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ONE. “Positively Alarming”: Southern Boosters, Piedmont Mills, and New England Responses
- University of Georgia Press
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chapter one “Positively Alarming” Southern Boosters, Piedmont Mills, and New England Responses During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the manufacture of cotton textile goods drove much of the industrialization of New England. In the eastern part of Massachusetts, Boston businessmen invested their monies in spinning and weaving mills along the fall lines of the Charles River in Waltham and the Merrimack River in Lowell and Lawrence. In the central part of the state, local merchants in the Chicopee-Springfield area of the Connecticut River valley did the same. Drawing a largely female workforce from an increasing surplus of agricultural labor, these entrepreneurs facilitated the creation of the region’s first full-scale manufactories as well as entire communities based on cotton textile production. In Lowell, for example, a group of Boston investors that came to be known as the “Boston Associates” established the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in 1822. In 1825, they incorporated the Merrimack Lock and Canal Company, and over the next twenty years they built mills, machine shops, and company-owned boarding houses and tenements in the city. The Boston Associates eventually controlled many of the largest cotton textile manufactories in the United States, including the Boot, Tremont, Lawrence, Appleton, Suffolk, Hamilton, Massachusetts, and Prescott Mills.1 Simultaneously through the early 1820s, industry took root in Springfield and neighboring Chicopee. By 1820, Chicopee had a base of several small-scale industries consisting of a paper mill, iron works, and saw and grist mills, but the community remained predominantly agricultural. Between 1822 and 1823, local entrepreneurs recognized the potential of the Chicopee River, a tributary of the Connecticut River, to drive the turbines needed to operate looms and spinning machines, and they began to develop the cotton textile industry in central Massachusetts. In 1823, Springfield merchant Jonathan Dwight Sr. and investors with familial and commercial ties to his influential family incorporated the Boston Springfield Manufacturing Company. Through this company, 7 8 • “positively alarming” 1 they purchased property and water privileges from Chicopee locals. With five hundred thousand dollars of capital stock, they began constructing a dam to harness the river for factory use, intending to build a cotton mill as well as workforce housing. The owners of the Boston Springfield Manufacturing Company , renamed the Chicopee Manufacturing Company in 1828, started work on a second mill in 1825, a third in 1826, and a fourth in 1831. By 1835, the Chicopee Manufacturing Company was capitalized at seven hundred thousand dollars.2 Through the 1830s, the Dwight family, by virtue of its ties to influential financiers and politicians in Boston, was instrumental not only in spearheading the construction of a railroad line connecting the Connecticut River valley and western Massachusetts to Boston but also in drawing Boston investments into Chicopee’s cotton textile concerns. In 1831, eight Boston investors and five local entrepreneurs incorporated the Springfield Canal Company, which then developed the water power and constructed textile mills for three new companies downriver from the Chicopee Manufacturing Company: the Cabot Manufacturing Company (1832), the Perkins Manufacturing Company (1836), and the Dwight Manufacturing Company (1841). The Cabot and Perkins Companies merged in 1852, and then in 1856 they consolidated with the Dwight Manufacturing Company and operated under the Dwight name. In less than twenty years, Chicopee had become one of the Bay State’s foremost industrial centers.3 The owners of the Chicopee companies, like other New England textile manufacturers in the 1820s and 1830s, filled their mills with a workforce of farm girls attracted to the factories by the opportunity to earn cash wages. During the 1840s, mill owners began employing English and Irish immigrants in the city’s mills, and later they culled their operatives from successive waves of French Canadian, Polish, and Greek and Portuguese workers as they began arriving in Massachusetts in the 1860s, 1880s, and early 1900s, respectively. As the ethnic makeup of the workforce of the Chicopee textile mills changed through the mid- to late nineteenth century, so too did its gender composition. The workforce shifted from consisting almost exclusively of native female labor to an immigrant population of both men and women. Local businesses that provided needed services for the Chicopee community grew during these years as well, and mill owners living in Boston invested funds to aid in the establishment of city schools, libraries, parks, public services, and utilities.4 The outbreak of the Civil War accelerated Chicopee’s industrial development. Local machine works and...