From cotton and bookcloth to fuel cells, films and printing media these two 150 year old mills are state-of-the-art! The Arkwright Company of Coventry, R.I. began in 1810 as a textile mill owned by James DeWolf. Two mill buildings were constructed, one of which burned down in 1851. With the construction of a new building in 1883, the company became Interlaken Inc., and was engaged primarily in the manufacture of cloth for book binding. It was purchased by an English firm, Winterbottom Mills, in 1892, but continued operating under the Interlaken name. Interlaken absorbed the nearby Harris Manufacturing Company in 1900 making Interlaken the largest bookcloth manufacturing company in the world at the time. A new plant was built in 1922 to manufacture tracing cloth for architects and draftsmen; it was called Arkwright Finishing Company, and was nominally a separate business until a formal merger in 1959 as Arkwright-Interlaken, Inc. The name was changed to Arkwright Inc. in 1973. It gradually phased out its textile operations and moved to the coating of film. The last cloth was produced in 1983. Arkwright was bought by Dietec Group, headquartered in Cles, Italy in 2008. Winterbottom, the parent firm, was bought out by Venesta International in 1961. Venesta was bought out by Ozalid Group Holdings in 1972, who were in turn bought out by Oce Van Der Grinten (a Dutch firm) in 1977. Now the north complex is occupied by SIHL a global manufacturer of films, printing media, thermal papers, packaging films, etc.
Response Technologies, a material science and engineering company in West Warwick, moved to the south complex (next to the river) in early 2020, and in December, 2020 was acquired by Bell Textron to advance its fuel cell technology offerings. Meanwhile a part of the company in West Warwick was renamed Response Medical and is in the forefront of producing high quality medical masks.
]]>Although the mill across the street is gone, what you see behind the Harris Mill Lofts sign is a classic example of the evolution of a mill over 150 years, starting small and adding on and on. Between the street and the river a two-story spinning mill was built in 1813. Then Elisha Harris replaced it with a cotton factory 34’ X 50’ to make heavy cotton sheetings. Success led to expanding it to 34’ X 106’ but by the 21st Century only two derelict buildings remained there. Like many mill owners, Mr. Harris became a politician as well. As a Republican he served several terms in the Assembly before being elected Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island in 1846. The following year Harris was elected Governor of Rhode Island and served a 1-year term. After leaving the Governor’s office, he razed the 1822 mill on the south side of Main St and, in 1850, built the new and larger mill across the street that you see now. New owners made additions in 1883 and in 1911 the Weave Shed (the large brick building) was built. Following industry trends toward consolidation and specialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Harris Mill later produced book cloth for Interlaken Mills (just up the river, now Arkwright Mill), one of the nation's largest suppliers of the cloth used by the publishing industry. In 1900, Interlaken Mills purchased the Harris Mill as part of its attempt to consolidate and control all of the processes for its book cloth production operations. In 1942 a booklet put out by the mill boasted it was producing “Industrial Gray Fabric of high tensile strength, using 150 bales of cotton per week. It has 36,896 spindles, and produces 72,699 pounds, or 1,040,917 miles of yarn per week. It operates 872 Draper Automatic Looms, and weaves 319,248 yards of cloth each week…and employs 425 people.” In 1956, the Harris mill ceased textile operations and was purchased by the Victor Electric Wire and Cable Corp for light manufacturing, until that company left the state in 2000, In 2006 redevelopment plans failed and the mill went into receivership. In 2011 there was a fire in the main mill but the complex was saved. The same company that developed the Anthony Mill took over Harris Mill in 2014, and redeveloped it as an upscale 156-unit, three-story loft apartment complex called Harris Mill Lofts. For a pleasant quarter-mile walk take the Phenix-Harris Riverwalk on the old railroad bed just across the river on Lincoln St, on the left.
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