Second Shift: New Bedford's Industrial and Immigrant Heritage

24 Locations | Curated by and edited by Ron M. Potvin

Listen closely and you might still hear the footsteps of the workers who tramped between their tenements and the textile mills. New Bedford is known mostly for its whaling past, but in the 19th century rolls of cloth overtook barrels of whale oil as the city’s primary commodity, and the city led the world in textile production.


In 1602, English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold recorded his observations of the area that would become New Bedford. By 1785, residents began to hunt local whales, “trying” their blubber into oil for use in candles, lamps, and lubrication. In 1841, Herman Melville shipped out from New Bedford on the whaler Acushnet. His experiences on the high seas became the inspiration for Moby Dick. In 1857, the city led the world in whaling with 329 ships employing 10,000 people.


In the 1840s, whaling investors began to invest their profits in textile manufacturing. Wamsutta Mills opened in 1849, and its success inspired other textile ventures between the 1870s and 1920s. New Bedford’s early mills employed experienced “operatives” from textile manufactories in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, England, Scotland, and Ireland. As mills blossomed throughout the city, immigrants from French Canada, Portugal, and elsewhere fulfilled workforce needs. In addition to men, the mills employed thousands of women and children, and sometimes entire families went to work together.


By the 1850s, widespread overfishing led to the depletion of whales, forcing ships to travel further and stay out longer to make a profit. In 1871 and 1876, shifting ice trapped the Arctic whaling fleet, and thirty-four ships from New Bedford were lost. At the same time, petroleum-based products began to capture the market for commodities once made from whale oil and spermaceti.


While whaling was slowly dying, the textile industry flourished. The influx of workers to New Bedford required housing, and mill owners erected multi-family tenement buildings, two or three stories high, charging rent to their employees. By the end of the century, three-deckers, a form of worker housing unique to the industrial northeast, dominated the streetscapes of the North and South ends of the city, where the textile mills were concentrated. Between 1910 and 1915, New Bedford’s population reached 104,000 people, of whom 84% were first or second generation immigrants. The city led the nation with sixty-seven textile mills, and in 1910 alone there were applications for building permits for 290 three-deckers.


The New England textile industry rode out many economic downturns. However, by the 1920s, mismanagement, outdated machinery, and lower wages and lower taxes in Southern states caused many New Bedford mills to close or relocate. A six-month strike in 1928 was disastrous for mill owners and workers. By 1938, only thirty mills remained in New Bedford and production had dropped from its peak by 93%. Since then, the City of New Bedford has grappled with ongoing questions about the nature of its economy, the use of massive and empty mill buildings, and housing for the working poor.


The mills are mostly silent now, but their echoes remain in brick and stone mill edifices and in the rows of triple-deckers that line the streets in the former industrial areas of New Bedford.


Forget beeswax. The prized ingredient in Samuel Rodman’s candle works was spermaceti, the waxy head matter of toothed whales, especially sperm whales. For the whales, spermaceti most likely aids in communication through echolocation, but in the candle making industry craftsmen refined it into a…
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In 1847, a building without precedent in New Bedford began to rise north of the harbor in a grassy field along the banks of the Acushnet River. The building was five stories tall, of rough-hewn local granite, and about as long as the distance between streets in the older whaling center of town.…
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With the new Wamsutta Mill rising on the banks of the Acushnet River, its proprietors tried to attract a new workforce. New Bedford’s workers hunted whales and made rope and candles, but Wamsutta needed skilled weavers, loom fixers, and managers. In addition, Wamsutta competed with established…
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In 1892, the Reverend William J. Potter referred to the Wamsutta four tenements as a "pestiferous excresence." While the company built neat rows of brick double-houses for its skilled workers close to the mills, the company also constructed dwellings for its other workers—loom operators, floor…
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“Ever Since I Can Remember, I’ve Been Working”—Alfred Benoit Alfred Benoit was one of many youths who spent their childhood laboring in the brutal, unforgiving mills of New Bedford. Born September 3, 1900, Alfred began working in 1912 as a floor sweeper but became skilled at repairing the looms…
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Before discount department stores became popular, New Bedford had Mars Bargainland. In the 1960s and 70s, the enormous high-ceilinged space contained a treasure trove of cut-price clothes, toys, and household items. A bit further inside the massive building shoppers found Food Mart, where workers…
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Built in 1903, Manomet Mills was “equipped with every improvement for the manufacture of combed yarns from the better grades of American, Egyptian, and Sea Island Cotton.” The complex eventually grew to include three buildings. Manomet 1 and 2 were connected by overhead bridges, now demolished.…
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“We went back with what we thought was a 10% cut. Once we got inside it was 20%, and in some crafts it was more than that. A weaver who was paid piece work would look at his pay and realize the size of the cut. When he went to complain the boss would tell him, ‘Look, be quiet. If you don’t want it,…
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This metal archway welcomes 100,000 attendees each year to New Bedford’s Feast of the Blessed Sacrament. It is a year-round reminder of the importance of this annual event in New Bedford’s North End. Positioned on the edge of Madeira Field, the archway also reminds us that the Feast is now a 100+…
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If it’s the first weekend in August, it’s time for “The Feast.” New Bedford’s Feast of the Blessed Sacrament is the largest Portuguese Feast in the world and attracts 100,000 visitors to its festival grounds on Madeira Field each year. Now more than 100 years old, the Feast of the Blessed…
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More than 100 years after its founding, the Feast still begins and ends at Our Lady of Immaculate Conception Church. Though in recent years the religious aspects of the Feast have taken a backseat to its many secular offerings, the Feast’s four Madeiran founders held the first event at the church…
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New Bedford was a city of smokestacks. The coal-fired boilers that powered the textile mills left a layer of gritty soot that seemed to cover everything. This legacy of industrialization is still visible on the darkened redstone exterior of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, which has served the…
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“The American holly is quite common here,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “I heard a lark sing, sweet and strong, and heard robins.” Thoreau, a naturalist and philosopher and author of Walden, was describing the rural North End estate of his friend Daniel Ricketson, which eventually became Brooklawn…
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In 1932, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that Beacon Manufacturing Company used misleading practices to violate the rights of Native American weavers. The FTC objected to Beacon’s marketing of its popular line of “Indian blankets,” which deceived the public into believing the company’s products…
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Rainbow-colored homes spring up from the street grid in New Bedford’s West End like children’s play blocks. However, underneath the colorful patina of the Temple Landing Apartments lays a dramatic history of protest, neglect, and reuse. To understand the full history of these bright new houses…
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“Bay Village First to Go Solar, Makes History Again!” shouts the enthusiastic headline on the New Bedford Housing Authority website. Accompanied by a video, the announcement about New Bedford’s oldest public housing project has an upbeat feel that is at odds with the mixed legacy of public housing…
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Listen closely and you might hear the footsteps of hundreds of mill workers who lived in tenements on the block bounded by Rivet, Potomska, Second, and First Streets. Only two remain, but there once existed a complex of ten six-tenement buildings erected by the Potomska Mills for its workers. Built…
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Shortly before nine o’clock on the morning of February 27, 1897, a 16-foot boiler at Acushnet Mills exploded. Flying debris nearly demolished a building a quarter of a mile away, and a large piece of the boiler crashed through the roof of the south end police station 700 feet away. The sound of the…
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As patrons poured into the Orpheum Theater on opening night, April 15, 1912, the celebration may have been muted by news of the sinking of the Titanic early that morning. However, these were good times for New Bedford. The city’s economy thrived on its foundation of textile production and immigrant…
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Warren Buffet’s empire started with a fit of pique. In 1964, Buffet acquired shares in a failing New Bedford textile mill known as Berkshire Hathaway. His intent was to sell the shares back to the owners and make a tidy profit. His good business sense did not fail him. The owners of the mill, the…
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William D. Howland witnessed the decline of whaling and the rise of textiles in New Bedford, and he embodied the risks inherent in both enterprises. His grandfather, George Howland, made a fortune investing in whaling, and his father, Matthew, continued to profit from whaling until devastating…
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Come in and have a slice, courtesy of William Howland and his utopian mill village. The famous Ma Raffa’s restaurant now occupies one of the worker cottages of the Howland Mill Village, an important experiment in industrial housing that occurred between 1888 and 1897. The experiment was…
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The failure of the Howland Mill Village experiment may have been the final straw for New Bedford mill owners. By the end of the 19th century, they had decided to get out of the landlord business. Along with the financial and management burden of rental properties, by the 1890s housing reformers…
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New Bedford has long been conflicted about its historical identity. The city has been, at different times, a world leader in extracting energy from whales and in using energy to produce textiles. Despite a relative lack of physical reminders of whaling, and the abundance of “monuments” to…
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Students in the 2016 Brown University course, "Shrine, House, or Home: Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm," researched and created this tour. The students were Lena Bohman, Sean Briody, Ryan Cruise, Chelsea Fernando, Marjory O'Toole, Ryan Paine, and Jeremy Wolin. Ron M. Potvin was the instructor. In 2022, Ron Potvin developed additional content, more than doubling the number of locations. Patrick Malone provided additional information and served as an advisor for this tour.

Four texts were indispensable in the research for this project: Kingston Wm. Heath, The Patina of Place: The Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial Landscape (Knoxville: U of Tennessee, 2001); Joseph D. Thomas, et al, A Picture History of New Bedford: Volume One, 1602 – 1925, and A Picture History of New Bedford: Volume Two, 1925 – 1980 (Spinner Publications, 2013 & 2016, respectively); and The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, New Bedford Theme Issue, Vol. 40, Nos. 1 & 2 (2014).

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