We ascend the Seeconk River to Pawtucket, about five miles distant, a
busy manufacturing town of thirty thousand people, noted as the place
where Samuel Slater introduced the cotton manufacture into the United
States in 1790, the original Slater mill still standing. The Pawtucket
Falls of fifty feet give the valuable water-power which has made the
place, and here are some of the greatest thread factories in the
world. The town extends up into the villages of Central and Valley
Falls, and the enormous power furnished by the river is drawn upon at
different levels from several dams. All sorts of cotton textiles,
muslins and calicoes are made, and the slopes running up from the
valley, with the plateaus above, are covered with the operatives'
houses. This town has the most attractive situation on the Blackstone
River, which here changes its name to the Pawtucket, and finally to
the Seeconk. Samuel Slater, who started it, was a native of Belper, in
Derbyshire, England, having worked there for both Strutt and
Arkwright, the fathers of the textile industries. Learning that
American bounties had been offered for the introduction of Arkwright's
patents in cotton-spinning, he crossed the ocean, landing at Newport
in 1789. Here he heard that Moses Brown had attempted cotton-spinning
by machinery in Rhode Island. He wrote Brown, telling what he could
do, and received a reply in which Brown said his attempt had been
unsuccessful, and added: "If thou canst do this thing, I invite thee
to come to Rhode Island and have the credit and the profit of
introducing cotton manufacture into America." Slater went to
Pawtucket, and on December 21, 1790, he started three carding-machines
and spinning-frames of seventy-two spindles. He afterwards became very
prominent, building large mills at Pawtucket and elsewhere, and the
impetus thus given the place made it the leading American
manufacturing centre for a half-century. The Indian name of the falls
was retained by the city.
The Blackstone River was named after the recluse Anglican clergyman,
Rev. William Blackstone, who, as heretofore stated, first settled
Boston about 1625. When he found, after a brief experience, that he
could not get on with the Puritan colonists, who came in there too
numerously, he sold out and "retired into the wilderness." He wandered
for over forty miles into the forests, and during more than forty
years made his home on the banks of this stream among the Indians, not
far above Pawtucket Falls. He lived there in his hermit home at Study
Hill among his books, the river rushing by, and the Providence and
Worcester Branch of the New Haven Consolidated Railroad now cuts its
route deeply through his hill, running among the dams, and in some
cases over them, on its way up the busy valley of this very crooked
river. Its waters, which do such good service for so many mills,
become more and more polluted as they descend, so that its lower
course is a malodorous and dark-colored stream. The river is about
forty-five miles long, rising in the hills adjacent to Worcester and
flowing in winding reaches towards the southeast, descending over five
hundred feet to Providence. The mills, however, have grown vastly
beyond its capacity as a water-power, so that auxiliary steam is now
largely used. Numerous ponds and other feeders accumulate a vast
amount of water for the Blackstone in Southern Massachusetts, and its
lower course for nearly thirty miles is a succession of dams, canals
and mills, making one of the greatest factory districts in existence.
Over a half-million people work and live in this busy valley, the
operatives being chiefly French Canadians, Swedes, and the various
British races, the French preponderating in some of the towns. The
Yankees long ago left, seeking better pay elsewhere, being replaced by
a more contented people satisfied to work in mills. Most of the huge
factories lining the river are owned by wealthy corporations having
their head offices in Boston or Providence, and it is said that, the
buildings being without signs or names, many of the operatives
actually do not know who they work for. These mills are four and five
stories high, often a thousand feet long, with hundreds of windows and
ponderous stairway-towers.
Ascending the river, the factory settlements of Lonsdale, Ashton,
Albion and Manville are passed, and we come to Woonsocket Hill, one of
the highest in Rhode Island. Here the river goes around various bends
admirably arranged for conducting its waters through the mills, and
the town of Woonsocket is built where twenty thousand people make
cotton and woollen cloths, the noted "Harris cassimere" having been
long the chief manufacture at the Social Mills. To the northward,
Woonsocket spreads into the towns of Blackstone and Waterford, also
industrial hives; and finally, having followed the river up to its
sources, the route leads to Worcester, the second city of
Massachusetts, forty-five miles west of Boston, styled the "heart of
the Commonwealth," with a population of over one hundred thousand
people. Its chief newspaper, the _Massachusetts Spy_, is noted as
having actually started as a spy upon the royalists in the exciting
times preceding the Revolutionary War, and is still a prosperous
publication. It was at a Worcester banquet in 1776 that the "Sons of
Freedom" drank the noted toast: "May the freedom and independence of
America endure till the sun grows dim with age and this earth returns
to chaos; perpetual itching without the benefit of scratching to the
enemies of America!" Worcester is a great manufacturing city, but has
almost lost its New England population from the steady Yankee
migration westward, they being replaced in its numerous mills by
French Canadians, Swedes and Irish, the latter predominating. It has a
noble Soldiers' Monument, a splendid railway station, and the fine
buildings of the Massachusetts Lunatic Asylum standing on the highest
hill in the suburbs. Its new white marble City Hall, completed in
1898, is an imposing edifice. The huge Washburn & Moen Wire Works are
on Salisbury Pond, in the outskirts. Among the interesting old
dwellings is the Bancroft House, where the historian, George Bancroft,
was born, in 1800, dying in 1891. The great attraction of Worcester is
Lake Quinsigamond, on the eastern verge, a long, deep, narrow loch,
stretching among the hills four miles away, with little gems of
islands and villa-bordered shores. Scattered over the distant rim of
enclosing hills are several typical Yankee villages, with their
church-spires set against the horizon. Worcester had a chequered
colonial career, the Indians repeatedly driving out the early
settlers, until they built a fortress-like church on the Common, where
each man attended on the Sabbath, carrying his musket. These resolute
colonists were Puritans, bent on enforcing their own ideas, for when a
few Scotch Presbyterians came in 1720, and built a church of that
creed, it was declared a "cradle of heresy" and demolished. A
considerable number of the French Acadians, exiled from Nova Scotia in
the eighteenth century, came to Worcester, and their descendants are
now among its prominent people.
New England, as is well known, was forced to adopt manufacturing,
because the inhabitants could not extract a living from the soil. It
is difficult to say where is the most sterile region, but in
Massachusetts it seems to be generally agreed that the town of Ware,
on the Ware River, northwest of Worcester, is hard to beat in this
respect. It is a picturesquely located mill-village, with a soil that
is stony and sterile. The original grant of the land was made to
soldiers as a reward for bravery in King Philip's War. They thankfully
accepted the gift and went there, but after examination left, and sold
all their domain at the rate of about two cents an acre. President
Dwight, of Yale College, rode through the town, but never wanted to
see it again, saying regretfully, in describing the land: "It is like
self-righteousness; the more a man has of it, the poorer he is."
Someone wrote a poem describing the creation of the place, of which
this a specimen stanza:
"Dame Nature once, while making land,
Had refuse left of stone and sand.
She viewed it well, then threw it down
Between Coy's Hill and Belchertown,
And said, 'You paltry stuff, lie there,
And make a town, and call it Ware.'"