Cannelton Cotton Mill
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Cannelton Cotton Mills
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Mill in 2007, after adaptive restoration
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| Location | Cannelton, IN, United States |
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| Coordinates | 37°54′40.72″N 86°44′44.29″W / 37.9113111°N 86.7456361°WCoordinates: 37°54′40.72″N 86°44′44.29″W / 37.9113111°N 86.7456361°W |
| Built | 1849 |
| Architect | Tefft,Thomas A.; McGregor,Alexander |
| Architectural style | Romanesque, Other |
| NRHP Reference # | 75000011 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | August 22, 1975 |
| Designated NHL | July 17, 1991 |
Cannelton Cotton Mill, also known as Indiana Cotton Mill, is a National Historic Landmark of the United States located in Cannelton, Indiana, United States.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1991.
Construction of the Cannelton Cotton Mill began in 1849 and was completed in 1851. Designed by Rhode Island architect Thomas Alexander Tefft and built of sandstone, the mill was once the largest industrial building in the United States west of the Allegheny Mountains. It initially employed about 400 workers, mostly women and girls, and annually produced more than 200,000 pounds of cotton batting and four million yards of cotton sheeting.Of 309 workers employed there in 1890, only 78 were men. As late as 1900, the mill employed 35 girls and 19 boys under the age of 18.
The driving force behind the mill's construction was Hamilton Smith (1804–1875), a prominent attorney from Louisville, Kentucky. Smith's vision was to create a western milling center to rival Lowell, Massachusetts, but using steam-powered machinery fired by locally produced coal instead of the hydropower that ran the Lowell mills. The task proved too difficult for Smith and his associates, one of whom was Salmon P. Chase, later United States Secretary of the Treasury and Chief Justice of the United States, who became Smith's friend when both were students at Dartmouth College. Another was Indiana federal judge Elisha Mills Huntington. In 1851, control of the mill passed to brothers Dwight Newcomb (1820–1892) and Horatio Dalton Newcomb (1809–1874) who operated it successfully.
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