The First Factories

Factories are buildings or sets of buildings in which manufactured goods are made from raw materials on a large scale. Work in factories is usually accomplished with laborsaving machinery operated by wage workers, or people who work for others for pay. The entire manufacturing process, including humans and machines, is usually directed by professional managers hired by the owners or their representatives. The first U.S. factories were built around the turn of the nineteenth century. Most were located in the northeastern states, and they were usually established by a group of local businessmen who remained involved in their day-to-day operation at some level. Though these early industrialists were interested in making a profit on their investment, some expressed concern about the way their industries would shape the social world. Americans had heard about the miserable, dangerous, and unhealthy conditions for workers in British factories. Several leading businessmen hoped to create an industrial environment that was, at least in their own judgment, fair and safe for workers.

There was no existing group of workers to staff the first factories. Most Americans in the early nineteenth century were farmers. Men and women on farms were used to toiling from dawn to dusk, but they set their own schedules in accordance with the sun. If they had a good season, they reaped the benefits. When people left the farms to work in factories, they found themselves in a very different work situation. Factory managers, bells and whistles, and the driving pace of machines directed their actions. The work was repetitive and did not change with the seasons. Employers determined their pay. Learning to do factory jobs was only a portion of the education process in their new occupation; they were also required to conform to a way of life and labor that was foreign to them. Like the industrialists, the first factory workers had no existing work traditions or organizations to guide them. Though much hard work was accomplished in these first U.S. factories, the relations between the industrialists and the industrial workers remained somewhat experimental as each group tested the system.

Words to Know

capital:

Accumulated wealth or goods devoted to the production of other goods.

entrepreneur:

A person who organizes a new business.

factory:

A building or group of buildings in which many people work to manufacture goods, generally with laborsaving machines powered by a central source.

loom:

A frame or machine used to weave thread or yarns into cloth.

overhead expenses:

The costs of running a business not directly related to producing the goods, such as rent or heating and lighting the workspace.

shuttle:

A device that carries threads across a loom in the weaving process.

strike:

A work stoppage by employees to protest conditions or make demands of their employer.

turnover:

Employees quitting their jobs and others being hired to take their place.

wage worker:

A person who works for others for pay.

warp yarn:

The threads that run lengthwise on a loom.

waterwheel:

A wheel that rotates due to the force of moving water; the rotation of the wheel is then used to power a factory or machine.

woof:

The threads that run crosswise on a loom.

work ethic:

Abeliefinthe moralgoodofwork.

The first factory system

In the 1790s textile mechanic Samuel Slater (1768–1835) successfully mechanized the spinning, or yarn-making, process when he introduced British spinning machines to a mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island (see Chapter 1). Other businesspeople in the area soon followed his example. These New England mills are considered the first true factory systems of the United States because they mechanized spinning and organized the work processes of the unskilled wage workers.

By 1828 Slater owned three factory compounds—factories and the villages surrounding them—in the area of Dudley, Massachusetts. In his first mill Slater hired very young children between the ages of seven and twelve to work the machines, but he soon found that American farming families resisted sending their young children to work for his low wages. In his later mills Slater hired young women, entire families, and newly arrived immigrants. Slater played a personal role in his mills. Though he hired several levels of managers to oversee operations, he visited his factories regularly. He tried to instill a new work ethic, or a belief in the moral good of work, in his workers, presenting them with detailed schedules and rules about absenteeism, punctuality, and behavior toward bosses. He demanded exhausting workdays and conformity to the company's rules and in return paid very low wages. Slater's paternalistic attitude (an authoritative attitude in which someone tries to control the conduct of his or her inferiors, like a father might try to control his children) toward his employees probably annoyed some, but most historians agree that he succeeded in avoiding the poor working conditions that existed in the textile mills of England. His workers, for the most part, did not resist his rules or work schedules.

Lowell establishes the textile industry

In 1810 wealthy Boston businessman Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817) visited England's textile mills. He was impressed with British technology, particularly an automated weaving machine called the power loom (a frame or machine used to weave thread or yarn into cloth) that was not available in the United States. Lowell studied the looms, making sketches and memorizing mechanical details. Back in Massachusetts, he was able to create his own version of a working power loom with the help of a highly skilled mechanic. Then he began to study all the processes of textile production to determine how to carry out large-scale production at low cost.

To build a factory required large amounts of capital (accumulated wealth or goods devoted to the production of other goods), so in 1812 Lowell formed the Boston Manufacturing Company, also called the Boston Associates, with several wealthy businesspeople, each providing large sums of money. Two years later the company had built the water-powered mill Lowell had envisioned. For the first time in the United States, raw bales of cotton could be transformed into bolts of cloth under one roof. The production process became known as the "Waltham-Lowell System." By reducing the cost of cotton cloth, Lowell's mill put out a cheaper product than other cloth makers, thus assuring the company's success.

Lowell died in 1817, but the Boston Associates went on to build a complete factory town along the powerful Merrimack River in Massachusetts, naming it Lowell in his honor. They built more mills on the Merrimack at Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire. Soon the largest waterwheel in the nation was built on the Merrimack, supplying power to a dozen large factories. A waterwheel is a wheel that rotates due to the force of moving water, and the rotation of the wheel is then used to power a factory or machine. The new textile industry prospered. In 1832, 88 of the 106 largest American corporations were textile firms. By 1836 the Boston Manufacturing Company employed six thousand workers at the Lowell mills, and by 1848, the city of Lowell itself had a population of about twenty thousand and was the largest industrial center in America. Its mills produced fifty thousand miles of cotton cloth each year.

The Lowell Machines

The Boston Associates hired the best machinists they could find to build the advanced textile machinery that filled the company's four-story brick mills in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Lowell, Massachusetts. Waterwheels powered the mills from the basement, with belts running up to all floors to run the machines. Cotton, delivered to the mill in bales, traveled through the entire building, going through a different part of the manufacturing process in each room until exiting as finished cloth. The first stop for the cotton bales was just outside the mill at the cottonpicking machines, which opened the bales and removed foreign matter from the cotton. The cotton fiber was then sent along to the first floor carding machines, which combed the fibers and gathered them into a loose rope of strands called a sliver. The sliver passed through two more machines to be made into a more uniform strand called a roving. The roving then went to the second floor spinning machines to be drawn out into yarn. After spinning, the warp yarn (the threads that run lengthwise on a loom) was further processed and then closely bound on a spool.

Next the yarn went up to the third floor for weaving, a process in which the crosswise, or woof, threads were interwoven with warp threads on a loom to make cloth. The operator first set up the power loom with the warp yarn, which was mounted on a beam. Each piece of yarn was then drawn through a harness, which raised and lowered the warp threads on the loom, and onto a front roller. Then the filling yarn was mounted on shuttles (devices that carry threads across a loom in the weaving process) on the loom. After being set up the looms worked automatically. Hammers knocked the shuttle across the warp threads at a rate of about one hundred times per minute, while a movable frame called a reed separated the warp threads passed back and forth across the loom, beating strands of filling cloth into the woven material. The tubes holding the warp threads automatically unwound, releasing more thread to be woven, and the beams holding the woven cloth wound it into rolls.

The machines in the Lowell textile mills only made one kind of cloth and they were easy to operate without much training. The operators fed the threads into the machine and then allowed it to do the work, stopping the process only if threads broke or there was a malfunction. It was not easy to be a mill worker, though. In order for the total mill operation to run smoothly, all the machines had to be operating at the same time and at a steady speed. Factory work allowed for little independent action. Hours were long and the work was repetitive.

The Lowell girls

Lowell found an ideal workforce for his mills—the unmarried daughters of New England farm families. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, many young women were eager to work in the mills, viewing it as a chance to be independent or to provide income for their families. The "Lowell girls," as they were called, usually ranged in age from about sixteen to thirty. Most worked two or three years at the mill before returning home to marry and start a family. By 1831 women made up almost forty thousand of the fifty-eight thousand factory workers in the textile industry.

The women who operated the machines in the Lowell mills earned $2.40 to $3.20 a week plus room and board. The pay was more than double that of domestic servants and seamstresses, the two most common occupations for working women. Still, it was only one-half to one-third the wages paid to men for similar work. The Boston Associates tried to attract the young women to work for them by providing decent work and living conditions. They built factories that were clean and well lit. Understanding that single women living on their own feared for their safety and avoided circumstances that would stain their reputations, they established the country's first planned industrial communities, setting up rows of boardinghouses near the factories for their workers. The Associates paid responsible older women to run these boardinghouses and to enforce strict discipline on the residents, imposing curfews, requiring church attendance, and demanding chaperones for male visitors.

Work routines were strict at Lowell, with a twelve- to fourteen-hour day starting at seven in the morning and only a half-hour lunch break at midday. Factory bells announced times for leaving and entering the plant, and the employees were fined for lateness as well as breaking other rules. The work did not demand great physical strength, but it did require constant attention. In winter work began before sunup and lasted into the darkness, when smoky whale-oil lamps illuminated the interior of the factories. Because cotton thread breaks more readily in dry air, overseers sealed windows shut and sprayed water in the air to keep the humidity high, frequently creating an uncomfortable working environment.

The Lowell Offering

So many of the young women who worked at the Lowell mills wrote memoirs, letters, and stories about their experiences that readers today know more about them than numerous other historical groups. Many of the "Lowell girls," as the women who worked in the Lowell mills were called, were eager to experience independence from family for the first, and perhaps the only, time in their lives and they made the most of their time away from their rural homes. Though they had almost no free time, as work consumed up to fourteen hours of each day, it was common for young mill operators to spend their evening hours participating in reading groups, attending night school, going to lectures, or just reading on their own.

In October 1840 some of the women from the mills got together to produce and publish a sixteen-page journal called the Lowell Offering, the nation's first journal to be written solely by women. The Offering, which sold for about six cents a copy, published poems, articles, and stories contributed by mill women. In all, twenty-eight volumes of the journal were published, and it was hailed worldwide, even receiving praise from English novelist Charles Dickens (1812–1870), who had been impressed by it on a visit to the mills.

In the 1840s tensions mounted between the management and workers of the Lowell mills. The workers stopped reading the Offering. They believed the journal was serving the company and not its workers, since it would not publish articles about the worsening working conditions at the mills. The paper soon closed down.

Workers rebel

The success of the Lowell mills encouraged other industrialists. Soon many new textile mills were producing cloth, and by the 1830s the supply of cloth on the market had become greater than the demand for it. Though profits were down, the Boston Associates greatly increased operations between 1836 and 1847 in an effort to cut costs. The cost reductions were made at the expense of the workers, who were forced to tend more looms and spindles at once and to operate them at a faster speed. To reduce expensive turnover (employees quitting and others being hired to take their place) caused by the demanding new workload, workers were required to sign yearlong labor contracts. While these changes increased productivity dramatically, wages did not increase. In fact, in 1836, with profits down, the Lowell managers actually reduced workers' wages and raised their boarding fees. Two thousand women walked off their jobs in protest. The company fired the leaders of the strike (work stoppage by employees to protest conditions or make demands of their employer) but called off the pay reductions.

In 1837 the workers established the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) and petitioned the Massachusetts state legislature to limit the workday to ten hours. No action was taken in response to their protest, but it signaled the end of the young women's workforce at the mills. The Boston Associates soon started to replace them with poor immigrants who were willing to tolerate harsher conditions and lower pay. By 1860 one-half of Lowell's mill workers were impoverished Irish immigrants and Francis Cabot Lowell's early experiments with making a kinder and nobler industrial society were quickly fading from memory. (For more information on immigrant labor, see Chapter 5.)

The ready-made clothing industry

In the Northeast at the turn of the nineteenth century the time-consuming process of making clothing was often divided between a tailor's shop, which provided seamstresses with precut pieces of cloth, and the seamstresses, who stitched the pieces together in their homes for a very low price for each finished piece. In an 1867 magazine article journalist Sarah Hale (1822–1879), as quoted by Joan Perkins in History Today, estimated that "to make an average shirt by hand required 20,620 stitches; at a rate of thirty-five stitches a minute, a competent seamstress could complete a shirt in ten to fourteen hours." Most home seamstresses were married women with children who were supplementing their husbands' income, but sewing was also a common occupation for widows, unmarried daughters, and elderly women. Seamstresses working at home made so little money that many were forced to work long hours six or seven days a week. Clothing industrialists were happy to exploit this labor source, which provided service at low cost with no overhead expenses (those costs of running a business not directly related to producing the goods, such as rent or heating and lighting the workspace).

The garment industry began its shift from custom tailor shops to ready-made clothing stores in 1831, when prominent New York businessman George Opdyke (1805–1880) established a clothing store in New Orleans, where southern plantation owners were eager to purchase ready-made clothing for their large households, particularly for the slaves. Opdyke could not keep up with the demand for his inexpensive cotton clothing, so he went back to New York and established what is considered the first ready-made garment factory, in order to ensure a steady supply of goods. Soon other entrepreneurs, or people who organize new businesses, in New York established ready-made clothing factories, though many also continued to employ seamstresses who worked at home as well. The new garment factories employed young, unmarried women—sometimes as many as several hundred. At first, all work in the factories was done by hand.

In the 1850s the invention of the sewing machine greatly reduced the amount of work involved in sewing garments. Sarah Hale estimated that a seamstress with a machine could sew three thousand stitches per minute and complete a shirt in about an hour. The labor reduction did not mean that seam-stresses worked any less, however. In the garment factories of New York, they were carefully monitored in relentless work schedules, producing many garments in their workday. Since one person could produce many times the number of garments, labor costs dropped at a great rate, bringing the price of ready-made clothes down with them. The value of the American ready-made clothing industry, on the other hand, increased from $40 million in 1850 to over $70 million in 1860. Still, most sewing continued to be done by local tailors and seamstresses. This would change during the American Civil War (1861–65; a war between the Union [the North], who were opposed to slavery, and the Confederacy [the South], who were in favor of slavery).

The Sewing Machine

Sometime between 1832 and 1834 inventor Walter Hunt (1786–1859) invented the first U.S. sewing machine, but he never promoted it. According to some sources he was concerned that his machine might put needy seamstresses out of work. It was not until 1846 that inventor Elias Howe (1819–1867) patented (secured a legal document from the government granting exclusive authority to an inventor for making, using, and selling an invention) a sewing machine. However, Howe's design was not very practical and by that time there were many competitors already in the field who could make a better machine. In 1850 Isaac M. Singer (1811–1875) began to market the first practical sewing machine in the United States. Singer and his company perfected the machine and went on to develop mass marketing techniques for its sale. Sewing machines were sold by an aggressive force of nearly three thousand salesmen for use in homes and factories in the Northeast. The industry was producing some 111,000 sewing machines annually by 1860. In time, the garment shops began to demand that seamstresses who worked at home purchase their own sewing machines and lowered their payments for piecework accordingly. The sewing machine had a tremendous impact on the way that clothing and shoes were produced.

The shoe and boot industry

Prior to the nineteenth century, shoes and boots were made in farmers' homes or by a traveling shoemaker. These shoes were unlike the shoes we know today. There were no standard sizes and there was no left or right shoe. Though handmade to order and finely crafted, the shoes had to be worn a long time before they became more flexible and comfortable. They were also very expensive.

Jan Ernst Matzeliger and the Lasting Machine

By the mid-nineteenth century, machines had been invented that could cut, sew, and tack (fasten) shoes, but the "lasting" process was the final one to be mechanized in shoe factories. In lasting a shoe, its leather uppers are stretched over the last, a foot-shaped model. After the leather is correctly lasted, it is sewn to the inner sole. The labor required in the lasting process slowed production and added significantly to the cost of a shoe. One day, in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, a young Dutch-African American worker named Jan Ernst Matzeliger (1852–1889) overheard coworkers claim that no machine could ever last shoes as well as humans. Matzeliger had apprenticed in his father's machine shop and had also worked in a shoe factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An avid machinist and inventor, he took these words as a challenge.

Matzeliger spent his free time designing a lasting machine. By the fall of 1880, he found financial backers and began to build a machine. After about five more years of development, Matzeliger had a model appropriate for factory testing. It could last the leather, arrange it over the sole, and drive in the nails, finishing the shoe in about one minute. Before Matzeliger's lasting machine, a worker of average skill could last about thirty-five to fifty shoes per day. With adjustments, Matzeliger's machine could make between 150 to 700 pairs a day, depending on the leather's quality. Matzeliger's invention cut the cost of shoes in half.

Around the turn of the century, merchants in the Northeast began to organize the shoemaking process into a system like that of ready-made clothing. Precut parts of shoes were sent from central shops out to farmers who then put together the finished shoes for a set fee per piece. These farmers had learned the shoemaking trade as apprentices and worked at it part time, usually in the slow seasons on the farm, to supplement their income. They usually had small shoemaking shops called "ten-footers" (denoting the size of the shop) on their farms, and if there was enough business they trained assistants to help them. In the early decades of the nineteenth century the demand for manufactured shoes grew. With enough work to sustain them year-round, some rural shoemakers in the Northeast moved into town to work in the central shoe shops. The basic work process and tools for making shoes did not change.

The shoe industry expanded around 1845, when machines replaced hand tools for pounding sole leather into dense and long-lasting material. Soon the sewing machine was adapted to shoemaking. Enterprising shoe manufacturers also invented important marketing devices, such as standardizing shoe sizes and creating differently shaped shoes for the right and left feet. In the new shoe factories, some tasks required little training while others demanded specialists; the pay scales reflected the skill level of the worker. The owners of the factories hired professional managers. Some were paid to keep the productivity level of the other employees high through strict discipline. Others oversaw the operation, upkeep, and new design of machines.

In 1860 about one hundred million shoes were manufactured annually in the United States, with about 123,000 people working in the industry, mainly in New England and Philadelphia. Lynn, Massachusetts, the "Shoe City," was a major center of the shoemaking industry.

The factory workers in Lynn had watched as profits soared while their wages remained the same. Barely able to make a living and receiving no indication that their employers would begin to pay fair wages, they joined forces in a labor struggle against the factory owners and managers. In February 1860 shoemakers in Lynn walked off their jobs, starting a massive strike that eventually spread over a wide area, including factories in New Hampshire and Maine. By some estimates as many as seventeen thousand to twenty thousand men and women workers participated in the strike. The work stoppage cost their employers dearly, and the strikers eventually won the wage increase they demanded.

The Lynn strike was the largest labor movement in the United States before the Civil War and a sign of times to come in relations between industrialists and industrial workers. The protective care of the early industrialists had proved insufficient when the economy slumped or there were pressures in the market. The workers, though often powerless to accomplish change individually, had proved their strength when united.

For More Information

Books

Dublin, Thomas. "Factory Employment as Female Empowerment." In The Industrial Revolution in America. Edited by Gary J. Kornblith. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, pp. 53-62.

Faler, Paul. Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780–1860. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981.

Hindle, Brooke, and Steven Lubar. Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790–1860. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986.

McCormick, Anita Louise. The Industrial Revolution in American History. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1998.

Prude, Jonathan. "Social Conflict in the Early Mills." In The Industrial Revolution in America. Edited by Gary J. Kornblith. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Web Sites

Lubar, Steven. "Managerial Structure and Technological Style: The Lowell Mills, 1821–1880." Business and Economic History Online. Vol. 13, 1984. http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHprint/toc131984.html (accessed on June 30, 2005).

"Shoes of the 19th Century." http://people.deas.harvard.edu/∼jones/mckay/history.html (accessed on June 30, 2005).