Boston Manufacturing Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The Boston Manufacturing Company began in 1813, when Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell partnered with a group of investors later called the Boston Associates. Their goal was to manufacture cotton textiles at a single site in Waltham, Massachusetts. Using power from the Charles River, they built what became the first factory in the world to combine spinning and weaving under one roof. It grew into the largest factory in the United States, employing about 300 workers.

  A Boston merchant found a way to obtain that technology from a country that tried to keep it secret. The mill's workers followed a demanding daily schedule. Both stories, along with the fate of the Waltham site after the company closed, unfold across this documentary.

• 2. Smuggled Plans

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  In 1793, Samuel Slater set up the first successful water-powered textile spinning mill in the United States, at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. His system used water power only to spin cotton into yarn. That yarn was then sent to small weaving shops and private homes, where it was woven into cloth by hand. By 1810, dozens of spinning mills had spread across the New England countryside, but cloth production under this system remained slow.

  In 1810, Lowell traveled to Lancashire, England, and studied the region's textile industry firsthand. He paid particular attention to the power loom, a machine with no equal yet in America. He was convinced that faster cloth production in the United States depended on obtaining such a machine. On his return trip to Boston in 1812, he carried no drawings, since Britain banned export of the technology, and relied on memory alone. He disguised himself as a country farmer for the journey, so as not to draw suspicion.

  In September 1813, the Boston Associates purchased the site of the Boies Paper Mill in Waltham. A ten-foot drop in the nearby Charles River made it an ideal spot for the factory they had in mind. For the loom itself, they combined what Lowell had memorized in England with trade secrets from an earlier mill. That mill was the horse-powered Beverly Cotton Manufactory in Beverly, Massachusetts, dating to 1788.

  The plans existed only in Lowell's memory and on paper. Turning memorized sketches into a working machine would fall to a mechanic named Paul Moody.

• 3. The Power Loom

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  The investors hired Paul Moody, a skilled mechanic from Amesbury, to design the machinery and oversee construction of the new mill. After more than a year of trials, Moody turned Lowell's description of the power loom into a working machine, adding improvements of his own. Moody also devised a new way to transmit power, using leather belts and pulleys driven by water turbines. It proved far more efficient than the shaft-and-gear systems that other mills relied on.

  The first mill was completed in late 1814, after nearly a year of construction. Jacob Perkins oversaw installation of the first waterwheel, dam, flumes, and raceway. By early 1815 the mill was selling cloth, and both production and profits expanded quickly.

  In 1816, the company built a second, larger mill next to the first, one that also produced textile machinery for other companies. That same year, the Tariff of 1816 helped the mill compete against British textile imports. Many smaller American mills, lacking that advantage, were forced out of business. The two mills were connected in 1843, as part of a planned expansion. Other New England mills soon copied the power loom, modifying and improving it along the way.

  Francis Cabot Lowell died in 1817 at age 42, a few years after the mill's first cloth was sold.

• 4. The Waltham System

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  Mill owners built a tightly controlled labor system meant to differ from the harsh factory conditions Lowell had observed in Lancashire. They recruited young Yankee farm girls from the surrounding countryside to run the machines. These workers, known as mill girls, lived in boarding houses provided by the company and supervised by older women enforcing strict codes of conduct. Under this arrangement, they worked roughly eighty hours a week.

  A factory bell woke the workers at 4:40 in the morning. They reported to the mill by 5:00 and took a half-hour breakfast break at 7:00 in the morning. Work then continued until a lunch break at noon, lasting thirty to forty-five minutes. The factory shut down at 7:00 in the evening, when workers returned to their company housing, a routine repeated six days a week.

  That discipline could not expand forever. Waltham's water power had its limits, and the company was about to reach them.

• 5. Beyond Waltham

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  By the early 1820s, the Charles River's water power at Waltham was nearly used up. The investors began looking for a new site that could support even more mills. In 1822, operating as the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, they copied the Waltham System on a far larger scale. They built the new mills at Lowell, Massachusetts.

  The same investors went on to establish Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire, along with several other industrial centers. These new centers rose across New England during the first half of the nineteenth century. Waltham's factory methods were also carried into other industries in the years that followed. Many rural towns across the region ended up with their own textile mills as a result.

  The original mill buildings at Waltham, though, were about to change beyond recognition.

• 6. After The Mills

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  Workers connected the original Waltham mills into a single structure late in the nineteenth century. They removed the old gable roofs and added extra floors topped with flat roofs instead. The Boston Manufacturing Company closed in 1930. In 1977, the site was declared a National Historic Landmark. Some of the company's worker housing has also been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

  The rest of the property now includes housing for seniors subsidized by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. It also houses the Ira B. Gordon Center For the Arts, part of the Waltham Mills Artists Association. Additional housing rounds out the site today.

  Where mill girls once rose to a 4:40 bell, the Waltham Mills Artists Association now keeps its own hours.