Providence 375 Essay Series
Providence One Hundred Years Ago - The Industrial Heyday
by Richard E. Greenwood, Ph.D.Deputy Director, Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission
There was much about Providence in 1911 that would be familiar to us today, as so much of our present city assumed its character at the turn of the 19th century, with the downtown sprouting tall masonry office buildings, red brick mills along the rivers and new neighborhoods of Colonial Revival houses, bungalows and three-deckers spreading out in all directions. Yet in other ways, Providence one hundred years ago was a very different place indeed. It was the burgeoning center of one of the leading manufacturing regions in the country; factory workers with lunch pails filled the streets between shifts; and industrial giants stood astride the city.
Contemporary accounts of Providence's manufactures were rife with superlatives. The city boasted the world's largest manufacturers of steam engines (Corliss), machine tools (Brown & Sharpe), screws (American Screw), files (Nicholson File) and silver (Gorham). It was a national center of woolen and worsted textiles, rubber goods and jewelry production. Approximately a third of the city's industrial workers were employed by a manufacturer with 1000 or more employees with the rest working in plants half that size or smaller.
American Screw Company
These industrial giants were the dominant species but Providence's industrial ecosystem also featured a varied and vibrant understory of mid-range and small industries, mostly in the fields of textiles, machinery and base metals, and jewelry and precious metals. In addition to the giant worsted mills of Olneyville, there were cotton cloth, braid and knitting mills and textile finishing plants that regularly stained the rivers with their dyes. Manufacturers in iron and other base metals produced textile machinery, several types of steam engine including locomotives, sewing machines, stoves and wire. Benjamin Grinnell's Providence Steam and Gas Pipe Company was famous for its automatic sprinkler; and Builders Iron Foundry was renowned for the heavy armaments made for national defense and its Venturi tubes, used in municipal water supply systems around the world. The jewelry industry employed over 9,000 workers spread among nearly 300 firms carrying out a variety of specialized tasks to produce collar buttons, lapel pins, chains, rings, brooches and other ornaments. While the bigger firms had their own mills, the small firms rented space and power in large brick loft buildings, many on the periphery of the business district. They were joined there by start-up and spin-off businesses seeking to provide a new product line or occupy a specialized niche, such as insulated electrical wire (American Electrical Wire), metal fasteners for clothing (Rau Fastener) and expanding metal bracelets (Speidel).
In addition to the primary producers, many others provided essential support services that kept the industrial infrastructure humming, hissing and clanging. They produced machine parts and millwork to fit out the factories, oils, bobbins, spools and shuttles for spinning and weaving mills, soaps, bleaches and dyes to process textiles, all the way down to the boxes and labels for the finished goods. Supporting them all was a robust infrastructure of supply houses, brokers and wholesalers of cotton, wool and other raw materials, and shippers and carriers from railroads and steam boats to teamsters and delivery boys.
The breadth and depth of Providence's manufactures made a strong impression on observers; one of them compared its capacity to that of an elephant's trunk - able to complete amazing feats of strength as well as the most delicate operations. Others simply asserted "Providence manufactures everything from a carpet-tack to a locomotive."
Plant of the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company, Providence, January 1, 1901
The city of 1911 was the culmination of a process of industrialization that began a century before and accelerated dramatically in the mid-19th century. In 1811, "cotton fever" had Rhode Island in its grip, with investors rushing to follow Samuel Slater into the new field of textile manufacturing. The first boom in building cotton mills largely bypassed Providence due to its limited waterpower, but the town's merchants provided much of the capital and business expertise that built and ran the factories on the Blackstone, Pawtuxet, Quinebaug and other rivers. Providence was the financial center of the early textile industry and it retained its prominence at the century's end when it was the headquarters of numerous textile firms, including the world's largest - the Fruit of the Loom empire of B.B. and R. Knight. As Providence prospered and its capitalists reinvested, it became a magnet for inventors and entrepreneurs seeking backers for their own enterprises.
Even without extensive waterpower, early Providence was home to a number of artisans who operated iron foundries and other small shops that had been a significant part of the town's maritime economy. The town's mechanics adapted readily to the textile boom and with their technological versatility played a powerful role in the growth that followed. By the 1820's they had moved into textile machinery making and John Babcock had become New England's first manufacturer of steam engines. In 1827, Samuel Slater decided to use a steam engine (perhaps one of Babcock's) to power a new cotton factory on the Providence waterfront. His success on Ship
The city of 1911 was the culmination of a process of industrialization that began a century before and accelerated dramatically in the mid-19th century. In 1811, "cotton fever" had Rhode Island in its grip, with investors rushing to follow Samuel Slater into the new field of textile manufacturing. The first boom in building cotton mills largely bypassed Providence due to its limited waterpower, but the town's merchants provided much of the capital and business expertise that built and ran the factories on the Blackstone, Pawtuxet, Quinebaug and other rivers. Providence was the financial center of the early textile industry and it retained its prominence at the century's end when it was the headquarters of numerous textile firms, including the world's largest - the Fruit of the Loom empire of B.B. and R. Knight. As Providence prospered and its capitalists reinvested, it became a magnet for inventors and entrepreneurs seeking backers for their own enterprises.
Even without extensive waterpower, early Providence was home to a number of artisans who operated iron foundries and other small shops that had been a significant part of the town's maritime economy. The town's mechanics adapted readily to the textile boom and with their technological versatility played a powerful role in the growth that followed. By the 1820's they had moved into textile machinery making and John Babcock had become New England's first manufacturer of steam engines. In 1827, Samuel Slater decided to use a steam engine (perhaps one of Babcock's) to power a new cotton factory on the Providence waterfront. His success on Ship
Street once again pointed the way forward for American industry, and a few steam cotton mills starting up in Olneyville in the 1830s. However, steam power reached far greater heights of popularity and impact through the efforts of a young man named George Corliss, who came to Providence in 1845 seeking backers for a sewing machine he had invented. Finding little interest in his sewing machine, Corliss accepted the offer of work with a steam engine manufacturer and in 1848 he took out a patent for an automatic cutoff valve. Corliss's combination of a sliding steam valve with a regulating governor made steam engines more responsive to the varying demands of a factory and more efficient and therefore cheaper to operate. The advantages offered by the improved Corliss engine stimulated steam manufacturing both here and abroad. Freed from its geographical reliance on waterpower, industry was increasingly drawn to urban centers with good transportation facilities and labor pools. Providence benefitted immediately, not only from the success of the Corliss Steam Engine Company and its other engine manufacturers, but also from a dramatic proliferation of steam mills in almost every neighborhood. The image of a smoking factory chimney became a symbol of the new city's prosperity and coal, arriving by freighter and barge on the city wharves, was its lifeblood.
The city's emergence as a manufacturing center came with a corresponding growth in population. As native and foreign born workers streamed in to take advantage of the plentiful jobs, the population grew at a tremendous rate, tripling between 1830 and 1865, then doubling between 1865 and 1880. By 1910, it had doubled again to reach 224, 326 residents, at which point Providence was the 20th largest city in the country and the second in terms of per capita wealth. Foreign-born immigrants accounted for just under half of the population, with natives of southern and eastern Europe following the Irish and French Canadians who had made up most of the first waves. While the bankers and businessmen provided the capital and the mechanics and inventors developed the technological tools, it was these men, women and children, many of them fresh off the farm, who provided the labor to make the city's mills run.
This was a city that worked; more than 46,000 worked in over 1,000 manufacturing establishments, most of them as wage earners and a relative handful as salaried employees. Some industrial workers like machinists and die-cutters were highly skilled; most like weavers and spinners were semi-skilled; and some like the firemen who fed the steam boilers with coal and the boys that swept the factory floor had only minimal skills. Manufacturing provided employment to a growing contingent of white collar occupations as well, from stenographers and clerks up through professionals such as chemists, engineers and architects. Most worked a 9 or 10-hour day, 5 ½ to 6 days a week.
Driven by its powerful industrial economy the city spread out in all directions. Providence more than doubled its size as it re-annexed territory from North Providence, Cranston and Johnston, gaining the existing mill villages of Wanskuck, Manton, Dyerville and Olneyville, as well as large tracts of countryside. This open land was soon overlaid by the expanding grids of city streets and the building trades flourished as carpenters, masons, plumbers and painters provided housing for the workers, middle class and wealthy. While many walked to work, horse drawn streetcars and then electric trolleys made it possible to live at a distance from the increasingly noisy and smoky industrial areas. At the city's center, the growth was more vertical than horizontal as tall office buildings sprang up, led by the ten-story Banigan Building, built by Joseph Banigan, the Irish immigrant who had risen to the top of the rubber industry. Downtown was also the showplace of the ascendant commercial culture where department stores and specialty shops offered the wealth of goods made available through mass production and its profits.
Providence celebrated Labor Day in 1911 with a parade through Olneyville and an aeronautics race; and the Journal reported a large increase in the city's tax valuation. There seemed little reason to question the city's continued growth and prosperity but industrial Providence had reached its climax. In retrospect, there was already evidence that the industrial base was eroding. The New England cotton industry was weakening in the face of southern expansion. The steam engine was being challenged by the electric motor and the automobile. Although the locomotive plant on Valley Street had been converted to an automobile factory in 1905, these were not going to be industries in which Providence would achieve a dominant role. The city's industrial diversity insulated it from the initial downturn in the textile economy and manufactures continued to expand for a time, buoyed by booms during the two world wars. Then in the mid-20th century came an abrupt decline, as capital migrated in search of cheaper labor and manufacturing costs, and the electric grid and the automobile freed manufacturers to relocate from aging and expensive city locations to the suburbs. While manufacturing remains part of the Providence economy, the industrial giants are now long gone. However, the modern city that they built is still very much with us, providing a foundation on which to build and the challenge to build it well.
The city's emergence as a manufacturing center came with a corresponding growth in population. As native and foreign born workers streamed in to take advantage of the plentiful jobs, the population grew at a tremendous rate, tripling between 1830 and 1865, then doubling between 1865 and 1880. By 1910, it had doubled again to reach 224, 326 residents, at which point Providence was the 20th largest city in the country and the second in terms of per capita wealth. Foreign-born immigrants accounted for just under half of the population, with natives of southern and eastern Europe following the Irish and French Canadians who had made up most of the first waves. While the bankers and businessmen provided the capital and the mechanics and inventors developed the technological tools, it was these men, women and children, many of them fresh off the farm, who provided the labor to make the city's mills run.
This was a city that worked; more than 46,000 worked in over 1,000 manufacturing establishments, most of them as wage earners and a relative handful as salaried employees. Some industrial workers like machinists and die-cutters were highly skilled; most like weavers and spinners were semi-skilled; and some like the firemen who fed the steam boilers with coal and the boys that swept the factory floor had only minimal skills. Manufacturing provided employment to a growing contingent of white collar occupations as well, from stenographers and clerks up through professionals such as chemists, engineers and architects. Most worked a 9 or 10-hour day, 5 ½ to 6 days a week.
Driven by its powerful industrial economy the city spread out in all directions. Providence more than doubled its size as it re-annexed territory from North Providence, Cranston and Johnston, gaining the existing mill villages of Wanskuck, Manton, Dyerville and Olneyville, as well as large tracts of countryside. This open land was soon overlaid by the expanding grids of city streets and the building trades flourished as carpenters, masons, plumbers and painters provided housing for the workers, middle class and wealthy. While many walked to work, horse drawn streetcars and then electric trolleys made it possible to live at a distance from the increasingly noisy and smoky industrial areas. At the city's center, the growth was more vertical than horizontal as tall office buildings sprang up, led by the ten-story Banigan Building, built by Joseph Banigan, the Irish immigrant who had risen to the top of the rubber industry. Downtown was also the showplace of the ascendant commercial culture where department stores and specialty shops offered the wealth of goods made available through mass production and its profits.
Providence celebrated Labor Day in 1911 with a parade through Olneyville and an aeronautics race; and the Journal reported a large increase in the city's tax valuation. There seemed little reason to question the city's continued growth and prosperity but industrial Providence had reached its climax. In retrospect, there was already evidence that the industrial base was eroding. The New England cotton industry was weakening in the face of southern expansion. The steam engine was being challenged by the electric motor and the automobile. Although the locomotive plant on Valley Street had been converted to an automobile factory in 1905, these were not going to be industries in which Providence would achieve a dominant role. The city's industrial diversity insulated it from the initial downturn in the textile economy and manufactures continued to expand for a time, buoyed by booms during the two world wars. Then in the mid-20th century came an abrupt decline, as capital migrated in search of cheaper labor and manufacturing costs, and the electric grid and the automobile freed manufacturers to relocate from aging and expensive city locations to the suburbs. While manufacturing remains part of the Providence economy, the industrial giants are now long gone. However, the modern city that they built is still very much with us, providing a foundation on which to build and the challenge to build it well.
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