The Wire City: Worcester's Industrial Backbone

You are rolling through what was once called the Wire City, and the name was not a nickname. It was a statement of fact. By the middle of the eighteen hundreds, the factories of Worcester, Massachusetts produced more wire than any place on earth.

The man who built that empire was Ichabod Washburn. He arrived in Worcester in eighteen twenty with almost nothing, took up machinery work, and by eighteen thirty-one had figured out a process for drawing wire that no one in American industry had cracked before. He partnered with merchant Stephen Salisbury the Second, who built him a water-powered mill on Grove Street. From those first modest buildings grew the North Works, and eventually the company Washburn and Moen, which became the largest wire mill in the world.

The production record is staggering. By eighteen sixty, Worcester wire mills were turning out fifty-eight percent of all wire made in America. By eighteen sixty-five, the company employed three thousand skilled workers. The innovations kept stacking up: the first American-made telegraph wire in eighteen forty-seven, the first American piano wire in eighteen fifty-one, and the first barbed wire manufactured at industrial scale, a product that would help fence the American West.

In eighteen ninety-nine, Washburn and Moen was folded into American Steel and Wire, and in nineteen oh one that company became a subsidiary of United States Steel. The old North Works district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, still stands on Grove Street, its brick facades a catalog of nineteenth-century industrial ambition.

Ichabod Washburn was also one of the two founders of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, donating his shops and his expertise so that the next generation of engineers and machinists could learn their trades. The Wire City did not just make products. It made a model for how American industrial cities could work.