Old Slater Mill, RI. Made in England

The day after I attended CadenceLIVE Boston, I visited Slater Mill, or Old Slater Mill National Historic Landmark, to give its full name. You probably know that National Historic Landmarks are "properties that illustrate the heritage of the United States," as it says on the program's website. There are about 2,500 of them. They are the premium properties on the National Register of Historic Places, which has 90,000 sites. As it happens, Old Slater Mill was the very first property listed as a "historic place" in 1966 when that register was created.

Who was Slater?

In my post about a British Textile Mill, Quarry Bank Mill: A Technology Museum from the Industrial Revolution, I gave one version of the story:

From 1774, it became illegal to export textile machinery out of Britain, including parts, plans, models, and so on.

But that didn't stop a British-American called Samuel Slater. He memorized the construction plans for Akwright's factory. He then left for the US without telling anyone and created the first mill in the US to use the Arkwright system in 1793, at Pawtucket, RI. Or, as it says in The Spies Who Launched America’s Industrial Revolution:

From water-powered textile mills, to mechanical looms, much of the machinery that powered America's early industrial success was "borrowed" from Europe.

Slater went on to be known as the "Father of American Industry" since he was really the first industrialist.

The website for the mill makes it sound more innocent, since it omits the part about intellectual property laws:

Providence merchant Moses Brown wanted to build water-powered machines to spin cotton fiber into thread. He rented a workspace next to the Pawtucket Falls. With a source of waterpower, a community of tool and machine makers already living there, and the ability for ships to bring in raw cotton and take out finished textiles, this location seemed ideal for Brown’s experiment.

The one thing Brown needed was someone who knew how English textile machines worked.Then in December 1789, Brown hired Samuel Slater. Slater was a recent immigrant from England. He had spent seven years working in an English textile mill. He rose from an apprentice to an overseer of machinery and mill construction.

Slater determined that Brown’s machines would not work. Slater worked with local mechanics, like the Wilkinson Family, to make new machines. In 1790 Slater got the machines running. Thread was produced on water powered machines for the first time in America. A new age of American Industry had begun.

I suspect the truth lies somewhere between these two stories. Slater, as an overseer of machinery and mill construction, knew a lot of valuable information in his head, and since it was illegal to export it, that information was even more valuable in the U.S. As many people have discovered over the years, you can't stop people from taking what's in their heads with them. In the U.S., he might have been known as the "Father of American Industry" but in England he was known as "Slater the Traitor".

The Mill

The mill is the oldest industrial building in the US, built in 1789. It is not unreasonable to say that the American Industrial Revolution started here. When it was built, the mill was about half of what you see here, the part nearer the camera was built later.

The weir was built at the same time, and was controversial since it meant that many fish could no longer get further upstream, and people used to catch and eat them. The purpose of the weir is to build up a head of water that was then used to send through the mill race and turn a water wheel that ran the spinning equipment. The mill was used purely for spinning cotton. The equipment was all operated by children, about 70 of them. This was in an era before there were schools, and the children actually had an easier time working in the mill than the harder work on the farms that they would otherwise be doing. Plus they came home every day with money.

Unfortunately, although the building has been preserved, the water wheel, the belts and pulleys, the spinning jennies, and so on have all long been lost. Today, the mill contains a lot of spinning equipment,  but it is all either well-made reproductions of the very old machines, or are from later than the mill.

You can see some cotton being spun, but this is on a "Throstle Spinning Frame from about 1815, so much later. Quarry Bank Mill is the only museum I know of that actually has all the equipment running, and still has the old water wheel and the old steam engines that eventually replaced it. However, that is in Manchester, England, so is a lot less accessible than Slater Mill in Rhode Island. If you are in the Boston area, I recommend a visit. Note that you can only go inside on a ranger-led tour (free), which were held every two hours on the day I went.

More Museums

Read about more of the museums of technology I have visited and written about here. I interpret "technology" in a very broad way:

• The Intel Museum
• German Computer Museums
• British Computer Museums
• The Computer History Museum
• Four Early Computers 1&2
• Four Early Computers 3&4
• Heinz Nixdorf's Legacy in Paderborn
• The San Jose Tech Museum
• Porsche Museum (video)
• Mercedes-Benz Museum
• TSMC Museum of Innovation
• Quarry Bank Mill: A Technology Museum from the Industrial Revolution
• PK: A Museum for the Biggest Telecommunication Hub in the World

 

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