Slater Mill and the Birth of American Industry

In seventeen ninety, a young Englishman named Samuel Slater came to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and by December had a cotton-spinning frame running from memory in a small building on the east bank of the Blackstone River. He had worked in a British textile mill as an apprentice, memorized the design of Richard Arkwright's water-powered machinery down to the last spindle, and emigrated to America knowing that the British government had made it illegal to export those designs or to let anyone who knew them leave the country. He left anyway, disguised as a farm laborer.

Slater had written to Moses Brown, a Providence merchant, who had been trying unsuccessfully to build a working mill for years. Brown's mechanics could not get the machines to function. Slater could.

In seventeen ninety-three, their factory on the Blackstone began producing cotton thread by water power, the first successful mechanized textile mill in the United States. The consequences were enormous and not entirely benign. Slater's mill employed children, some as young as seven, working long shifts in the noise and lint.

The system he introduced, known as the Rhode Island system, spread across New England and eventually the country, reshaping what it meant to work, to live near a factory town, and to be a child in early industrial America. But the date and place are definitive. The American Industrial Revolution began at a bend in the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, because one young Englishman had an extraordinary memory and a willingness to break the law.

The mill still stands. The river still runs past it. The National Park Service now interprets the site, and the Blackstone River Valley has been designated a National Heritage Corridor for the pivotal role this small, fast-moving river played in changing American life.