Sam Patch swung his hat and leapt off the cliff, cutting through the mist towards the seething whirlpool below. A roar rose up from the massive crowd of over 8,000 people. The outcome of this feat – at High Falls in upstate New York – would send reverberations across the nation.
Sam Patch's jumping career began several decades earlier at Slater Mill in Pawtucket. From the age of seven, Patch worked in the mill, scuttling between looms, clearing bobbins of cotton, and replacing them with empty ones. Eventually, he was promoted to a coveted weaving position. He toiled for fourteen hours a day, six days a week, starting at five in the morning. In the summer the mill was hot and humid, and during lunch breaks Patch would join other boys in jumping off the mill dam or nearby bridges into the cool tidal pool at the foot of the Pawtucket Falls. Soon this leisurely activity turned into a competition, with each boy jumping from higher and higher-still factory windows.
In 1824, mill owners demanded that workers accept steep wage cuts and a shortened lunch break. Patch, along with his fellow workers, protested against these unfair practices. Continuing conflict with mill management may have been one factor that precipitated Patch's subsequent move to Paterson, New Jersey, where he found work at another mill. Upon hearing that a bridge was to be built over the Passaic Falls, Patch declared that – once built – he would jump from it. On September 30, 1827, he jumped as promised from Clinton Bridge, drawing a large, incredulous crowd. The press went wild, dubbing him the “New Jersey Jumper” and launching his career as a daredevil stuntman.
Patch's career hit a high point in October of 1829, when, as part of his east coast “Jumping Tour” he became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls. Waving to crowds assembled on both the American and Canadian sides of the Niagara River, he kissed the American flag before hurling himself one hundred and thirty feet down into the churning river.
One month later, Patch found himself poised above High Falls in upstate New York. However, this leap went terribly wrong.
Patch's body dropped like an arrow, when suddenly his legs separated and set his body spinning. As he struck the water, a terrible thwack echoed through the air. Audience members held their breath – one minute – two minutes – three minutes – but there was no sign of the daredevil. Rumors rippled through the crowd: could he be hiding in a cave at the base of the falls, poised for a triumphant reappearance? It took four months to find his corpse, frozen in a block of ice six miles downstream.
Sam Patch lived on in the American imagination as hero to a budding proletariat culture: democratic, hard-drinking, sports-obsessed, and loving of melodrama. Amidst a rapidly changing social structure, Patch's trademark phrase – "Some things can be done as well as others” – hinted at what we now call the American dream: a belief that human ingenuity can generate endless, perhaps even extravagant, possibilities.
]]>Despite the rain, a troupe of bicyclists and mustached men costumed as knights, clowns, pages, and a prince paraded through the streets of Pawtucket. Thousands of people from Rhode Island and the adjoining states thronged the streets. For a week, all of Pawtucket celebrated one hundred years of cotton production with lavish decorations, elaborate parades, and both horseback and bicycle races. One might wonder why bicycles featured so prominently at a festival of cotton, but in Pawtucket, the two have had a long and interconnected history.
Slater Mill, which gained early fame as the first cotton spinning mill in the United States, changed hands many times over the course of the nineteenth century. By 1865, it was owned by the Spencer family of Pawtucket.
Around this time, velocipedes, commonly called “boneshakers” for their rough effect on riders’ bodies, were gaining popularity. These early bicycles, made entirely of wood, were eventually enhanced by the introduction of lightweight metal frames and air-filled tires. These improvements in safety and comfort brought about the American bicycling craze of the 1890s.
Anticipating this fad, Henry L. Spencer opened a bicycle shop on his father’s property in downtown Pawtucket – in a structure adjoining the old Slater Mill building. Spencer did a booming trade, becoming the second proprietor of bicycles within the state. As profits expanded and interest in bicycling increased, he transformed the third floor of Slater Mill into a riding rink and bicycling school where customers could practice the art of riding bicycles in a supervised setting.
Residents of Pawtucket were proud of their unique and varied industrial heritage. Henry L. Spencer, alongside cotton magnates and textile industrialists, was numbered one of Pawtucket’s prominent citizens worthy of mention in an illustrated history of the city published in the 1890s. The varieties of industry undertaken at the old Slater Mill building in less than a century – from cotton spinning to bicycling – were described as the “epitome of the progress of the century.”
When Pawtucket hosted its weeklong celebration to mark its “Cotton Centenary” in 1890, it was no surprise that bicycles featured prominently in the festivities. The centenary featured many contests, including horseracing and a regatta, but the bicycle races, held on the final day of the celebration, were the most popular. Three races took place: an intensive three-mile race that drew participants from around New England, a one-mile race limited to local riders, and a half-mile boys’ race. It is likely that William F. Almy, the triumphant winner of the boys’ race that day, as well as many of the other local contestants, had learned to ride at H.L. Spencer’s Bicycle Rink, a prominent sponsor of the day’s festivities.
Outside of Pawtucket, the bicycling craze had far-reaching effects. By 1896, noted suffragist Susan B. Anthony believed that “the bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world” and a group of cyclists called the League of American Wheelmen quite literally paved the road for the automobile by lobbying for safer streets.
]]>On January 3, 1791, Ann Arnold walked into the newly founded Slater Mill and onto the pages of history as one of the first nine employees hired by the mill. She was probably about ten years old.
As the industrial revolution swept across the western world, many factories, including Slater Mill, capitalized on child labor. Pliable young children could be easily taught the skills needed to operate the mill’s spinning frames, could be paid less than adults, and were less likely to incite trouble than adult workers. Some factories hired children as young as four years old. At Slater Mill, Ann Arnold joined a workforce made up of boys and girls between the ages of seven and twelve who worked six days a week – twelve hours a day in the winter, sixteen hours a day in the summer. They spent more than twice the amount of time that today’s kids spend in school working at the mill each day.
Ann Arnold and her fellow workers picked cotton clean and worked the mill’s carding and spinning machines. The roar of the Blackstone River and hum of the water-powered machinery filled the air. Fine cotton lint coated the floor, clung to the workers' clothes, and clogged their throats. If the mill supervisor thought the children were not working hard enough, the children were fined, further reducing the small paycheck that they took home each week. The children were expected to spend Sundays, their one day of rest, at a mill-sponsored Sunday school where Brown University students provided basic schooling.
For her hard work, Ann Arnold brought home a regular salary: a luxury compared to farm life. The rest of her family toiled all day on the family farm, working just as hard as Ann did in the factory, but without the assurance of a regular paycheck.
As Slater Mill expanded, more workers were needed to run the carding and spinning equipment. Mill operators adopted the “Rhode Island System” of labor where entire families were hired to work together in the factories. Nonetheless, children remained a key source of labor. In 1830, fifty-five percent of all millworkers in Rhode Island were still children.
Long after Slater Mill closed its doors in 1895, child labor continued to be a contested issue. In the early 1900s, organizations such as the Consumer's League of Rhode Island fought to limit child labor. Early legislation restricted the number of hours that children could work and set age requirements for factory work – unscrupulous mill owners seldom enforced these rules. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act made it illegal to employ any child under the age of twelve in the United States. However, children like Ann still work in factories throughout the world today, enduring harsh conditions to support themselves and their family.
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