Boston Manufacturing Company
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Boston Manufacturing Company
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Boston Manufacturing Company, Waltham, Massachusetts
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| Location | 144-190 Moody St., Waltham, Massachusetts |
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| Coordinates | 42°22′23″N 71°14′9″W / 42.37306°N 71.23583°WCoordinates: 42°22′23″N 71°14′9″W / 42.37306°N 71.23583°W |
| Built | 1813 |
| Architect | Paul Moody |
| NRHP Reference # | 77001412 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | December 22, 1977 |
| Designated NHLD | December 22, 1977 |
The Boston Manufacturing Company was a business that operated the first factory in America. It was organized in 1813 by Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, in partnership a group of investors known as The Boston Associates, for the manufacture of cotton textiles. It built the first integrated spinning and weaving factory in the world at Waltham, Massachusetts, using water power. They used plans for a power loom that he smuggled out of England as well as trade secrets from the earlier horse-powered Beverly Cotton Manufactory, of Beverly, Massachusetts, of 1788. This was the largest factory in the U.S., with a workforce of about 300. It was a very efficient, highly profitable mill that, with the aid of the Tariff of 1816, competed effectively with British textiles at a time when many smaller operations were being forced out of business. While the Rhode Island System that followed was famously employed by Samuel Slater, the Boston Associates improved upon it with the "Waltham System". The idea was successfully copied at Lowell, Massachusetts and elsewhere in New England. Many rural towns now had their own textile mills.
Since 1793, when Samuel Slater established the first water-powered successful textile spinning mill in America at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, water power had been operating machinery to process cotton fiber into yarn, which would then be outsourced to small weaving shops and private homes where it would be woven into cloth on hand-operated looms. By 1810, dozens of spinning mills dotted the New England countryside. However, cloth production was still fairly slow with this system.
While on a visit to Lancashire, England in 1810, Francis Cabot Lowell studied the workings of the successful British textile industry. He paid particular attention to the power loom, a device for which there was yet no equal in America. He knew that increased cloth production in the United States depended on such a machine. Upon his return trip to Boston in 1812, he committed the plans to memory, disguising himself as a country farmer, since the British banned export of the new technology at the time.
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