Daniel Day (manufacturer)

• 1. Introduction

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  Daniel Day built a dam on the West River in Massachusetts at the age of 43, and in doing so helped start an industrial revolution. The year was 1810, and Day was laying the foundation for what would become one of the oldest woolen mills in the United States. How did a man born in Mendon, Massachusetts in 1767 come to stand at the center of a national transformation in manufacturing? What made the Blackstone River Valley the crucible of American industry? And what family ties stretched from Day's modest wool carding operation all the way to a company still operating in the 21st century?

• 2. Roots in Mendon

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  Joseph Day and Deborah Taft raised their son Daniel in Mendon, Massachusetts, a town whose history ran deep with one particular family name. Daniel was a fourth-generation descendant of Robert Taft Sr., the original Taft settler in America, who had claimed land in the western section of Mendon in 1679. That ancestry would prove more than a genealogical footnote. Daniel married Sylvia Wheelock, and their children were born in Mendon up until 1800, according to the town's vital records. Two sons and two daughters carried forward a network of family connections that would shape the mills, villages, and factory lineages of the Blackstone Valley for generations to come.

• 3. The Mill at Elmdale

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  Pliny Earle I had developed carding machines at Leicester, Massachusetts, near Worcester, as early as the 1780s, establishing a precedent Day would build upon. When Day raised his woolen carding mill beside the West River dam, the site he chose sat just south of the main village of Wheelockville, near a place known as Hecla, off Elmdale Road at Scott's Lane in Uxbridge. The location would eventually be called Elmdale. By 1809 the Daniel Day Mill held a remarkable cluster of distinctions: first textile mill in Uxbridge, first woolen mill in the entire Blackstone River Valley, second oldest woolen mill in Massachusetts after one in Watertown, and third oldest woolen mill in the United States, trailing only a worsted mill in Hartford. Day's son Joseph, born in 1790, joined the business alongside Jerry Wheelock. A loom was added to the carding works by 1811, and the mill was greatly enlarged by 1825.

• 4. The Rhode Island System

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  Day's mill was only the second established in the historic Blackstone River Valley, a region considered a major contributor to the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The network of mills, dams, and villages that grew up along that waterway was developed by John and Samuel Slater and became known as the Rhode Island System. In the same year Day opened his woolen mill, only one other mill was established in Uxbridge: the Clapp Mill on the Mumford River, a cotton operation. The concentration of industry along these river corridors was not coincidental. Water-powered manufacturing required precisely the kind of dam-and-river geography that Day had claimed at Elmdale, and the Rhode Island System gave that geography an organized form that would replicate across New England.

• 5. Family Legacies

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  One of Day's daughters married Luke Taft, a descendant of the same American Taft family whose roots traced to Mendon and Uxbridge. Luke Taft went on to start his own mill in Uxbridge, eventually known as the Waucantuck Mill. Day was also an ancestor of a branch of the Wheelock family that established an early factory. That enterprise continued operating into the 21st century as Berroco, Inc., now headquartered in nearby North Smithfield, Rhode Island. The business threads that began with Daniel Day's dam on the West River thus ran forward for more than two centuries through marriages, partnerships, and inherited enterprise.

• 6. Later Life and Death

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  Sylvia Day, Daniel's wife, died in 1842 at the age of 77. Their son Peter had died far earlier, in 1815, at just 23 years old. Daniel himself outlived his wife by six years, spending his final years as a widower. The Uxbridge Vital Records document his death on the 26th of October, 1848, at the age of 81. The cause was listed as Consumption, or Tuberculosis. That record, drawn from page 369 of Uxbridge Vital Records through 1850, preserves the sparse details of his final chapter. The mill he established at Elmdale, the first woolen operation in the Blackstone Valley, remained a landmark of early American manufacturing long after Day himself was gone.