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.

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 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 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

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.” b ibliogra P hy

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.

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.” n otes

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

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