#wilkinsonmill

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Slater Mill-original machinery (1830's); Wilkinson Mill-late 19th century version of David Wilkinson's screw lathe

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Slater (1793) and Wilkinson (1810) Mills

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You Say You Want a Revolution...

7/30/2014 - I come from a mill family. My father’s parents (Mémé and Pépé) worked in Rhode Island mills as children. So I’m not sure why-or maybe that’s why-I never visited the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution and “The Rhode Island System”, in which families lived in mill towns and worked in the mills together. As an adult regularly coming back to visit family and “the old country” around Christmas, my only defense is that the Slater Mill Museum is only open March-October.

Samuel Slater not only worked in an English textile mill, but was a superintendent. Still, he wanted more. In a time when he could have been convicted of the crime of leaving England-they wanted to maintain their monopoly- he brought his expertise to a new state with money looking for expertise. He recreated the basic machinery for separating (carding) and spinning cotton into thread. He and his financiers built a mill in Pawtucket in 1793. With Slater’s knowledge and the power of the Blackstone River, the American Industrial Revolution began. Not satisfied with mere production, Slater envisioned a system where workers would live, work, and shop together- wives and children included-in a company owned village. Slater mill used his machinery to turn 500 pound cotton bales delivered practically to its door into cotton thread which was then sold to households and other mills to spin into fabric. My discovery of the day, this “Rhode Island System”, and child labor, were used until The Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted in 1938, which by the way, excludes manual agricultural work. The mill town system was used to company advantage in manufacturing and mining industries. Mill houses still exist in Rhode Island and other states. One end of my paper route as a kid was a row of mill houses, small dwellings cheaply made which sat across Manton Avenue from Atlantic Mills, which produced wool muslin, cotton, and khaki in its heyday.

The Slater Mill site was home to other mills. While Slater and his brother owned three mills at the site, one neighbor, the Wilkinson Mill, made machinery, hardware, and repair parts for Slater. David Wilkinson constructed a beautiful three story fieldstone building next to the “old mill” in 1810. Slater and Wilkinson shared a ditch to draw water from the Blackstone, powering water wheels under their factories. Wilkinson was a brilliant engineer and machinist. His screw lathe (1798) and threading lathe (1806) allowed mass manufacture of tools, weapons, and screws, which it is hard to imagine were once made individually, by hand, for each project. He created a grinder to make thread spindles for Slater Mill. He built and sailed a small steamboat down the Providence River in 1793. Although brilliant, his lathes didn’t sell, his ideas for steam powered machinery and boats were eclipsed (stolen?) by Robert Fulton, and his bad luck continued when he went broke in a textile depression and financial crisis.

Today I discovered a new appreciation for Rhode Island inventors, innovators, and generations of laborers, including my own family, that made this state the manufacturing powerhouse it once was. I wonder if any of them would appreciate a state that is tied for the highest unemployment rate and leads not in innovation, but government mismanagement, and where people keep inventing ways to take taxpayers’ money.