Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures

The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (S.U.M.) or Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures was a private state-sponsored corporation founded in 1791 to promote industrial development along the Passaic River in New Jersey in the United States. The company's management of the Great Falls of the Passaic River as a powersource for grist mills resulted in the growth of Paterson as one of the first industrial centers in the United States. Under the society's long-term management of the falls, the industrialization of the area passed through three great waves, centered first on cotton, then steel, and finally silk, over the course of over 150 years. The venture is considered by historians to have been a forerunner for many public–private partnerships in later decades in the United States.

The society was the brainchild of United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Tench Coxe, who convinced United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton to support the creation of a quasi-public manufacturing town. Hamilton, who had visited the Great Falls of the Passaic River in 1778, envisioned it as a planned industrial site, using the waterfall as source of mechanical power. The society was chartered by New Jersey under Hamilton's direction to exploit the falls for this planned city, which Hamilton called a "national manufactory". The enterprise was exempt from property taxes for ten years. The society founded the city of Paterson in the vicinity of the falls, naming it in honor of William Paterson, the governor of New Jersey. Hamilton commissioned civil engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant, responsible for the layout of the new capital at Washington, D.C. to design the system of canals known as raceways suppylings the power for the watermills in the new town.

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