investigate the financial affairs of A. & W. Sprague found that the firm’s finances were too distressed to justify a $4 million bailout by local banks. The once unthinkable was now a fact: the National Bank of Commerce would commence proceedings in bankruptcy against A. & W. Sprague, a truly disastrous prospect for Rhode Island. Sprague’s failure threatened to exacerbate the heavy toll of the Panic of 1873.

“No one can appreciate the significance of such a portent who has not known Rhode Island,” the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote. “Rhode Island has been described as a pair of scissors, one side of which is the Spragues, and the other is Brown & Ives. If the Spragues were to fail, or if Brown & Ives were to fail, Rhode Island would cease to exist as a composite character. She would become simply Brown & Ives or the Spragues, according to which survived.”

Another newspaper referred to the Sprague and Brown & Ives concern not as a pair of shears but as Capulets and Montagues, the warring houses in Romeo & Juliet. The rivalry between them was as bitter as their wealth was immense. Each controlled a newspaper, the Providence Press for Sprague, the Providence Journal for Brown & Ives. They backed different factions of the Republican Party, with Boss Brayton yet under the control of Brown & Ives and William Sprague holding a seat in the US Senate, a position he used to castigate his rivals in a public rant delivered on the Senate floor.

The families that controlled Rhode Island’s two houses could not have been more different. William Sprague and his brother, Amasa, were young, brash, given to racing horses and throwing lavish parties. Brown & Ives was composed of partners perceived as “very aristocratic, very reserved, and very astute gentlemen, who live in the grand old way [and] don’t trouble themselves to take off their hats to ordinary people.” The bitter, public split between the two houses might have been comedic fodder if not for the political and economic clout they exerted on the state due to their vast wealth.

A. & W. Sprague spun 280,000 spindles and employed more than 12,000 people, mostly in Rhode Island. By one estimate, the firm controlled 25 percent of the state’s textile industry. People entered Rhode Island on steamboats partly owned by the Spragues and stepped onto streetcars exclusively owned by them. They made horseshoes and owned an iron foundry, machine shop, mowing machine company, one-third of the stock of Rhode Island Locomotive Works, and an equal share of Nicholson File. Their daily payroll approached $25,000. The threat of their forced liquidation exacerbated in Rhode Island the global panic that cast a “gloom” everywhere.

Despite the panic, Ballou & Son ended 1873 in apparent good shape. “Their production has been curtailed by the panic same as other manufacturers,” a Dun agent reported on December 9, 1873. Yet: “They have shown no signs of distress, met their engagements as well as others and are believed to be in a healthy condition.”

“There is comment on them in some quarters, but we incline to the opinion that it arises from the unpopularity of David Ballou, the active manager of this business, with some parties.”

In January 1874, Social Manufacturing determinedly pressed on with its own plans to expand its mill in Woonsocket, consistent with the trend to build bigger. Social successfully petitioned the state’s General Assembly to increase its capital from $600,000 “to an amount not exceeding One Million of Dollars,” twice what Ballou Manufacturing had raised to capitalize the Globe. The stated reason for the boost in capital was that Social had “within the past year enlarged their

Mill by the addition of new Buildings and Machinery.” There is no evidence that this is true. In fact, the Woonsocket Patriot, which paid painstaking attention to developments in the town’s textile industry, reported that July that the Social Mill’s “last improvements happened to the east end two years ago.” Social did not need the capital increase to finance a recent expansion, as stated; it required money for a massive rebuilding that the company tackled that summer after a fast-moving fire swept through the plant just before the summer shutdown, leveling the existing mill within a matter of hours.

On July 1, 1874, two days before the mill was scheduled to close for the two-week summer shutdown, dense clouds of smoke rolled from the eaves of the mansard roofs of the Social Mill. Shortly before 3:00 P.m., fire pierced the thick smoke, and all wings of the big mill quickly became, in the words of the Woonsocket Patriot, “a roaring mass of flame.”

The roofs of the factory stood higher than the Social Mills Fire Department’s fire hoses could reach. “The officers of the fire department seemed to think that the conflagration could be subdued with the means at their disposal, and we do not learn that aid was sought from abroad,” the Patriot reported.

“Between 4 and 5 o’clock the roofs had fallen in, and before 6 o’clock there was nothing but bare and blackened walls.” Flames consumed the massive mill in less than three hours. Despite the astonishing speed of the blaze, company officials managed to save all valuables from the counting house in front of the mill before it, too, went up in flames.

Before day’s end, company officials announced the

cause of the fire. It “originated from the friction of the main belt in the weaving room, near the center of the mill; and the fire ran through the belt holes, from story to story, with astonishing rapidity.”

Adjusters placed the loss on buildings, machines, and stock at $594,338.18. Insurance, mostly through policies written by fourteen large mutual companies, covered $524,231.81, or 88 percent of the loss.

“It is a matter of public congratulation that the insurance is so large,” the Patriot opined. “It cannot be concealed that this fire is a real calamity for our town, About 600 persons are thrown out of employment.”

Flush with more than a half-million dollars of insurance money and one million in newly capitalized stock, Social vowed to build back bigger and better than ever, bigger, even, than the Globe Mill that the Ballous had built on the other side of the river less than a year before.

Teams of masons labored to build brick walls 451 feet long by 73 feet wide. The walls were three feet thick at the bottom, tapering to twenty inches at the top, looming five stories above the Social district. Looms, carding machines, and spindles began arriving even before workers finished installing the floors.

On the west side of the river, Ballou Manufacturing kept building out its Globe mill village, too; the Patriot reported in August:

“There are more buildings in the process of erection on the Globe side than there has been in many years.

George C. Ballou & Son [formally Ballou Manufacturing] have doubled the size of the boarding house formerly known as the Globe Tavern. They have also erected a large brick tenement house in the rear of

the Globe Store [which still stands along Front Street today], and have a brick counting house partially completed. Mr. Ballou is erecting, just west of the Metcalf Place, two houses, one for his son and one for Mr. Seagrave,” the husband of one of Ballou’s granddaughters.

The Globe Bank raised a new building adorned with marble trimmings at Globe and Arnold Streets. With a new mill and bank going up and the Globe Village expanding, Woonsocket appeared to be prospering, but the look was deceiving—the city was coasting on the inertia of a postwar boom that had gone bust.

Six hundred people thrown out of work by the Social Mill fire could not find work. On October 9, 1874, the Ballou Mill announced a program of “two-thirds time,” slashing working hours and wages by one-third. The new schedule was 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 P.m. Monday through Thursday, 7:00 to 4:00 on Friday, with Saturday “holidays.”

Up and down the valley, Saturday shutdowns became the rule, prompting the Patriot to lament: “In this valley between Providence and Worcester, at least 15,000 manufacturing operatives are without employment on Saturday.”

Without millwork, many people had no way to earn a living. In 1875, 25 percent of Woonsocket residents over ten could not read or write, leaving them largely dependent on jobs that did not demand literacy. Most of the town’s residents were foreign born. Of 13,576 people in town, 6,236 were born in Canada, mostly Quebec; 2,218 came from Ireland. Only 1,836 were born in Woonsocket. A mere nineteen people were described as “colored.” Forty-five percent of the town’s children between ages five and sixteen did not attend school;

many of them worked in the mills. It was a tough time and place to be a child: 290 people died in Woonsocket that year—half of them were under age eleven. The prevalence of childhood death in the mid-1800s did not discriminate—in a two-week period of 1856, Henry Lippitt had buried three children, killed by an epidemic of scarlet fever.

Mills throughout the valley cut work hours, and wages, too—no work on Saturdays, half of Lippitt Woolen’s machines shut down, and all of Social Mill’s workers were out on the street. Evenings and Saturdays, unemployed men wandered downtown and stood around, looking for something to do. The Woonsocket Patriot editorialized against this scourge of idle workers:

“Loafers are to be found in full force on every corner, doorway and dry goods box which will provide them with a seat,” the Patriot carped. “Here they stand, sit, or lounge with consummate impudence, gazing upon the legitimate pedestrian with a leer that only the genuine loafer acquires, passing remarks upon the ladies passing, and often indulging in language so low and vulgar that it cannot fail to grate upon the ear of the passersby, male or female.”

A year later, the town faced more serious problems than French and Irish “loafers” standing around, making passersby feel uncomfortable. An arsonist was on the loose, targeting properties that symbolized power. On October 11, 1875, he tried burning the Congregational Church by shredding a Bible and using its torn pages to kindle a fire that burned a small organ before going out.

Later that week, a live-in maid at Ballou’s Stone

House heard noises inside the house after midnight. She crept downstairs to investigate and found the wood box dragged into the foyer, soaked in oil, and lit on fire. Her cries of fire woke George, who put the fire out. Just two weeks earlier, George had come home to find his house burglarized.

While George was dousing a fire, an arsonist was lighting another, inside the basement of the new public high school. The firebug opened windows to increase the draft, and the flames passed through the ventilation system to the top floor, consuming the entire wood-frame building, its books, three pianos, a cabinet of minerals, and maps.

A week later, a small railroad depot north of town went up in flames. A church, school, mansion of a mill owner, and a railroad depot were set on fire within a week, prompting a reader of the Patriot to write:

“we forebear to enter upon a motive whether political, social, moral, religious, rum, town debts, pauperism, tramps, and the whole category of influences that which underlie the problem...”

Hard times tore apart the town’s social fabric. Vandals toppled marble gravestones in Oak Hill Cemetery; someone threw oil onto the new Civil War monument in Monument Square; and burglaries increased, including the one at Ballou’s.

In response to the arson fires, the Town Council began to professionalize the police force. “Woonsocket is now one of the best policed towns in New England—it having nearly doubled its Police force within a fortnight,” the Patriot reported in November 1875. “And yet it is reported that a constable had his badge stolen from his dwelling house last week. Is there

no way to protect our officials from the cunning acts of thieves and burglars?”

“George C. Ballou is very sick,” a Dun agent reported on March 7, 1876, “but in case of death it is provided that the Ballou Manufacturing Company will continue his insurance. Credit good.”

A few weeks after the clandestine report on George’s illness, the Woonsocket Patriot confirmed it: “His disease is a cancerous affectation; and we are pained to say, there is no hope of his recovery.”

George had known for some time that his death was imminent. The previous October, one day before someone tried burning down his house, he had transferred all of his interests in mills, farms, houses, and stock to Ballou Manufacturing Company. The transfer acted as his will, giving control of his estate to David and the husbands of two of his three daughters to manage for the family after his death.

As George lay dying inside the thick walls of the Stone House, a storm raged outside. More than six inches of rain fell within a week, including a four-inch deluge on March 26, pushing the river above flood. The power trench spilled over, flooding the first floors of a Main Street mill it ran through. Wind split the ancient oak outside Friends Meeting House, leaving it, the Patriot noted, “doomed like man, to soon pass away.”

On March 28, 1876, George C. Ballou died. On the day of his funeral, people lined both sides of the street for more than a mile to watch his coffin roll past. The procession began at his house atop Woonsocket Hill and stepped toward the bridge spanning the falls of the Blackstone River, thunderously loud after days of flooding rains.

On the west side of the bridge, workers emerged from the long, white Globe Mill that dominated Front Street to see their late boss, a man whom they called “Uncle George,” roll past.

On the east side, workers stepped out from the Ballou Mill and American Worsted, fronting each other across Main Street. People stood shoulder to shoulder all the way east to the end of the power trench and to Clinton Mill, until recently, Ballou’s largest. Beyond the new Social Mill, the spectators thinned as the cortege crossed the Mill River and began the climb to the peak of Oak Hill, the town’s thirty-year-old garden cemetery, already a kind of Valhalla holding the bodies of textile “pioneer” Dexter Ballou and several men killed in the Civil War.

A week after Ballou’s funeral, the Woonsocket Patriot carried a small, advertisement from the administrator of Ballou’s estate, Spencer Mowry, giving notice “to all persons indebted to said Estate to make payment to the subscriber without delay; and all persons having claims against the said Estate, to present the same for settlement.”

Mowry had been George’s nearest neighbor, served as president of Globe Bank where George was a longtime director, and followed George as a master of their local Masonic Lodge. Mowry was a trusted family friend, though the Dun agents had some reservations about him, with one observing in 1862: “He needs integrity.”

“Considered good,” an agent reported later that year. “Is sharp & looks out for No. 1.”

People and letters began coming into Mowry’s office to make payments owed or to press claims against

the estate. To the astonishment of most people, Mowry concluded that claims against the estate “far exceeded” the payments due.

“The first information of the disaster came to the people of this town not unlike a thunderbolt from a clear sky,” the Patriot reported on April 20, 1876. “There were individuals in town who knew that the company—on account of its heavy expenditures in the erection and furnishing of its mammoth new cotton mill, and on account of the remarkable depression in the cotton manufacture which has existed for many months—was carrying a “heavy load;” yet a load that would have been carried comparatively easily if the cotton manufacture had been even ordinarily remunerative. But the common peoples—including factory operatives, who do not generally bother their brains with the difficulties that do bother businessmen during ‘hard times’—knew nothing of the impending disaster; and hence people in general are taken by surprise.”

George’s daughter, Abigail “Abby” Ballou Robinson, first heard the news through a newspaper while visiting friends in New York. “The poor thing has a very heavy heart, yet keeps life wonderfully,” her friend, Elvira Irwin Furber, wrote in a letter. “Has recently lost her father, not a month since, & while here, she saw a notice in the morning paper of an assignment of ‘Ballou & Sons,’ her father’s & brother’s mills in Woonsocket, by which they lose everything... .So much sorrow all at once, seems hard to endure.”

Furber wrote that letter to Sarah Orne Jewett5, a Maine writer who was a distant relative and close friend of Furber’s husband, Henry Jewett Furber. At the time, he had a reputation for rescuing large, Mid-

western insurance companies from financial difficulties. Abby knew the Furbers from traveling in the same, high social circles in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where Abby’s husband published the Green Bay Advocate newspaper. Abby wrote for the newspaper and eventually managed it during her husband’s long illness, then acted as its publisher for two years after his death, an unusual position of authority for a woman of her time. Whether she asked for Furber’s help in turning around Ballou Manufacturing is not known, but perhaps it was best he did not volunteer to lead the Ballous out of insolvency. Prosecutors would soon charge Furber with looting two distressed insurance companies he had been assigned to manage, though juries found him not guilty.

Ballou Manufacturing could have declared bankruptcy under the newly enacted federal Bankruptcy Act of 1867. But that act, like the two previous attempts at federal bankruptcy legislation in the 1800s, was unwieldy and inefficient and proved extremely unpopular among creditors and their debtors. Like the two previous attempts at enacting federal bankruptcy law (in 1800 and 1841), it soon would be repealed.

In the second year of the act’s existence, 29,539 companies filed for voluntary bankruptcy or were driven into it by creditors. Debtors soon found that the act did not absolve them from their debts, so they stopped filing for it; creditors discovered that delayed payments or excessive fees, and expenses made it hardly worthwhile to force a bankruptcy. By the early 1870s, when failures reached all-time highs, only 6,000 or so companies wound up in bankruptcy court.

Outside the framework of formal bankruptcy law, the disposition of failed businesses was a dog’s breakfast. The trustee appointed by A. & W. Sprague to retire its debts, Zechariah Chafee, built a lucrative, sixteen-year career out of the post, at the expense of the Sprague family and many of their creditors. He bought some of the assets with his own money and resold them for a profit, earning a censure from the state’s Supreme Court but no significant sanctions because he broke no laws. Chafee sold the biggest of the Sprague mills at fire-sale prices to the state’s biggest mill companies, Lippitt Manufacturing, Brown & Ives, and B. B. & R. Knight. Like Dyson v. Dyson in Dickens’s Bleak House, the court cases concerning disposition of the Sprague estate lumbered on until 1927, when the state’s Supreme Court ordered that all records of it be destroyed “by fire.”

“The collapse of the [1867] federal law was in many ways a misfortune,” wrote law historian Lawrence Friedman. “Such a law could have ensured fair, uniform division of assets among creditors.” Instead of operating within the cumbersome legal framework established by the Bankruptcy Act of 1867, the Ballous and their creditors opted to settle debts at the local level, resulting in a distribution that was neither fair nor uniform, and for the Ballous, definitely unfortunate.

On April 19, 1876, not one month after his father’s death, David Ballou signed over all of Ballou Manufacturing’s properties—the mills, tenements, farms, and George’s personal property—to three of Ballou’s creditors, “assignees” charged with overseeing distribution of the estate’s assets. Two of the three assignees held

close ties to Henry Lippitt, president of Lippitt Manufacturing and the sitting governor. Those two were Charles Merriman, who was Lippitt’s nephew and an executive in Lippitt Manufacturing, and Addison Q. Fisher, a Providence cotton dealer who rented an office in the same Providence building as Lippitt Manufacturing’s headquarters. Fisher succeeded Lippitt as president of the influential Providence Board of Trade.

The third assignee was Josiah Lasell of Whitinsville, Massachusetts. He was the son-in-law of John Whitin and an executive at Whitin Machine Works, makers of textile manufacturing machinery, most likely the company that furnished the machinery for the Globe Mill.

Merriman, representing Social Mill, held a controlling interest of Ballou Manufacturing’s assets. The trustees appointed two groups of assessors, one to set a value for Ballou’s mill properties and one to assess the value of his house, farms, and personal property.

In late April, three assessors, including Ballou’s grandson-in-law, combed through George’s house and barns, inspecting everything down to the chamber pots before returning an eight-page, handwritten inventory of his personal property. The list captures Ballou’s essence as a farmer: four ox carts $100; two ox wagons $100; one two-horse wagon $60; three harnesses $10. The Stone House’s most expensive furnishing was a “bookcase and books” in the parlor, worth an estimated $40.

The mill group, which included Lasell, assessed the Ballou Mill at $119,220, the original Globe Mill at $51,624, and the new “Great White” Globe Mill at $568,832, or more than $605,000 if an existing room were fitted with new spindles.

The assignees estimated all assets pledged by David Ballou to be worth $1.19 million. They listed claims against Ballou Manufacturing as being $1.48 million, a deficit of $289,277. Assignees listed the largest liability as “Accommodation Notes, $401,300.” Accommodation notes covered a wide range of paper: promissory notes, bills of exchange, and endorsements. Under the heading “Endorsements by Ballou Manufacturing Company on Notes Considered Doubtful,” the company owed $149,390. The Ballous had cosigned for nearly $150,000 worth of debt, which, with the onset of the Panic of 1873, the original debtors could not pay. Among those they endorsed was George’s nephew, and David’s cousin, Oren Ballou. Though he earned good money through partnerships with the Lippitts in the Social Mill and the Silver Spring Bleachery, Oren had taken a big risk. Around 1860, he spent $800,000 on a huge tract of old-growth forest in the Michigan Peninsula. Loggers were then pushing the Huron tribe of Native Americans off the land and felling millions of acres of old-growth white pines, forests of tall trees with tremendous girth, to turn them into lumber.

Oren’s sons ran sawmills and salt mines on their father’s property near Saginaw, but one contemporaneous account reported that salt mines “had become a losing business to such extent that...salt property had hardly a quotable value.” Logging also proved unprofitable; a recent Michigan State University study found: “Most of the small operators struggled to survive recessions, panics, and a devastating Civil War; bankruptcies were common.” Ballou Manufacturing guaranteed $37,500 of Oren’s notes and was on the hook to pay it.

Ballou Manufacturing’s secured creditors, which included Social Mill, claimed more than $565,000 of the assets, leaving about $625,000 to pay $915,000 worth of unsecured debt. Assignees estimated that if the properties brought their assessed values, unsecured debtors would receive sixty-eight cents on the dollar, or 80 percent, if American Worsted released the Ballous from endorsements of loans made to that company.

“These estimates of dividend are, of course, based upon the appraisal of the property,” the Patriot reported, “and creditors must judge for themselves whether the appraised value can be realized.” Secured creditors, such as Lippitt and Merriman, had nothing to fear as assets easily covered their claims. Unsecured creditors hoped the assignees would manage or sell the remaining mills and property to fetch the highest price, but as potential buyers of those mills, Lippitt and Merriman sought to pay the lowest price, a clear conflict of interest.

To pay the creditors, assignees opted against running the mills to generate income, choosing instead to sell the mills, tenements, farms, and houses at public auctions. The assignees chose the worst possible solution for the Ballous: forcing asset sales at panic prices. They scheduled the first public auction for October, 25, 1876, to sell the entire Globe Mill Village: dozens of four-family tenements and boarding houses, a steam sawmill, shops, houses, vacant lots, the mill store, and the “Great White” Globe Mill, for sale to the highest bidder.

On the morning of the “great sale,” 400 people gathered outside the 540 windows of the tall, white Globe

Mill on Front Street to witness the auction. Among the people milling about was a consortium of local businessmen who had pooled their capital in hopes of keeping the Globe Mill in local hands. One face that stood out in the crowd was the recognizable, lion-like mien of the sitting governor, Henry Lippitt. He had taken the day off from the State House to come up to Woonsocket to bid on the Globe Mill in person.

Lippitt could have sent a company representative to do his bidding—maybe not his nephew, since he essentially was running the auction, but the mill superintendent, Charles Nourse, or one of the company directors.

Lippitt wielded enormous power in political and financial circles, and his presence sent a message to potential big bidders such as Brown & Ives and B. B. & R. Knight: Lippitt wanted this mill, and he had the clout to cause problems for those who publicly opposed him.

At precisely 10:30 a.m., Charles Merriman— assignee, Lippitt’s nephew, and a Social Mills executive—stepped before the crowd. He said he “was glad to see the large assembly of creditors, and assured them that the property would be sold to the highest bidder, whether for one dollar or one hundred thousand dollars.”

A local auctioneer, Jefferson Aldrich, announced that the first property to go would be the Globe Mills, No. 2 and No. 3. Aldrich asked for the first bid. Henry Lippitt answered the call: “Three hundred thousand” dollars. The local consortium, led by a former mill superintendent named Elwell, countered: “310,000.” Lippitt boosted the price to $315,000.

“For awhile the genial and shrewd auctioneer could evoke no other bid,” reported the Boston Globe.

After hesitation, Elwell came back with $316,000; an increment of $1,000, just one-third of 1 percent, a tell that the consortium could not go much higher.

Lippitt bid $320,000. After that, the two sides exchanged a volley of mostly $1,000 bids. When the price hit $363,000, the hammer fell. The Globe Mill, the “crowning work” of George Ballou’s career, became the property of the Social Manufacturing Company. This sale included the No. 2 mill, formerly called the Globe Mill, built of stone and wood, containing 8,578 spindles, “with preparations and looms in good working order,” and the new No. 3 Mill, “built of stone, containing 35,392 spindles, with ample preparations and looms.”

Lasell, an objective assignee and a mill expert from Whitin Machines, had placed the value of those two properties at more than $620,000. Governor Lippitt, with little opposition, bought them at a public auction overseen by his nephew and business partner at 58 percent of their assessed value.

The Woonsocket Patriot observed that assignees sold the property “at the lowest ebb in the business depression of the past three years.” Selling low was bad for the Ballou heirs, bad for the unsecured creditors, and good for Social Manufacturing, whose agents were in charge of the company’s assets.

For secured creditors, a low sale price did not affect payback; the estate had enough assets to pay all debts secured by property in full. Social Manufacturing, for example, had secured $50,000 it loaned to Ballou Manufacturing through second liens on the Clinton and Peabody Mill stock. Social received full payment for its secured debts and bought the newly built, highly

efficient Globe Mill for less than 60 percent of its value. The manifold, unsecured creditors faced a more uncertain payback, particularly as Ballou’s best asset fetched less than 60 percent of its appraised value.

After the gavel fell on the Globe Mill, bidding began on the tenements. Lippitt took lots number 5 through 31, including the tenements closest to the mill building. His winning bid was $42,900, the assessed value. The bidding moved up Front Street, to South Main, and even across the river, where a bidder named John Maguire bought a single house of 2,400 square feet. The Weekly Patriot dryly noted, “George C. Ballou’s children were born in this house.” It sold for $3,610.

“The whole property went much lower than good judges predicted, and it is reported that the lucky purchasers were offered $40,000 for their bargains, and further, that certain men seemed ready to bid $475,000 rather than see the property pass into the hands of ‘outsiders,’” the Patriot reported. “The mills will start up in the course of a week or two, if the matter of relation to the purchase of supplies on hand can easily be arranged. Many heirs will probably date the commencement of their pecuniary welfare from the fortunate investments in real estate made on Wednesday.”

The Ballou heirs could date the commencement of their pecuniary decline from the loss of their former real estate on that October day. David Ballou and his sisters, Celia, Alpha, and Abigail, lost their father’s farms and personal possessions, their earliest home, and all interest in the Globe, Clinton, and Peabody Mills; days before the public auction, they had bought the anachronistic Ballou Mill from the assignees for $100,000, about 84 percent of its assessed value.

The three daughters of George C. Ballou salvaged some of their father’s once vast textile empire. They pooled their money, $7,000, to capitalize a trust, naming Alpha’s husband, Peter H. Brown, as the trustee. The Woonsocket Trust for Savings wrote them a mortgage for $125,000 to buy from the assignees of the Ballou Manufacturing Company the old Ballou Mill for $100,000, the Stone House mansion for $11,500, and tenements near the mill for about $13,000. Some of the creditors extended a second mortgage on those properties for $35,000, payable in installments, providing capital to replace the mill’s 30-year-old waterwheel with a turbine and to put up coal and cotton to get the old mill running again.

To run the mill, the Ballou daughters hired their brother, David. “He has a life training in the business,” the Patriot observed, “and is undoubtedly as well qualified for the position as any hired employee could be.”

Within three weeks of the Globe auction, the old Ballou Mill’s 10,000 spindles and looms were rattling and clacking. By March 1877, the mill employed 150 hands turning out 43,000 yards of cotton “shirtings” per week.

Measured in terms of annual business failures nationwide, the Panic of 1873 reached its worst year in 1878, followed by a quick recovery. By 1880, fewer businesses per 100,000 failed than at any time since the Civil War. In Woonsocket, the panic’s low point came at the same time as the Globe foreclosure auction. By the spring of 1877, all the former Ballou Mills were running near capacity. Lippitt Manufacturing’s new, million-dollar Social Mill employed 500 hands making 184,000 yards of sheeting a week, four times

the output of the old Ballou Mill. Lippitt employed another 350 hands in the “Great White” Globe Mill, putting out 135,000 yards weekly.

After taking the Ballou Company’s stock in the Clinton Mill to pay secured claims of Social Mill and Denny and Poor Company (Ballou’s selling agent), the assignees sold Clinton to B. B. & R. Knight Company, one of the state’s largest textile companies. B. B. & R. Knight employed 200 hands at Clinton Mill in April 1877, making 61,000 yards of cotton goods each week. Knight sold its products under the label “Fruit of the Loom.” The Knights also bought several of the former Sprague Mills from the Sprague trustee, Zechariah Chafee.

American Worsted paid all the endorsement notes Ballou Manufacturing had guaranteed, good news for the unsecured creditors, and ran independently of the Ballous, employing 150 hands spinning woolen braids. The Woonsocket Rubber Company, co-owned by an Irish immigrant named Joseph Banigan, bought from the assignees a rubblestone building built by George Ballou on the west side of the Blackstone. Banigan sold that to Glenark Knitting Company, which eventually made knit cotton linings there, probably for the Woonsocket Rubber Company’s products.

Oren Ballou, who lost his Michigan lands, mines, and sawmills at public auction one week before the Globe sale, did not live to see the frozen grip of the panic begin to thaw locally in the spring of 1877. That February, he died of a fever in his Providence home. The Patriot noted: “His last years were shadowed by pecuniary troubles.”

The former Ballou Manufacturing mills quickly gen-

Remnant pillar of Globe Mill, author’s collection

erated some money for their new owners, but payment for the smaller, unsecured creditors languished. In April 1878, the assignees announced “a second dividend of 10 percent will be paid to parties holding notes against the Ballou Manufacturing Company.” Creditors could collect their dividend at 37 Weybosset Street, Providence, where two of the assignees, Merriman and Fisher, had their offices. Eighteen months after the Globe auction, while the Globe and Clinton Mills were making money for the Lippitts and the Knights, the small, unsecured creditors had received only 20 percent of their claims.

Henry Lippitt did nothing illegal in buying the Globe Mill for a fraction of its price from his nephew at a public auction. He was playing by the rules of the game then in effect. Through a fortuitous combination of fire and foresight, Social Manufacturing was holding fresh capital of $1.5 million in the mid-1870s, when cash was hard to come by.

Conversely, the Ballous were plagued by an unfortunate combination of debt, depression, and death:

debt to finance the Globe Mill; depression (the Panic of 1873); and George’s death in March of 1876. Creditors waited until after the venerated George Ballou’s death before calling their notes in April; had he lived another year, the times might have turned profitable enough for the Ballou mills to meet their obligations. The administrator of the Ballou estate, Spencer Mowry, submitted his final accounting in July 1880, more than four years after the assignees took possession of Ballou’s properties. Woonsocket became a chartered city in 1880; the city’s Probate Court file includes fifteen numbered folders, one of which is missing. Curiously, the case shows no accounting of claims from, and payments to, the large secured creditors. Mowry did submit a detailed, handwritten account of small receipts credited to the estate, $9.85 for the sale of hay for example, and relatively small payments made to unsecured creditors, such as $5 to Mowry for attending court hearings in a suit brought against the estate. The largest unsecured claim listed in the final account was $9,000, paid to Social Manufacturing.

After all the assets were collected and counted, and all creditors, secured and unsecured, were paid, the estate of George Ballou was actually in the black. On September 7, 1880, the Probate Court returned $14,327.64 to the Ballou heirs. Presumably, all creditors were paid in full, or they would have claimed money returned to the estate. Even after selling its key assets at the lowest ebb of a severe panic, Ballou Manufacturing had owned enough assets to cover all of its debts. Ultimately, the assignment had been unnecessary.

The inequities and outright abuses of the type evident in the Sprague and Ballou assignments spurred a cry for bankruptcy reform from merchants and manufacturers nationwide. In 1881, the New York Board of Trade and Transportation formed a national committee of Boards of Trade to push through federal bankruptcy legislation; they failed, but a National Convention of Representatives of Commercial Bodies convened in St. Louis in 1889 to try again. After nearly a decade of lobbying, they succeeded, ushering in a Federal Bankruptcy Act of 1898 that, with amendments, referees objective disposition of bankruptcy cases to this day. Flaws remain—the US Bankruptcy Court in Providence assigns court-appointed trustees on a rotating schedule. Debtors know when a certain trustee will be assigned to a case and could shop for a trustee who they feel will be sympathetic to their interests, but the system is far more objective and protective, for creditors and debtors alike, than it was through the freewheeling 1800s.

The Dun agency’s credit spies kept a wary eye on the Ballou Mill, noting in April 1881: “It is generally thought that they have a good load to carry. It has been reported up to quite recently that they were making a little money.”

The Ballou heirs had invested in a second, relatively small textile mill in Scituate, causing the Dun agent to observe: “It was thought when they bought in the Scituate Mill they strained themselves to their utmost to make the cash payments.” But they made the payments.

Dun agents noted in April 1884 that the Ballous had paid most or all of the mortgage they had taken to

buy back their father’s mansion and mill. “The property consists of mill estate and homestead of the late George C. Ballou, and good judges think there is an estate worth $40 to $50,000 over the mortgage. Business with them has been about fair probably.”

David Ballou’s wife, Emily Stetson, died in August 1884. He buried her in Mount Auburn Cemetery, near her childhood home in Boston; six months later, he shuttered the relatively small, obsolete Ballou Mill and moved back to Providence. “Have closed out about all their stock and the mill is closed,” a Dun agent reported in June 1885. “Their property is mortgaged for near full value and it is doubtful if they could wind up and have a surplus.” David chose to be buried away

from Woonsocket, with his wife at Mount Auburn. He joined her there in 1908.

In April 1885, the Dun agency issued its last, handwritten report on Henry Lippitt & Co., a holding company for all of Lippitt’s concerns. “It’s very hard to make an estimate of their worth. Governor Lippitt considers himself to be worth over $6,000,000 but it is not possible for us to give any opinion in the matter.”

Gerald M. Carbone ’s publications include Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry, written under the auspices of the Rhode Island Historical Society, a biography of Nathanael Green, and a book on George Washington. He is a former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow (Stanford University, 1999), and holds an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University.

b ibliogra P hy

Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton, A Global History. New York: Vinatge Books, 2014.

Biographical Cyclopedia of Representative Men of Rhode Island. National Biographical Publishing Company, 1881.

Chase, David, “National Register of Historic Places InventoryNomination Form: Hanora Mills.” Department of the Interior, September 1979.

Chafee, Zechariah, “Weathering the Panic of ’73: An Episode in Rhode Island Business History.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 66 (Oct. 1936–May 1941), pp. 270–293.

Coleman, Peter J., “The Insolvent Debtor in Rhode Island, 1745–1828.” William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 3 (July 1965), pp.

413–434.

Connors, Anthony J., Ingenious Machinists, Two Inventive Lives

from the American Industrial Revolution. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.

David Ballou Papers, MSS 9001-B Box 3, Rhode Island Historical Society Archives.

“Deaths Registered in the Town of Woonsocket, 1876.” pp. 1114–1115. Rhode Island State Archives.

Dunwell, Steve, The Run of the Mill: A Pictorial Narrative of the Expansion, Dominion, Decline and Enduring Impact of the New England Textile Industry. Boston: David R. Godine, 1978.

Fitch, Virginia A., “National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form: Glenark Mills.” Department of the Interior, December 1988.

Fortin, Marcel, ed. Woonsocket, Rhode Island, A Centennial History, 1888–1988. State College, PA: Jostens Printing and Publishing Division, 1988.

Friedman, Lawrence, A History of American Law, Second Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Hansen, Bradley. “Bankruptcy Law in the United States.” EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. August 14, 2001. http:// eh.net/encyclopedia/bankruptcy-law-in-the-united-states/.

History of Tuscola and Bay Counties, Michigan: with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of their prominent men and pioneers. Chicago: H. R. Page & Co., 1883.

Kulik, Gary, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island.” Hahn, Steven, and Prude, Jonathan, eds. The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Incorporation Papers for Lippitt Manufacturing, Social Manufacturing, Clinton Manufacturing Company, and Ballou Manufacturing Company, Rhode Island State Archives.

Lauer, Josh, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America.” Technology and Culture, Vol. 49, No. 2 (April 2008), pp. 321–324.

Lippitt Papers: “Henry Lippitt & Co.,” MSS 1045, and “Lippitt Family,” MSS 538, Rhode Island Historical Society Archives.

“Merriman v. Social Manufacturing Company.” Rhode Island Superior Court.

Newspapers.com. Multiple newspapers.

“R. G. Dun & Co. credit report volumes.” Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

“Rhode Island Census of Industry, 1850, 1860, 1870.” RI State Archives.

Richardson, Erastus, 1876 History of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Woonsocket: S. S. Foss, 1876.

Sanborn Insurance Maps of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Stevens, Horace Nathaniel, Nathaniel Stevens, 1786–1865, An Account of His Life and the Business He Founded. Boston: D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, 1946.

“Tenth Census of the United States, 1880: Waterpower.”

Vogel, R.M., Sande, Ted, “The New England Textile Mill Survey: Selections from the Historic American Buildings Survey, Number Eleven.” Washington: National Parks Service, 1971.

“White Pine Logging: A Background.” Michigan State University, Project Geo.

Woonsocket Probate Court, “George C. Ballou, Dec’d. April 4, 1876, Spencer Mowry, Adm.”

Woonsocket Weekly Patriot and Woonsocket Daily Patriot, American-French Genealogical Society.

n otes

1. Letter from Charles Walter Stetson to Miss Lippitt (possibly Jeanie), December 19, 1887, Lippitt Papers, A55888(404): [Carrie Taylor believes this batch of Lippitt Papers is at the Hay Library. It’s definitely not in the RIHS Lippitt Papers, because I checked.]

2. Lippitt, Robert Lincoln. Untitled poem, saved in Mary Ann Lippitt’s Journal, 1876–1886. Box 19, Lippitt House Museum Collection.

3. Elizabeth Wayland Agee Cogswell, “The Henry Lippitt House:

A Document of Life and Taste in Mid-Victorian America,” Master’s Thesis (University of Delaware, 1981), 29.

4. Oak, Renaissance Revival hall stand with walnut moldings. Purchased for $625. See Cogswell, Appendix C, “Transcription of Bill from Anthony, Potter & Denison,” 213.

5. http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/let/Corresp/1876. html, accessed September 13, 2022.

JEROEN VAN DEN HURK

Forgotten Textile Mills of North Kingstown, Rhode Island

The Sanford Brothers’ Mills

As you drive around North Kingstown, Rhode Island, you still come across some of the mills that were once part of its vibrant nineteenth-century textile industry. Local place names remind us of former mill towns, such as Belleville, Davisville, Hamilton, and Lafayette. The industry is no longer, and the buildings that survive have been turned into apartments, offices, or artists’ studios.1 In some cases, the only reminders are the former millponds or the ruins of mill buildings. This essay starts with the remnants of two of these mills once owned and operated by brothers Joseph C. Sanford and Ezbon Sanford. The mills can give an insight into the role the textile industry played in the brothers’ lives and that of their neighbors during the nineteenth century and how we can uncover these oftforgotten histories. Placing the mills within the context of the other nineteenth-century textile mills in North Kingstown, and Rhode Island as a whole, allows us not only to gauge their success and commitment to the industry but also to draw attention to the duplicitous nature of the textile industry in nineteenth-century Rhode Island. It was Northern industry that for a long time thrived by producing textiles to clothe enslaved people in the South. Whereas the Sanford brothers did not rise to the fame of, for instance, the members of the Hazard family in neighboring South Kingstown, a historical narrative that understands that these phenomena occurred at multiple levels in society can be reconstructed around these men.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Joseph Congdon Sanford (1788–1856) and his younger brother

Ezbon (alternatively spelled Esbon) Sanford Jr. (17981864) of North Kingstown, Washington County, Rhode Island, were drawn into the emerging textile industry like numerous others in Rhode Island. The scarcity of information can make it hard to paint a clear picture at times, but this study shows that this was about more than the traditional monuments of history, such as the Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The textile industry dominated Rhode Island’s economic life from 1790 to the early 1950s.2 The mills the Sanford brothers bought, built, leased, and sold; the variety of technologies they adopted; and how they moved beyond their business lives to take on civic and political roles in their communities highlight the complex nature of this part of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Milling long played a pivotal role in Rhode Island’s economy. During the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries, commercial agriculture and maritime trade drove the state’s economy. However, waterpowered sawmills and gristmills and the wind-powered grain mills that processed the raw materials were what created the building materials and produced the export goods that these industries relied upon. Samuel Slater built the nation’s first commercially successful, water-powered cotton-spinning machinery in 1790 in Pawtucket, using innovative technology developed in Britain.3 His success inspired other entrepreneurs to copy his model and open similar mills, thereby transforming industrial life in Rhode Island and across the United States.

Despite Slater’s introduction of a more efficient

Barlow Insurance Survey of the Annaquatucket Mill, 1876. Image courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine.

means of carding and spinning cotton in 1790, only twenty-five spinning mills were erected in Rhode Island between 1790 and 1809.4 A labor shortage and the slow rate of population growth initially held the industry back. However, the construction of textile mills saw a rapid increase after 1810. Between 1810 and 1815, approximately seventy-five new cotton mills were built in Rhode Island.5 The introduction of the power loom in 1817 stabilized the industry, and by 1831, there were 119 cotton mills in the state, employing 8,595 workers.6 Initial production was located in the northern part of the state, in the Blackstone and Pawtucket River Valleys, but it gradually spread south reaching Washington County and North and South Kingstown. For their workforce, Rhode Island textile mills relied on family and child labor as Slater had, unlike the much larger and better-organized textile mills in Massachusetts.7 Transportation improvements also assisted the growth of the textile industry. Turnpikes and steamship lines allowed for the easier supply of raw materials and the distribution of finished products. The growth of the textile industry continued to go hand in hand with the development of textile machinery and modes of transportation.8 The introduction of the railroad to Rhode Island in 1835 meant an increase of shipments between Boston and New York made over land instead of water. However, the coastal trade with the South remained important to those involved in the textile industry in Rhode Island. By 1849, only 7 percent of total expenditures of transportation was made up of railway revenues, and by 1852, the tonnage of rail freight transportation was less than 20 percent of that carried on canals and in the coastal trade.9

Cotton was an important source of raw material for the textile industry. However, improvements in technology dealing with wool and an increase in sheep farms in Rhode Island raised the status of the woolen industry. Other contributing factors that stimulated the woolen industry in the Northeast were the Embargo Act of 1807, the War of 1812, and the tariff legislation of 1816 and 1824.10 With the decrease in the supply of cotton due to the Civil War, wool gained an even more prominent position. By the early 1830s, North and South Kingstown had become the centers of woolen production in Rhode Island. This later shifted north and northwest to places such as Burrillville and Olneyville.11

The research makes it clear that owning a textile mill in the nineteenth century was not necessarily rare, a lifelong vocation, or even a family tradition that was passed on from one generation to the next. For some, owning a mill was part of a broader investment strategy, a means to diversify but not to identify oneself solely as a “manufacturer,” a term used to describe textile mill owners in the nineteenth-century federal census records. Mill sites could be home to a variety of mills that could be operated during different seasons depending on the supply of raw materials.12 The textile mills were one of several sources of income, at times to be managed and at other times to be leased to others or sold.

The built environment associated with this industry—the mills and the mill villages—remains a visual reminder of its importance to local economies. This exists not only at the large scale, as seen in the Blackstone River Valley north of Providence, but also

at smaller scales across Rhode Island and the Northeast. Mills that survived often have been reappropriated as apartments, artists’ studios, or office spaces. In some cases, however, there are few tangible reminders, most often a millpond, the fragments of a raceway, or the ruins of a mill building. The remnants of two mills on the Annaquatucket River in North Kingstown provide an example of this. No historic markers tell us who built and owned the two mills. Research reveals that they were once owned by Joseph C. and Ezbon Sanford. The only part to survive from Joseph C.’s mill, at one point known as the Narragansett Mill, is a stone, arched culvert, which was part of the raceway that channeled the Annaquatucket River underneath the Post Road leading up to Providence and Boston. Only the ruins of Ezbon’s mill, also located on the Annaquatucket River, about a mile downstream from Joseph C.’s mill, remain visible in the winter, on Featherbed Lane. It was known as the Annaquatucket Mill. Here we can see the foundations of the mill itself and the ruins of the cotton and waste house. A starting point to learn more about mill history can be the parcels associated with the mill sites. Deeds allow us to trace the ownership of a property. They predominantly record the size and location of a parcel and the transfer from one owner (the grantor) to the next (the grantee). Starting with the present owners allows us to work our way back. In some cases, deeds do mention buildings or other features. Whereas deed traces can be vexing and at times incomplete, we can discover that Joseph C. purchased an approximately 121-acre tract from Jesse Gardner for $2,950 in 1818.13 The deed mentioned the Post Road and the

Annaquatucket River as well as the owners of the surrounding parcels and that there was a dwelling house and “other buildings” on the property. This would become the site of the Narragansett Mill. Around 1831/2 Joseph C. and Ezbon joined forces to buy a 100acre parcel directly to the south of Joseph C.’s land on the Annaquatucket River that used to belong to Nicholas C. Northup, and this would become the site of the Annaquatucket Mill.14

Despite the lack of physical evidence, and at times scarcity of other information, these mill sites can provide an insight into the industry and the lives and business practices of Joseph C. and Ezbon, and mill owners like them, at that place and in that time frame. No commemorative plaques or biographies provide us with all the answers. The names found in deeds allow us to look for the landowners in the census records, historic newspapers, books on local history, and other archival records. These historic records can tell us when and where they were born, what their families were like, and how they identified themselves.15 They make it possible to reconstruct parts of their lives and the history of the mills and to contribute to the historical narrative of not only North Kingstown but also of Rhode Island and the United States.

Joseph C. and Ezbon were two of thirteen children born of Ezbon Sanford, Sr. (1765–1846) and Abigail Congdon (1777–1841). Ezbon Sr. was a cabinetmaker by trade, but he also was heavily involved in state politics.16 In 1820, he was listed as representing North Kingstown as a Republican on the roll of House of Representatives for the State of Rhode Island.17 The following year, he was the president of the General

Republican Convention of Delegates, which was held in East Greenwich.18 That same year, he was nominated for lieutenant governor, a position he ended up declining.19

Joseph C. was their oldest son. He married Frances Northup (1793–1886) on September 13, 1814. Frances was from Preston, Connecticut. They had ten children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. Like many of his upper-middle-class contemporaries, Joseph C. practiced various professions and was involved in multiple business enterprises. He was not only a mill owner but also an active member of the local civic community. In 1824, Joseph C. was elected to the board of directors of the North Kingstown Bank, together with his father and 19 other men. He would hold this position for almost two decades.20 In 1833, Joseph C. was listed as the treasurer of the Washington Academy, a school located in Wickford at the south end of what is still known as Academy Cove.21 His varied business activities continued, and in the 1835 and 1836 records, Joseph C. was listed as one of the owners of the sloop Lucy Emeline. 22 The sloop had been built in North Kingstown in 1826 and was involved in coastal trade, operating out of Wickford. Joseph C. also followed in his father’s political footsteps and in 1839 was elected as a delegate for the Whigs of North Kingstown, together with eight other men, to a convention to be held in Kingston.23 After 31 years as a mill owner, Joseph C. put his mill property on the Annaquatucket River up for sale in November 1849.24 Despite the sale of his mill, and identifying as a farmer in the 1850 federal census, it appears that Joseph C. did not completely abandon the textile industry; in 1851, he began

to spin yarn at a small factory in Kettle Hole.25 By 1853, however, the mill was operated by James and Benjamin Sweet, and in 1861, it was converted into a grist mill.26

The career of Joseph C.’s younger brother Ezbon, the seventh child of Ezbon Sr. and Abigail, followed a somewhat similar path. Born in 1798, Ezbon became active in local civic life, like his father and oldest brother. He was elected to the board of directors of the North Kingstown Bank in 1827, joining his father and brother.27 In 1828, he joined a school committee with fifteen other “substantial citizens” to help develop the district system in North Kingstown.28 Ezbon married Mary Stockman (1805–1849) in 1833, and four of their seven children lived to adulthood. After Mary passed away in 1849, Ezbon married Esther Chappell (1812–1885) the following year.29 Like Joseph C., Ezbon identified himself as a farmer in the 1850 federal census.30

The textile milling world in North Kingstown was a close-knit community. The historic records suggest that a small number of people owned or operated one or more mills in North Kingstown. Before 1850, information on the textile industry in North Kingstown is fragmentary. A report by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission suggests that by 1832, there were nine textile mills in North Kingstown, six woolen mills, and three cotton mills.31

Besides Joseph C.’s mill from ca. 1818 and Ezbon’s Annaquatucket Mill from 1832, the records indicate that there were seven other textile mills. One of the oldest mills was the woolen mill at Davisville, which dated to at least 1811 when it was operated by members of the Davis family.32 The North Kingstown Cotton

Factory operated a cotton mill at Lafayette as early as 1815.33 After Robert Rodman (1818–1903) purchased the mill in 1847, he changed it into a woolen mill.34 By 1815, there was also a woolen mill at Sand Hill, and by 1824, one at Silver Spring.35 Records show that the Wickford Manufacturing Company operated a cotton mill at Belleville as early as 1826.36 The woolen mill at Shady Lea dated to before 1832 when Ezbon sold the mill to Edward Tillinghast.37 One of the earliest official records on textile mills in Rhode Island comes in the form of the so-called McLane Report, which was published in 1833.38 The information for the report, regarding American manufacturers and including 39 mills in Rhode Island, was gathered in 1832. The goal of the report was the adjustment of the tariff for the textile industry. The report collected information for four mills in Washington County: Wakefield, Burtonville, and Rocky Brook in South Kingstown and Belleville Mill in North Kingstown.

Although Joseph C.’s and Ezbon’s dealings were relatively small enterprises, they paint a picture of the textile industry during the nineteenth century in North Kingstown. The historic records are incomplete, but they show that, by age 30, Joseph C. made his first foray into the world of small textile mill ownership. The mill was alternately known as the Sanford Mill or the Narragansett Mill on the Annaquatucket River. Initially, Joseph C. and his family lived in a house on Brown Street in nearby Wickford, but by 1828, he had an almost identical house built a stone’s throw away from his mill on the Post Road. The two-story, hiproofed building on Brown Street would have been one of the more imposing buildings at the time, with its

low cupola surmounted by a baluster surrounding a central chimney stack.39 Joseph C. came to include his oldest son, Albert (1817/18–1899) in his business dealings, and on May 31, 1847, they bought a tract of land known as the Bissell Mill Estate.40 In September of that same year, Joseph C. conveyed his share to Albert, who in turn sold the property in 1849 to Perez Peck, Asa Sisson Jr., and Isaac Peck. The estate consisted of 22 acres of land with “a cotton manufactory, machine shop, and four dwelling houses.”41 The three new owners together with Owen Vaughn (1808–1865) had formed the Hamilton Company the previous year.42 This company would ultimately become the Hamilton Web Company, one of the largest and longest operating textile mills in North Kingstown.

The mill site that Joseph C. bought on the Annaquatucket River in 1818 already contained a sawmill and gristmill. He added a textile mill and a general store, underscoring the diversified nature of these operations. The store would have catered not only to the millworkers but also to the local farmers. It became known as the Allenton Store and at some point also housed the local post office. The store burned down in 1896.43 Joseph C.’s mill initially operated about 500 spindles and produced cotton warps.44 There is little information as to what happened in the intervening years and how Joseph C.’s business fared with the protective tariffs that were enacted in 1824, 1828, and 1832.45 The McLane Report only mentioned the Belleville Mill in North Kingstown, which at the time was probably the largest mill in the area.46 The Belleville Mill was located just upstream from Joseph C.’s mill, and he may have been producing yarn for it. Other

records show that Joseph C. produced yarn for the Davis mill in 1834.47

On November 19, 1849, Joseph C. placed an advertisement in the Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal announcing the sale of his mill at a public auction to take place in May of the following year.48 The property consisted of four parcels and included water privileges. It contained a cotton mill and a dresser house, with all the fixtures and machinery recently repaired. The mill continued to produce cotton warps, but by then Joseph C. had more than tripled the number of spindles to 1,620, and there was room to add looms. The advertisement also stated that the property was located conveniently between Wickford and the depot of the Providence and Stonington Railroad. The reference to a dresser house and room for adding more looms would suggest that Joseph C. was not only producing yarn but also had started to weave fabric; however, other records do not confirm this.49 The first auction did not go through because the property was again offered for sale in August 1850, with an auction date of February 19, 1851.50

Ezbon’s first venture into textile milling came sometime before 1832 because in that year he sold the Shady Lea Mill in North Kingstown to Edward Tillinghast.51 There is some evidence that Ezbon may have constructed the original mill in the late 1820s, manufacturing jeans.52 After selling Shady Lea, Ezbon built a new textile mill on the Annaquatucket River on the parcel he had bought with his oldest brother. Ezbon also built himself a new house less than 300 feet south of the mill site; it still stands today. Compared with his brother’’s house, Ezbon’s house is a more modest

one-story, side-gabled dwelling, which also is probably more fitting in its rural setting. Even though both Joseph C. and Ezbon ultimately abandoned textile milling and none of their children decided to carry on with the family business, they allow us to place them in the larger context of textile milling in North Kingstown during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to study the buildings, the workforce, and the product. The first quantifiable data that provide insight into the people involved in the textile industry in North Kingstown comes from the 1850 Products of Industry and the federal census. North Kingstown was home to eight mills: three cotton mills and five woolen mills (see Table 1).53

Christopher and William Rhodes had purchased the Belleville Mill, a cotton mill, in 1830.54 Belleville was at the time the largest textile mill in North Kingstown, with fifty looms, employing seventy people, and producing sheeting. Albert and Samuel P. Sanford were listed as the agents for the cotton mill founded by their father, Joseph C. It employed twenty people and produced warps. The Products of Industry made no mention of looms. Daniel Chase Hiscox and William E. Pierce were the owners and agents of the Silver Spring woolen mill. Pierce initially had worked with Robert Rodman at the Albro Mill in Exeter in 1840.55 Hiscox and Pierce employed twenty-six people and produced coarse woolen. Rodman himself had purchased the Lafayette Mill from Albert Sanford in 1847.56 Rodman employed sixteen people, and his woolen mill produced jeans and tweeds. Charles Allen had purchased Shady Lea from his brother Christopher in 1840, who in turn had bought the property from Tillinghast in 1836. Till-

inghast had acquired the mill four years earlier from Ezbon.57 Allen’s woolen mill employed thirteen people and produced Kentucky jeans. Despite being identified as a farmer in the 1850 census, Ezbon Sanford remained listed as the owner and agent of the Annaquatucket Mill. His woolen mill employed thirteen people and produced Kentucky jeans. Syria H. Vaughn (1817-1897) had purchased the Hamilton Company mill only about a month before the census was taken. His cotton mill employed twenty-three people and produced warps. The Davis Mill dated back to the early nineteenth century and had been owned and operated by members of the Davis family. In 1849, James M. Davis, together with brother-in-law Henry Sweet and cousin Albert S. Reynolds, called the firm Davis, Reynolds & Co.58 In 1850, the woolen mill employed fifteen people and produced Kentucky jeans. Four of the mills produced a fabric identified as jeans or Kentucky jeans, a lightweight twill fabric woven from an all-cotton or a cotton-and-wool-blend typically used to make men’s work clothes. The fabric was not expected to last long, and by the 1840s, work pants were referred to as “Kentucky jeans” after the

state where they were originally made, although the fabric and the style of pants also were copied in other states because of its popularity.59 There is some evidence that Ezbon may have been one of the first mill owners in North Kingstown to produce jeans, in the mill he constructed at Shady Lea in the late 1820s.60 Kentucky jeans were considered a type of “Negro cloth,” which also included cashmeres and kerseys to name but two.61 “Negro cloth” was a cheap and coarse material manufactured specifically to reduce the cost of clothing enslaved people in the South. The production of “Negro cloth” played an important role in Rhode Island’s textile industry during the nineteenth century. Between 1800 and 1860, more than eighty mills in Rhode Island produced a type of “Negro cloth,” most of them located in Washington County. By 1850, 79 percent of all textile mills in Rhode Island manufactured slave clothing.62 The records do not reveal whether Ezbon or any of the other mill owners in North Kingstown experienced a similar moral dilemma as Rowland Gibson Hazard did in neighboring South Kingstown with the production of “Negro cloth.”63

the production of various types of “Negro

1 : 1850 Products of Industry

cloth,” textile manufacturers in New England were fully invested in Southern slaveholding. They received the raw materials from the South and in return produced fabrics that would clothe enslaved people on the same plantations from which they got their materials. The position of the mill owners in North Kingstown may have been as complex as that of Hazard, who had antislavery sympathies but also heavily benefited in multiple ways from the institution of slavery in the South. The textile industry, of course, also required a labor force. Before the introduction of the power loom, the mills performed only some of the tasks, such as the carding and oiling of wool. This would then be spun by area residents at home and returned to the mill to be scoured and dyed. According to the 1850 federal census, approximately 2,991 people were living in North Kingstown, and of them, 1,000 people had their profession listed. There were 271 farmers, 247 laborers, fifty-four carpenters, seventeen jewelers, and seventeen miners, to name but a few of the professions. Fifteen men identified themselves as a manufacturer.64 Some of those known to have been associated with the mills, however, did not, or were not, identified as manufacturers. For example, and as mentioned above, both Joseph C. and Ezbon were listed as farmers, Allen was listed as farmer and manufacturer, and Rodman was listed as a merchant. Due to the lack of similar records from before 1850, it is not clear why, for instance, Joseph C. and Ezbon did not identify themselves as manufacturers. Whereas Joseph C. seemed to have moved on from textile milling, Ezbon remains listed as the mill owner in the Products of Industry. 65 For textileindustry-specific jobs, the 1850 census listed thirteen

spinners, all men; four dresser tenders, one woman and three men; four male colorers; two overseers of a weaving room, both men; one male carder; and one male calico printer.66 A wage and time book from the period between 1845 and ca. 1856 mentions twenty-three people who also showed up in the census records.67 Of those nine who identified themselves laborers, eight listed no profession, six were listed farmers, one as a miner, and one as a mariner. It is possible that, similar to the mill owners, their jobs in the mill were seasonal and just one of many sources of income.

One hundred and seventeen people of color were recorded in the 1850 federal census for North Kingstown, identifying as either Black or “mulatto.” Whereas none of them were directly linked to the textile mills in the census records, the wage and time book mentioned above provides more insight into their roles. The earliest entry, dated January 19, 1846, listed eight men, one of whom was J[oseph] G. Potter. The 1850 census identifies Potter as Black and lists his profession as a laborer. In 1846, he would have been about fourteen years old. The wage and time book also mentions Timothy and Isaac Rodman, father (aged 42 in 1850) and son (aged 14), and George Roame (aged 15), spelled Roome in the census records, as being Black. Timothy Rodman’s profession was listed as a laborer, but Isaac Rodman and George Roame had no profession listed. In addition to Isaac Rodman and George Roame, six other minors listed in the 1850 census can be connected to the textile industry through the wage book.68

The end of the 1850s saw a downturn for the textile industry in Rhode Island and North Kingstown. The

Panic of 1857 affected the entire United States, including North Kingstown.69 An article taking up almost one-third of a page in the Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal published on December 24, 1857, mentioned the suspension of labor across the state of Rhode Island. In neighboring South Kingstown, only two of eight mills had ceased production, five were operating on a reduced schedule, and only one was running full time. In North Kingstown, the article listed five mills by their owners: Robert Rodman, Davis, Reynolds & Co., Hiscox & Pierce, Ezbon Sanford, and Charles Allen.70 Except for the mill owned by Hiscox & Pierce, which still was running full time, the other mills had ceased operations. The mill in question was probably the Silver Spring Mill, although at this point Hiscox & Pierce also owned Joseph C.’s old mill. Even though there had been a third advertisement in the Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal dated August 26, 1852, that offered Joseph C.’s mill for sale, with an auction date of March 2, 1853, a newspaper article from 1889, which reported on the destruction of what had been Joseph C.’s mill, mentioned that it had been sold to Colonel Daniel C. Hiscock [Hiscox] and William E. Pierce (sometimes also spelled Peirce) in 1850.71 In his 1889 book, History of Washington and Kent Counties, J. R. Cole stated that Wilcox [sic] and Pierce had purchased the old Narragansett Mill (i.e., Joseph C.’s mill) in 1852.72

Due to a paucity of records, it is difficult to paint a clear picture of Ezbon’s involvement with the Annaquatucket Mill or the story of the mill community itself. The available evidence indicates that it initially was a water-powered mill. To build up enough water

pressure to power the waterwheel, Ezbon would have had to dam the Annaquatucket River to create a millpond. Water privileges often were part of deeds for tracts of land along streams that had the potential to support a mill. In 1855, the river backed up, causing $3,000 worth of damage to the waterwheel of the Narragansett Mill, Joseph C.’s old mill, which at that point was owned by Hiscox and Pierce. They sued Ezbon for damages done to their mill wheel.73 The judge and jury went to the site at the request of the plaintiffs to review the situation firsthand. The outcome of the case was that Ezbon had to pay fifty dollars in damages, a fine to which he objected, and then requested a new trial, which he ultimately was denied.74 The fact that Ezbon was identified as a farmer on the 1850 census suggests that being a mill owner was just one of several hats he wore. A common practice among mill owners was leasing their property for a certain number of years instead of selling it. Ezbon placed an ad in the Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal in October 1858 for a woolen mill to be let, one-and-a-half miles south of Wickford. It contained one set of woolen machinery and room for two more and included tenements for millworkers.75

Whereas Joseph C. passed away in 1856 and Ezbon appears to have divested from the responsibilities of mill ownership around 1858, we still can follow the development of the textile industry in North Kingstown through the mills they built and the mills of their neighbors. The Products of Industry of 1860 mentioned only six mills in North Kingstown (see Table 2).

Three of the mills no longer were identified by their name but by the names of their owners. Robert Rodman was still listed as one of the owners. His water-

and steam-powered mill employed thirty-seven people and produced Kentucky jeans, as did Davis, Reynolds & Company, which operated a water-powered mill that employed thirty-three people. Syria H. Vaughn produced cotton warps at his water-powered mill and employed fifty-two people. His older brother Owen Vaughn was in charge of the Sanford Mill, which was Ezbon’s Annaquatucket Mill. It was a water-powered mill and the smallest at the time, employing only thirteen people. Walter B. Chapin was the agent for Shady Lea Mills, which produced cotton warps and “cassimeres” [cashmere].76 The mill still was owned by Charles Allen at the time. The mill had switched from water to steam power and was one of the largest mills, employing seventy people. Hiscox and Pierce’s Silver Spring Mill now was identified as the Kersey Mills. It was steam- and water-powered and produced kersey, cotton, wool, and warps. Kersey was a heavy, coarse fabric made from wool or wool and cotton and used for work clothes; it was considered a “Negro cloth.” With ninety employees, the mill employed the largest workforce of the mills listed in North Kingstown in 1860, and the laborers were the best paid, with the men and women having equal wages, both earning approximately $27.78 a month.

By 1860, the population of North Kingstown had increased slightly to 3,104. Approximately 862 people had their profession listed. Two-hundred-thirty-two people were identified as farmers, fifty-four as farm laborers, and thirty-seven as farmhands.77 Eightysix people had a profession associated with the textile industry, which was only 29 percent of the number of people listed as working in the textile mills in the

Product of Industry of 1860. Eight men identified themselves as manufacturers, all of whom were involved in the textile industry.78 The number of jobs associated with the textile industry in North Kingstown became much more specific. People were listed as working in cotton mills (six), cotton spinners (three), or spinners (three). John Slocum was listed as an agent for a cotton mill, and Cyrus Dyer as an agent for a woolen mill. Twenty-three women were identified as weavers, Rowland Perry as a wool dyer, John Ritson as a dyer, and Lorenzo Stone as a woolen cloth finisher. John H. Mines, originally from England, was listed as a carder. According to the 1860 census, twenty-eight minors worked in the textile mills; the youngest person was an eleven-year-old girl who was employed as a weaver. The number of people of color, Black or “mulatto,” in North Kingstown had declined by 1860 to eighty-nine, one of whom was described as a factory hand, which was Joseph G. Potter, who also is mentioned above. The other three Black mill workers who showed up in the wage and time book and the 1850 census, Timothy and Isaac Rodman and George R. Roame, no longer appear in the 1860 federal census for North Kingstown. Timothy and Isaac Rodman do show up in the 1860 census for South Kingstown, where their professions are listed as factory laborers, and George Roame may have moved to Worcester, Massachusetts.79

An interesting shift in the nationalities in general and of those working in the textile industry in North Kingstown took place by 1860. According to the 1850 census, most people living in North Kingstown were born in the United States. Eighty-five were born in Ireland, twelve in England, and nine in Canada. Of

the seventy-one people involved in the textile mills in North Kingstown in 1850, sixty-five were born in Rhode Island, one in Massachusetts, one in New York, one in England, one in Ireland, and one in Scotland. In 1860, eighty residents of North Kingstown were born in Canada, seventy-five in Ireland, and thirteen in England. Of the eighty-five individuals involved in the textile industry, twenty-six were born in Canada, eleven in Ireland, and one in England. An explanation for this increase can be found in immigration numbers during the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1840 and 1930, roughly 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to the United States, leaving their native Quebec in search of better living conditions.80 The agriculture in Quebec was in decline and industry undeveloped. Some of them found employment in the textile industry in New England, which rapidly would expand in part due to the Civil War. As for the Irish, they had long been fleeing British oppression, and a large number came after the potato famine of 1845. In 1860, there were 1.6 million Irish in the United States of a total population of 31 million.81 Initially, most were too poor to move inland, so they congregated in cities along the East Coast near their port of entry. Scores ended up working as unskilled laborers in the textile industry in New England.

The mills the Sanford brothers had built remained in operation in 1860. When Daniel Chase Hiscox passed away in 1861, William Pierce became the sole owner of Joseph C.’s old mill, which by then was known as the Narragansett Mill. After Hiscox’s death, Pierce leased the mill to Robert Rodman for ten years.82 Ezbon had leased the Annaquatucket Mill to Owen Vaughn on September 9, 1860.83 The indenture for Ezbon’s mill gives a fairly detailed description of the property and the buildings that were part of the complex, such as a grist mill, a dye house, and several dwelling houses, as well as the water, waterpower rights, and privileges that went along with the mill. The grist mill suggests that this remained a diversified operation. Vaughn’s lease of Ezbon’s mill was confirmed by the 1860 Products of Industry. 84 Interestingly, the mill was described as a cotton spinning mill producing warps instead of a woolen mill. It appears the mill still produced fabric because Vaughn placed an ad for a dresser tender in the Providence Journal the following year to dress colored warps.85 Ezbon passed away on July 19, 1864, but the mill initially remained in possession of the Sanford family. The lease to Vaughn must have expired after five or six years because, in March 1866, Abbie Sanford, Ezbon’s oldest daughter, and her youngest brother (who also was called Ezbon) leased the

2 : 1860 Products of Industry

property to Syria Vaughn and Asa Sisson. The indenture described the property as containing approximately 50 acres, a cotton factory, a dye house, five dwelling houses, two barns, a carriage house, a [corn] crib, and other improvements.86

By the next decade there seems to have been a recovery in the textile industry in North Kingstown because according to the 1870 Products of Industry, eleven textile mills were in operation (see Table 3). Robert Rodman was listed in connection with the Lafayette Mill, the Silver Spring Mill, and the Narragansett Mill. The first two produced doeskin and cotton warp.87 The three mills combined employed the largest workforce of men, women, and children in North Kingstown and spent the most on annual wages.88 The Narragansett Mill remained one of the smaller mills in North Kingstown, in the size of its labor force and production, producing 600,000 yards of warp. S. A. Edmonds & Co. was listed in connection with the Shady Lea Mill, producing “Fancy Cassimeres.” The S. A. Edmonds & Co. was a partnership between Samuel A. Edmonds and Alexander A. Ellsworth. They had owned Shady Lea since at least 1868 because in that year William A. Harris filed a petition against them at the Clerk’s Office of the Supreme Court for the sum of $1,269.41 for labor and materials for construction, repair, and improvements at the “Shady Lea Factory estate.”89 They must have sold the mill not long after the census was taken by June of that year because according to J. R. Cole, Robert Rodman purchased the mill in 1870.90 J. P. Campbell & Co. operated the Belleville Mill. In 1864, it had leased the mill from William E. Pierce and later purchased the

property.91 John M. Davis and Henry Sweet still ran the Davis Mill producing Kentucky jeans. G. W. Reynolds & Co. operated a water- and steam-powered mill that also produced Kentucky jeans. This probably was the woolen mill at Sand Hill that a “D. Tillinghast” had sold to George Washington Reynolds (1822–1904) and Allen Reynolds (1826–1909) in 1860.92 W. E. Peirce [sic] & Co. operated a water-powered mill that produced plain and twilled kersey. It is not clear which mill this might have been since Rodman leased the Narragansett Mill and John Campbell the Belleville Mill. Vaughn & Greene Manufacturing operated the Hamilton Mill and the Annaquatucket Mill. Both were water- and steam-powered cotton mills. The Annaquatucket Mill was one of the smallest textile operations in North Kingstown, equipped with only 1,404 spindles and producing no more than 97,000 yards of yarn. The last mill that was listed was the Waterside Mill. The mill had been constructed in 1865 by the American Bobbin Company in the village of Wickford.93 It initially produced woolen and cotton bobbins and spools, undoubtedly some of which supplied the local textile mills. Seven of the eleven mills were still producing material that had been known as “Negro cloth” before the Civil War. By 1870, the population of North Kingstown had increased to 3,568, and approximately 1,530 people had their profession listed. Three-hundred-and-one were identified as laborers; 275 as farmers; 125 as servants; sixty-two as domestic servants; forty-eight as farm laborers; and forty-one as mariners, among other professions. Two-hundred-and-seventy-five were associated with the textile industry, still more than

200 fewer than the number mentioned in the Products of Industry. Seventeen men identified themselves as manufacturers, ten of whom can be linked with the textile industry through the Products of Industry. 94 The types of occupations were more varied than during the previous census, and it is apparent from the types of jobs that the industry was expanding. People listed their positions as clerks in the woolen mill or engineers, overseers, and superintendents. There were, of course, still carders, dresser tenders, dyers, and spinners. There were forty weavers, nine men and thirtyone women. People also specified if they worked in a woolen mill or cotton mill. Despite the predominantly generic job descriptions, some entries provided more insight into the kind of machinery used in the textile mills, such as the man whose profession was listed as “mule spinner.” The mule spinner, or spinning mule, originally had been invented by Samuel Crompton in 1779.95 The spinning mule combined elements from James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny and Richard Ark-

wright’s spinning frame. It produced a higher quality thread and allowed the cotton yarn to be spun simultaneously onto a much larger number of spindles than before. Some spinning mules could hold up to 1,320 spindles and be 150 feet long. The number of minors who were working in the textile mills had more than tripled to ninety-seven, with the youngest being an eleven-year-old boy working in a cotton mill. The number of people of color, on the other hand, had further decreased in North Kingstown, down to sixtyfive with only one person, Abby A. Brown, a thirtyfive-year-old Black woman, listed as working in a woolen mill.

As in the previous decade, many textile workers were born outside Rhode Island. Thirty-five were born in Ireland, thirty-two in Canada, twenty-eight in England, three in Scotland, and one in Switzerland. Of the twenty-eight people born in England and working in the textile mills, fifteen of them were working in a woolen mill. Some of them were working

table 3 : 1870 Products of Industry

in the mills in family units, such as James Bedford (57) and his two daughters, Emiline (20) and Mary A. (18), who were all born in England and listed as weavers in mills. Some were boarding together. Owen and Mary Conly were born in Ireland. Owen is listed as working in a mill. They had five boarders, four of whom were young Irish women, all of whom were weavers in a mill. Even though the 1870 federal census does not refer to specific addresses or mill villages, the way the census was recorded suggests that people were living in specific clusters, based on profession, and in some cases on their national background as well. The census taker recorded numerous dwelling houses in succession where the heads of household worked in a mill or woolen mill, including with some of their family members and boarders, suggesting that these were mill villages.

The threat of fire was a constant and serious danger for textile mills during the nineteenth century. The combination of flammable cotton and fabric dust and the grease that was used to lubricate the machinery saturated the wooden floors and created a high risk for conflagration. Workers often smoked, and in those mills that relied on steam power, the coalfueled steam boilers added a further risk. So perhaps it was no surprise when the Annaquatucket Mill succumbed to fire on October 5, 1874. A newspaper report in the Providence Journal described the building as the “Annaquatucket Cotton Mill” formerly known as the “Esbon Sanford Mill.”96 According to the article, the mill was a small, two-and-a-half-story wooden building belonging to Syria H. Vaughn and used to produce cotton warps and yarns. The fire engine from Wickford

arrived too late, and the entire building, including the machinery and stock, were consumed by the fire. The building was insured in the Queen’s Office in London for $4,000.

The exact sequence of subsequent events is unclear. What is evident is that the mill was quickly rebuilt and perhaps at a larger scale than before because in June 1875, the property, then identified as the Ezbon Sanford Manufacturing Property, was offered for sale in the Providence Journal. 97 The advertisement described it as a new mill, 40 by 130 [feet], with a lapper building, a Collins Turbine Wheel, and six houses in good repair. Perhaps awaiting the sale of the property, Edwin Rhodes Gardiner, his wife Abbie Sanford Gardiner, and Ezbon Sanford III leased the property to James A. Greene on August 2, 1875.98 Greene and Syria H. Vaughn had dissolved their partnership in 1873.99

A rich source of information on the actual structure of the new Annaquatucket Mill comes in the form of a Barlow’s Insurance Survey conducted on October 25, 1876. As mentioned above, fires posed a great threat to textile mills and other industrial buildings during the nineteenth century. Insurance companies created maps for entire cities as well as individual properties as a tool for insurance company underwriters. The Jefferson Insurance Company of New York was the first to sponsor the production of detailed fire insurance maps in the United States in the 1850s.100 Perhaps the best-known maps are the Sanborn fire insurance maps. Daniel A. Sanborn began producing fire insurance maps for the Aetna Insurance Company but set out on his own in 1866.101 While Sanborn predominantly focused on entire cities, other companies produced

a series of individual insurance plans for commercial and industrial buildings, one of which was Barlow’s Insurance Surveys of New York. Barlow’s survey forms included a colored isometric view of the property and a plan, as well as detailed information describing the buildings, the occupants, and the fire risk. Three buildings were on the site. The main building measured 40 by 135 feet. The colored isometric drawing shows that it was a rectangular, one-story, banked building with a low-pitched gable roof. It had a stone-and-brick lower floor and a frame upper story. A rectangular brick chimney was located against the west elevation, near the south (front) gable end. Located on top of the roof, near the front-gable end, was a small decorative pyramidal-roofed cupola with double roundarched openings in each of its four sides. A covered bridge on the east elevation of the main building connected the upper floor with the one-and-a-half-story picker house, which measured approximately 18 by 40 feet. Located roughly 35 feet north of the main building was a freestanding cotton and waste house. The building measured about 22 by 50 feet and was constructed entirely out of stone. The plan shows a small trapezoidal-shaped shed against its east gable end. The description of the property mentioned that the upper story of the main building was used for carding and spinning and that it had the capacity for eighteen carding machines. A furnace was located in the basement of the main building, and light was provided by kerosene lamps. The mill operated an average of eleven hours a day, and waste was removed daily to the waste house. There was no watchman or sprinklers, but there was a medium-sized Fales & Jenks rotary pump in the

basement of the main building and hydrants on both of its floors as well as in the picker house.

In July 1877, Gardiner, his wife Abbie, and her brother Ezbon sold the property to Joseph Warren Greene (1798–1888) of Brooklyn, New York.102 Greene was the father of James A. Greene, who had been leasing the mill since 1875. Joseph W. had set up his son in partnership with Syria H. Vaughn in 1866 at the former Bissell Mill Estate, which was downstream from the Annaquatucket Mill where the river empties into Bissell Cove. The reason Joseph W. purchased the Annaquatucket Mill in 1877 was perhaps not so much to diversify his operations as to ensure the protection of water rights for his much larger operation downstream. A new census law passed in March 1879 created a more specialized record for the various businesses and industries.103 The number of general economic questions was expanded to twenty-nine, and specialists were assigned to conduct the census for specific industries. One of these designated areas was the manufacturing of cotton, woolen, and worsted goods. These experts were paid at a rate not to exceed six dollars per day plus expenses, whereas the regular census takers were only paid fifteen to twenty-five cents for each establishment they recorded.104 Unfortunately, the records for North Kingstown reporting on the textile industry have not survived.105 However, general figures can give an insight into the continuing importance of this industry in Rhode Island. According to the 1880 Report on the Manufacturers of the United States, Rhode Island ranked second after Connecticut in New England with 115 cotton manufacturers and 21,474 people employed.106 The number of cotton

manufacturers in New England (the Eastern states) was almost three times as many as in the Southern states, 439 versus 161.107 It appears that the manufacturing of woolen goods played a less important role in Rhode Island. Out of thirty-five states that reported having wool manufacturers, Rhode Island came in fourteenth.108

By 1880, the population of North Kingstown had once again increased, this time to 3,949. The 1880 census for North Kingstown was divided into two districts, one covering the northern part (155) of the town and one the southern part (156). There were 255 farmers, 151 farm laborers, forty-two servants, and thirty-seven domestic servants, and only forty-nine people who identified themselves as laborers. The largest employer at the time was the textile industry, with approximately 720 people working in the mills in North Kingstown. Unlike in the previous federal census, most of these people were simply listed as working in a cotton or woolen mill. Weavers and spinners no longer were mentioned, and the only specialized occupation was that of dyer in a woolen mill. William E. Peirce [sic] identified himself as a manufacturer of cotton yarn, and James M. Davis and Henry Sweet as retired wool manufacturers. The census also still reflected the diverse national background of its citizens and those working in the textile industry. The largest non-American group was the Irish, with 165, of which sixty-five worked in the textile industry. There were 142 Canadians, and little more than half (seventy-two) worked in the textile mills, most of them in the cotton mills. Eighty-eight people were born in England, and forty-seven of them worked in the textile indus-

try. Twenty-one people were born in Scotland, nine of whom worked in a woolen mill. The number of minors who worked in the textile mills had almost doubled to 165, with the youngest being a nine-year-old boy, Archie D. Nichols, who worked in a woolen mill. There still were sixty-five people of color living in North Kingstown, one of whom identified as Filipino. None of them worked in the textile mills.

The role the Sanford brothers’ mills played in the 1880s slowly declined. In 1885, the Hamilton Web Company was incorporated, and a new brick mill was constructed at the Bissel Cove site. Downstream from Ezbon’s old mill, it measured 145 by 224 feet, operated eighty looms, and manufactured webbing.109 The company maintained ownership of the Annaquatucket Mill, but the mill no longer appeared in the records.

As for Joseph C.’s old mill, the partnership between William Pierce and his son-in-law Philogene Nichols was dissolved in September 1889, and about three weeks later, a mysterious fire caused the Narragansett Mill to burn to the ground.110 A newspaper article estimated the loss of the mill at $30,000, which would be approximately $890,227 in today’s money.111 According to the newspaper report, the mill consisted of an older frame part and a newer brick section, each about 80 by 40 feet. The headline identified the mill as a seine twine mill, indicating that it produced a tightly twisted yarn used for warp. The report also mentioned that Pierce had a bad heart condition; the shock of the fire may have led to his early death about three weeks later.112 The Narragansett Mill was not rebuilt, and the only remaining part is a stone arch, which was part of the raceway that channeled the Annaquatucket River

underneath the Post Road. Pierce also owned the much larger woolen mill at Belleville that was located just upstream, so there may not have been a necessity to rebuild Joseph C.’s mill. Unfortunately, the census records for 1890 for North Kingstown no longer survive. Most of them were lost in a 1921 fire that destroyed much of the Commerce Department building where they had been stored.113 Other sources that could have shed some light on the textile industry in North Kingstown at this time are surprisingly vague. For instance, the Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Industrial Statistics listed occupations by age and place of birth of the parents for North Kingstown residents.114 None of the textilerelated occupations mentioned in the previous census records are part of the list. Twenty manufacturers were living in North Kingstown, and there were 269 mill operatives, which after farmers (294) was the largest employment sector. Some of these likely were working

in the textile mills. According to the Census Bulletin, Rhode Island saw a decline in the number of cotton manufacturers from the previous decade, from 115 to 94, but it still came in second in New England and third nationwide.115 Whereas cotton manufacturing had declined, the number of wool manufacturers had increased in Rhode Island from 62 to 91.116

By 1900, the population of North Kingstown had increased to 4,194.117 North Kingstown was again divided into two districts: the northern (234) and southern (235) parts of town. A portion of the records for District 235 are challenging to decipher, making an accurate analysis difficult. The records still mentioned specific occupations associated with the textile industry, such as dyers, spinners and weavers, mule spinners, beamer tenders, card tenders, and dresser tenders. By 1906–07 only five mills remained in operation in North Kingstown (see Table 4).118

The Belleville Woolen Mill was closed, as was the

Village Name Product Male Workers Female Workers

under 16

Bellville Woolen Mill — Closed

table 4 : 1907 Thirteenth Annual Report of Inspections of Factories, Mercantile Establishments, and Workshops

Coronet Worsted Company in Wickford.119 The Davisville Woolen Company operated two mills in Davisville, one that produced jeans and cassimeres and one that produced woolen yarn, employing twenty-five and thirteen people respectively.

The Hamilton Web Company produced narrow fabrics and employed 100 men, fifty-five women, five boys, and seven girls under sixteen. The Rodman Manufacturing Company operated two mills. The Lafayette Mill produced worsted suitings and employed the largest workforce of the surviving mills in North Kingstown, with 104 and eighty-eight women. The Shady Lea Mill also was owned by the Rodman Manufacturing Company and produced cotton yarn, employing eighty-one people (including one boy and two girls under sixteen).

The Annaquatucket Mill had been more or less mothballed by the Hamilton Web Company. The inspection report of factories in North Kingstown done between January 1906 and January 1907 no longer mentioned the mill.120 The mill was permanently shuttered in 1915 and by 1925 was torn down with only the cotton and waste house spared.121 By 1944, the cotton and waste house were equipped with a fireplace and used as a “country camp.”122 All that remains now are parts of the foundation of the main building and the shell of the cotton and waste house.

After more than a century of operation, the textile industry in the United States fell into decline during the first half of the twentieth century. Some described it as a “sick giant” that had overexpanded and was overproducing.123 Increased foreign competition, the Great Depression, and labor strikes led to a steady

decline that ultimately reached the textile mills in North Kingstown. A newspaper article in the Providence Journal of October 1936 reported on the temporary closure of the Lafayette and Shady Lea Mills, causing 250 people to be unemployed, and the Belleville Mill reducing its workforce to 25 percent.124 Only the Hamilton Web Company was not affected at the time.

Ultimately, the remaining textile mills in North Kingstown fell into decline during the twentieth century, unable to compete with some of the new mills being built in the South and abroad. The Lafayette and Shady Lea Mills closed in 1952 and were sold at auction.125 The Belleville Woolen Mill had ceased regular operations by the late 1960s and burned to the ground in 1969.126 The Hamilton Web Company Mill was the lone survivor, having carved out a niche for itself in the narrow-weave fabrics market, but it ultimately closed in 1978. The textile industry had played an important part in North Kingstown’s economy for more than a century, but on a much smaller scale compared with other parts of Rhode Island and New England. Its owners did not gain the national renown of people such as Samuel Slater, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, or Francis Cabot Lowell, in Massachusetts, or the Hazard family in neighboring South Kingstown. And whereas other areas in Rhode Island had been susceptible to mill strikes, this does not seem to have been the case in North Kingstown. There are no records to suggest that the workers ever united to demand better wages and fewer hours or that mill owners organized to stave off unrest among its labor force.127 For some North Kingstown families, the tex-

tile industry was their life’s work, one that was passed from one generation to the next. For instance, the closure of the Lafayette and Shady Lea Mills brought an end to more than a century of textile manufacturing by eight generations of the Rodman family. The Greene family were the last owners of the Hamilton Web Company and had been in the textile business since 1794.

Joseph C. Sanford and Ezbon Sanford were perhaps representative of a different type of mill owner during the nineteenth century that existed along the margins. Their lives suggest they saw textile mill ownership as a strategic investment, not a way of life worthy of their full attention and passing down to the next generation. None of their siblings appear to have joined them in their ventures, and although some of their children were involved at an early stage, most of them moved away and sought other forms of employment.128 The only exception was Ezbon Sanford’s son, Ezbon San-

ford III (1844–1903), who worked for Vaughn & Greene at the Hamilton Mill from 1869 until 1892, after which he worked for the Hope Webbing Company in Pawtucket until his death.129 Although next to nothing survives of the Sanford brothers’ mills, both men were an important part of nineteenth-century life in North Kingstown and Rhode Island and contributed to the nation’s Industrial Revolution. Their lives and labors, and those of the workers they employed, deserve lasting acknowledgment.

Jeroen van den Hurk is an architectural historian and an assistant professor of Cultural and Historic Preservation at Salve Regina University. He would like to thank G. Timothy Cranston, Grace Vargo-Williford, Josephine T. Taranto, and Deirdre A. Lafferty, for their help with this article as well as the Southeastern New England Education and Charitable Foundation whose grant made the research possible.

n otes

1. Of the mills that once dotted the landscape of North Kingstown, only the Hamilton, Shady Lea, Lafayette, and Waterside Mills are still standing.

2. Gary Kulik and Julia C. Bonham, Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission, and Historic American Engineering Record. Rhode Island: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites. Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service Publication, no. 5. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of the Interior,

Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service, Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, Historic American Engineering Record, 1978, 1.

3. James L. Conrad. “‘Drive That Branch’: Samuel Slater, the Power Loom, and the Writing of America’s Textile History.” Technology and Culture 36, no. 1 (1995): 1–28.

4. Kulik and Bonham, Rhode Island: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, 6.

5. Kulik and Bonham, Rhode Island: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, 7.

6. Kulik and Bonham, Rhode Island: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, 7–8.

7. Kulik and Bonham, Rhode Island: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, 9. Gary Kulik. “Factory Discipline in the New Nation: Almy, Brown & Slater and the First Cotton-Mill Workers, 1790–1808.” The Massachusetts Review 28, no. 1 (1987): 164–84.

8. The Wilkinson Mill, in Pawtucket, was built between 1810 and 1811 and was used as a cotton mill and a machine shop. David Wilkinson developed a power loom that would dominate the weaving industry in New England for much of the nineteenth century.

9. Robert F. Martin, National Income in the United States, 1799–1938 (New York: NICB, 1939), 146, and George R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1951), 174.

10. Seth Rockman, “Negro Cloth: Mastering the Market for Slave Clothing in Antebellum America,” in Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, eds. American Capitalism: New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2018), 171.

11. Kulik and Bonham, Rhode Island: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, 11.

12. Richard William Judd, Second Nature: An Environmental History of New England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 122.

13. North Kingstown, Town Clerk, Land Records. Book 21A, 134.

14. North Kingstown, Town Clerk, Land Records. Book 26A, 270.

15. This applies to the census records from 1850 onward. Before 1850, the federal census records list only the names of the heads of families and the number of males, females, slaves, and “free colored persons” who are part of a household.

16. Joseph K. Ott, “More Notes on Rhode Island Cabinetmakers and Their Work,” in Rhode Island History, 28 (2), April 1969, 49–52.

17. “General Assembly.” Providence Patriot, November 11, 1820, 2.

18. “Republican Nomination.” Providence Patriot, March 10, 1821,

2.

19. “State Election.” Providence Patriot, March 28, 1821, 2, and “To the Public.” Providence Patriot, March 31, 1821, 2.

20. “North-Kingstown Bank.” Rhode-Island Republican, November 25, 1824, 3.

21. J. R. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties: Rhode Island, Including Their Early Settlement and Progress to the Present Time; a Description of Their Historic and Interesting Localities; Sketches of Their Towns and Villages; Portraits of Some of Their Prominent Men, and Biographies of Many of Their Representative Citizens. (New York: W. W. Preston, 1889), 464. See also G. Timothy Cranston, The View from Swamptown, “Samuel Elam and The Washington Academy,” February 17, 2000. https://www.nklibrary. org/sites/nklibrary.org/files/pdf/Wickford.pdf, accessed June 1, 2020.

22. Survey of Federal Archives (U.S.), and National Archives Project. Ship Registers and Enrollment of Newport, Rhode Island, 1790–1939 (Providence, RI: National Archives Project, 1938), 389.

23. “North Kingston.” Providence Journal, October 25, 1839, 2.

24. “Sales at Auction.” Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, November 19, 1849, 3. The property continued to be offered for sale until August 1853.

25. The 1850s, however, became a period of transition for Joseph C. in his personal life. He had not only identified himself as a farmer in the federal census records, but also no longer was living in the same house as his wife. He lived with a 15-year-old girl named Harriet A. Dawley, who most likely was his servant. His wife, Frances Sanford, lived five houses away with five of their children and her younger sister Mary Northup. Joseph C. and Frances’s sons, Albert and Samuel P., did identify themselves as manufacturers in the 1850 federal census, suggesting they still were involved in the textile business. This is confirmed by the 1850 Products of Industry, which will be discussed below. Later that same year, Joseph C. filed a divorce petition. (“General Assembly.” Providence Journal, October 30, 1850, 2.) The divorce pro-

ceedings dragged on for several years and appear never to have been formalized. The proceedings ended with the death of Joseph C. in 1856 in Providence at age 68. (“Died.” Newport Mercury, September 13, 1856, 3.) It appears Frances had moved to Providence as well. She died there in 1886 at age 94. Despite the divorce filings, they were buried in the same grave near other members of the Sanford family at the Elm Grove Cemetery in North Kingstown.

26. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 419. James and Benjamin Sweet operated the mill for only two years.

27. “North-Kingstown Bank.” Providence Patriot, November 29, 1827, 3. Ezbon also was still on the board in 1848.

28. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 424.

29. An interesting social detail is that according to the 1850 federal census, Ezbon’s two youngest children, Alexander and Ezbon, already were living with Esther Chappell and her family, whereas Ezbon was living in a different house with his two older children, Alfred and Abby. Esther was listed as a teacher in the 1850 census, and the daughter of Francis Chappell, a former teacher at Washington Academy, and also listed (confusingly) as the Deputy Town Clerk in the 1850 census. I have been looking at the 1880 federal census for Newport and the city directory from the same year and sometimes people’s professions are radically different. I do not yet have an explanation for these discrepancies.

30. United States Federal Census, 1850, North Kingstown, 632. Ancestry.com, accessed June 11, 2020.

31. Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission (RIHPHC), North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Statewide Historical Preservation Report, W-NK-1, 1979, 16.

32. RIHPHC, North Kingstown, 18. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 406.

33. “For Sale.” Newport Mercury, June 10, 1815, 3.

34. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 415.

35. RIHPHC, North Kingstown, 21–22.

36. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 405. “Damages by the Late Storm.” Connecticut Courant, August 21, 1826, 3.

37. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 416.

38. United States Department of the Treasury, and Louis McLane. Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States: Collected and Transmitted to the House of Representatives, in Compliance with a Resolution of Jan. 19, 1832. (Washington, DC: Duff Green, 1833), vol. 1. Hereafter McLane Report.

39. Both houses remain standing.

40. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 399.

41. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 399.

42. “Copartnership Notice.” Providence Journal, November 30, 1848, 2.

43. “Fire at Allenton.” Standard, July 31, 1896, 2.

44. Cole. History of Washington and Kent Counties, 403.

45. Clive Day, “The Early Development of the American Cotton Manufacture” in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 39 (3), May 1925, 450–469.

46. McLane Report, Vol. 1.

47. George R. Loxton. Davisville, Rhode Island: A History of the Textile Mill Village of Davisville, North Kingstown, Rhode Island, Since the Arrival of Joshua Davis in 1694. (Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 2001), 79.

48. “Mortgage Sale of a Valuable Factory and Privilege.” Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, November 19, 1849, 3.

49. A dresser was a person who would set up the warps on a loom to prepare it for weaving. The Products of Industry for 1850 does not mention any looms at what used to be Joseph C. Sanford’s mill.

50. “Mortgagee’s Sale of a Cotton Mill and Privilege.” Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, August 8, 1850, 3.

51. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 416.

52. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 416.

53. Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, Rhode Island, Products of Industry, 1850.

54. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 405. Both Christopher and William Rhodes are listed in the 1850 census for the town of Warwick, in Kent County, as a manufacturer.

55. “Obituary – William E. Pierce.” Providence Journal, October 25, 1889, 3.

56. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 415. The Lafayette Mill originally was known as the North Kingstown Cotton Factory. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 405.

57. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 416.

58. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 406.

59. Lynn Downey, “Patent Riveted Clothing.” In Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016, 127.

60. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 416.

61. Barbara M. Starke. “A Mini View of the Microenvironment of Slaves and Freed Blacks Living in the Virginia and Maryland Areas from the 17th through the 19th Centuries.” Negro History Bulletin 41, no. 5, 1978, 879.

62. Christy Clark-Pujara, “The Legacies of Enslavement.” In Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island, 86–109. New York: NYU Press, 2016, 90.

63. Christy Clark-Pujara, “The Business of Slavery and Antislavery Sentiment: The Case of Rowland Gibson Hazard — An Antislavery “Negro Cloth” Dealer.” In Rhode Island History Journal, 71, no. 2, Summer-Fall 2013, 35–56.

64. Besides the men who are mentioned in the 1850 Products of Industry and are identified as manufacturers in the 1850 census, there also are Euclid Chadsey, George A. Davis, William D. Greene, William Holloway, Oliver Kenyon, Elisha Kenyon, George C. Sanford, and Daniel Wall. Due to a scarcity of additional records, it is not always clear in which industry they would have been involved. George A. Davis was related to the Davis family that operated the Davis Mill, but the historic records do not tell us what his role was. William Holloway also is mentioned as the master of the Newport packet sloop Resolution, and in 1870 his profession is listed as an acid manufacturer. Oliver Kenyon is mentioned as the operator of the Oak Hill Mill in 1868, which was a woolen mill that around 1865 had belonged to William E. Pierce. George C. Sanford was the second oldest son of Joseph C. Sanford. He is not mentioned together with his two brothers as an agent of his

father’s old mill. According to the 1860 census, he lived in Warren and worked in a cotton mill, and by 1870, he had moved to Providence and his profession is listed as a clerk in a railroad office. Daniel Wall’s profession is listed as “manufacturer tin & sheet iron ware.”

65. One explanation could be a combination of the accuracy of the person providing the information at the time of the census and the arbitrariness of the census taker. In 1850, for instance, Robert Rodman is identified as a merchant, but in 1860 as a manufacturer. In the 1870 census, he is identified more specifically as a woolen manufacturer, and in 1880, he is simply listed as working in a woolen mill.

66. We know there are inconsistencies between the federal census and other official records since the Products of Industry for 1850 lists 196 people working in the textile mills.

67. The wage and time book is held in special collections of the North Kingstown Free Library, covers the period from 1845 to ca. 1856, and relates to the Silver Spring Mill or the Narragansett Mill.

68. The youngest was Alonzo Bicknell, age 12. George N. Hammond (16) and George W. Gardner (17) are identified as spinners. James Kenyon (16) is listed as a student but also shows up in the 1850 wage book. William Bicknell (17) also shows up in the wage book but is listed as a farmer on the 1850 census.

69. Charles W. Calomiris and Larry Schweikart. “The Panic of 1857: Origins, Transmission, and Containment.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 51, no. 4 (1991): 807–34.

70. “Suspension of Labor.” Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, December 24, 1857, p. 4.

71. “Mortgagee’s Sale.” Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, August 26, 1852, p. 3. “Seine Twine Mill Burned.” Providence Journal, October 3, 1889, p. 8, and “Disastrous Fire at Belleville.” Narragansett Times, October 4, 1889, p. 3.

72. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 404.

73. “Supreme Court.” Providence Journal, August 25, 1855, p. 2.

74. “Supreme Court.” Providence Journal, August 26, 1856, p. 2.

See also Samuel Ames, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined

in the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, Providence, RI, 1902, 55–64.

75. “Woolen Mill To Be Let.” Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, October 21, 1858, p. 2.

76. J. R. Cole described Walter B. Chapin as a general and noted that during the war the mill produced army blankets. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 416. According to the 1860 federal census, Chapin lived in Providence with his family, where his profession was listed as manufacturer.

77. Two of the other more common professions included seventyfive people who identified as a mariner and twenty-six laborers.

78. George A. Davis was still listed as a manufacturer on the 1860 census.

79. George Roame’s last name is spelled Rome in the 1860 census.

80. Iris Saunders Podea. “Quebec to ‘Little Canada’: The Coming of the French Canadians to New England in the Nineteenth Century.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3 (1950): 365–80.

81. George Brown Tindall and David E Shi. America: A Narrative History. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999, 520–524.

82. “Seine Twine Mill burned.” Providence Journal, October 3, 1889, p. 8.

83. North Kingstown, Town Clerk, Land Records. Book 33B, pp. 577–579.

84. Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, Rhode Island, Products of Industry, 1860.

85. “Wanted Immediately.” Providence Journal, December 17, 1861, p. 3.

86. North Kingstown, Town Clerk, Land Records. Book 33B, pp. 762–764.

87. Doeskin can refer to a medium-weight wool fabric with a tightly woven structure, which made it more durable, or a finer quality of jeans. See William Henry Baker, A dictionary of men’s wear: embracing all the terms (so far as could be gathered) used in the men’s wear trades...with an appendix containing sundry useful tables: the uniforms of “ancient and honorable” independent mili-

tary companies of the U.S.; charts of correct dress, livery, and so forth Cleveland, OH: The Britton Printing Company, 1908.

88. The “Children and youth” who were part of the workforce were younger than fifteen for the females and younger than sixteen for the males.

89. “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal. January 27, 1868, p. 2.

90. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 416.

91. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 405. John Peter Campbell (1843–1927) also was involved in the Oriental Manufacturing Company in Providence and the Campbell Mill in Westerly. See Fibre & Fabric: A Record of American Textile Industries in the Cotton and Woolen Trade, Volume 32, 1900, 116.

92. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 405.

93. “Building in Rhode Island.” Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, December 28, 1865, p. 1.

94. William Holloway is identified as an acid manufacturer and James Eldred as a manufacturer of jewelry. The other men were Crawford Allen, Alonzo F. Crombe, Albert F. Ellsworth (he was the son of Alexander A. Ellsworth), Albert S. Reynolds (in the 1880 census listed as a wool manufacturer), and Albert Rodman (one of Robert Rodman’s sons).

95. Joe Carlen. “Captains of the Revolution.” In A Brief History of Entrepreneurship: The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World, 143–63. New York; Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2016, 158–160.

96. “North Kingstown.” Providence Journal, October 6, 1874, p. 1.

97. “For Sale.” Providence Journal, June 3, 1875, p. 4.

98. North Kingstown, Town Clerk, Land Records. Book 36, p. 547.

99. “Dissolution.” Providence Evening Press, May 7, 1873, p. 1.

100. Helena Wright. “Insurance Mapping and Industrial Archeology.” IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology, vol. 9, no. 1 (1983): 1.

101. Helena Wright. “Insurance Mapping and Industrial Archeol-

ogy.” IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology, vol. 9, no. 1 (1983): 2.

102. North Kingstown, Town Clerk, Land Records. Book 36, p. 590.

103. Charles G. Langham. “Economic Census of the United States: Historical Development.” In Working Paper 38, Bureau of the Census, 1973, 4.

104. Langham. “Economic Census of the United States: Historical Development.” 6.

105. This is based on research done at the Rhode Island State Archives in Providence. Only Schedule 3 for the manufacturers survives, which for North Kingstown reported on a wheelwright, blacksmiths, a tin and coppersmith, and boot and shoe factories.

106. Edward Atkinson, “Report on the Cotton Manufacturers in the United States,” in Report on the Manufactures of the United States at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880), Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883, 15.

107. Massachusetts (175), Rhode Island (115), Connecticut (82), New Hampshire (30), Maine (24), and Vermont (7). North Carolina had the greatest number (49) of cotton manufacturers in the South.

108. George William Bond, “Report on Wool Manufacture in All Its Branches,” in Report on the Manufactures of the United States at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880), Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883, 4.

109. Cole, History of Washington and Kent Counties, 400.

110. “Seine Twine Mill burned.” Providence Journal, October 3, 1889, p. 8, “Disastrous Fire at Belleville.” Narragansett Times, October 4, 1889, p. 3.

111. September 2021.

112. “Obituary–William E. Pierce.” Providence Journal. October 25, 1889, p. 3.

113. Kellee Blake. “‘First in the Path of the Firemen,’ The Fate of the 1890 Population Census, Part 1.” In Prologue Magazine. Spring 1996, 28, no. 1. Genealogy Notes. https://www.archives.gov/pub-

lications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census-1.html, accessed June 11, 2020.

114. State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Industrial Statistics: Made of the General Assembly at Its January Session, 1891, Providence, RI: E. L. Freeman & Son, 1891.

115. Census Bulletin No. 237. “Manufacturers—The Cotton Industry.” Washington, DC, October 14, 1892, 4.

116. Census Bulletin No. 169. “Statistic of Manufacturers—The Wool Industry.” Washington, DC, March 8, 1892, 4.

117. This was only one more than recorded in the 1890 census.

118. J. Ellery Hudson. Thirteenth Annual Report of Inspections of Factories, Mercantile Establishments, and Workshops from January 1st, 1906 to January 1st, 1907, 1907.

119. This may have been the Gregory Woolen Mill.

120. J. Ellery Hudson. Thirteenth Annual Report of Inspections.

121. F. A. Westbrook Jr. “Hamilton Web Company,” in Textile Age, October 1944. According to Westbrook’s article, the main building was demolished at the outbreak of World War I, whereas a newspaper article from 1944 suggests it was not demolished until 1925. “A Mill That Is No More.” The Standard, June 22, 1944, p. 1.

122. “A Mill That Is No More.” The Standard, June 22, 1944, p. 1.

123. Robert W. Dunn and Jack Hardy. Labor and Textiles: A Study of Cotton and Wool Manufacturing. New York: International Publishers, 1930.

124. “North Kingstown Is Hit By Slump.” Providence Journal, October 13, 1936, p. 22.

125. “Plant Auction Closes 104-Year Rodman Textile Co. Regime.” Providence Journal, November 26, 1952, p. 1.

126. “Investigation Set on Fire at Belleville Mill.” Providence Journal, March 7, 1969, p. 25.

127. Several authors have looked at strikes in Rhode Island. Gary Kulik. “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island.” Radical History Review 1978, no. 17 (1978): 5–38. James Findlay. “The Great Textile Strike of 1934:

Illuminating Rhode Island History in the Thirties.” Rhode Island History 42, no. 1 (1983): 17–29. Carl Gersuny. “A Unionless General Strike: The Rhode Island Ten-Hour Movement of 1873.” Rhode Island History 54, no. 1 (1996): 21–32.

128. Of the brothers, William Congdon Sanford (1794–1882) is listed as a carpenter and a wheelwright, and Peleg Clarke Sanford (1812–90) as a carpenter and a building mover. Of Joseph C.’s children, Albert Sanford (1817/8–99) initially follows in his father’s

footsteps but ultimately moves to Providence, where he works in an insurance office and eventually joins the police. George C. Sanford (1820–84), also ends up moving to Providence to work for the railroad, as does his younger brother Samuel P. Sanford (1825–75/81/95), who ends up being an agent for the Hartford Providence & Fishkill Railroad.

129. “Obituary–Ezbon Sanford.” Providence Journal, August 25, 1903, p. 2.

The Rhode Island Historical Society would like to thank the Museum of Work & Culture Preservation Foundation, the Rhode Island Labor History Society, the Rhode Island chapter of the AFL-CIO, and Mr. Fred Ballou for supporting the production of this issue.