Hamilton's Dream Mill, Paterson and the Great Falls

Alexander Hamilton first saw the Great Falls of the Passaic River in seventeen seventy-eight, when he was still George Washington's aide-de-camp and the war was far from over. The Passaic drops seventy-seven feet in a single curtain of white water, the second-largest waterfall by volume east of the Mississippi, and Hamilton recognized immediately what he was looking at: power. Mechanical, industrial, national power.

Thirteen years later, in seventeen ninety-one, Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury and writing his famous Report on Manufactures, arguing that the United States could not remain economically independent as a purely agricultural nation, it needed to manufacture its own goods. He used the Great Falls as his centerpiece. That same year, the New Jersey legislature chartered the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, a public-private corporation with Hamilton as its architect.

Pierre Charles L'Enfant, who was at that moment laying out Washington D.C., was hired to design the canal raceway system that would deliver water power from the falls to mills throughout the new city.

Hamilton named the city Paterson, after New Jersey governor William Paterson. It grew from five hundred residents in the seventeen-nineties to over five thousand by eighteen twenty, and then kept growing. The mills ran through three great industrial waves: cotton first, then iron and steel, then silk.

By the eighteen-eighties, Paterson was making more silk ribbon and silk fabric than any other city in the United States, it was called Silk City, and it drew immigrant workers from Italy, Poland, and the Middle East. Those workers would eventually strike in nineteen thirteen, in one of the great labor confrontations of the Progressive Era. But that story belongs to another track.

What matters here is the vision: Hamilton looked at a waterfall in the New Jersey hills and saw a nation that could make things for itself. Paterson is where that idea first became mortar and brick and turning gears.