Founded in 2002 on the former site of Providence Steel and Iron Company (PS&I), the Steel Yard’s 3.5-acre site has become a community gathering space for people interested in creative, industrial arts. The design of this former brownfield site embraces the property’s urban industrial history while incorporating innovative approaches to sustainability.

Founded in 1822, PS&I built precision iron castings, water meters and architectural ironwork. In addition to installing pipes in numerous local buildings, such as the Pawtucket Times Building and the William Fletcher Building, PS&I produced ironworks for the iconic Library of Congress. PS&I purchased the 27 Sims Avenue site in 1902 to accommodate its growing manufacturing output. The complex expanded over the next forty years, eventually absorbing the former Providence Brewery site. PS&I was an early adopter of electrical power in the 1890s and utilized electrically driven movable cranes and hoists to manage heavy materials and parts in their fabrication and assembly process. Technological innovation in steel manufacturing resulted in increased output of large industrial products such as bridges, trusses, girders, stairs, fences, railings, and grillwork. After 179 years of operation, PS&I closed in 2001.

In 2002, two local artists and entrepreneurs purchased the property. The owners formed the nonprofit Woonasquatucket Valley Community Build, which operates as the Steel Yard, and began to actively rehabilitate the facility. The first priority was to address the site’s toxic environmental legacy. As part of their operations, PS&I sprayed lead-based paint onto steel beams. Overspray resulted in elevated lead levels in the soil. In 2007 the Steel Yard began a brownfield cleanup in compliance with the EPA, the RI DEM and the Narragansett Bay Commission, which it completed in 2007. The Steel Yard’s cleanup is a showcase for regenerative design. What was once two acres of unusable space is now a de facto public park, home to over 100 trees, a half acre of green space, and storm water-managing wetland plants.

As part of the transformation, old PS&I buildings have been converted into over 9,000 square feet of workspaces for artists, classrooms (for education and job training), and office space. The Steel Yard is the recipient of the 2010 Providence Preservation Reuse and Neighborhood Revitalization Award, the 2011 Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects and the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence.

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In 1892, Providence resident and Irish immigrant James Hanley opened the American Brewing Company. Beer was as big a business then as it is now. Hanley teamed up with Philadelphia architect and brewmaster engineer Adam C. Wagner to build a state-of-the-art, industrial-scaled brewery. The two men utilized the latest brewing techniques that required precisely controlled temperatures by way of new steam-powered De LaVergne mechanical refrigeration equipment that came on to the market in 1890. The American Brewing Company built two climate control systems for the lagering of beer, which required longer and more controlled cooling and aging than the ales and porters that had long dominated American tastes. The plant was a massive three-story building with a temperature-controlled basement level “stock house” for cooling, a process once done in underground caverns or above-ground ice houses. The American Brewing Company was one of 17 brew companies in Providence that supplied the city and surrounding region with America’s drink of choice.

But not all was smooth sailing for the grand brew masters of pre-WWI America. One big issue for the industry was the temperance movement, and in Rhode Island, John F. Collins, a man who would eventually become the mayor of Providence during the Great Depression.

In the 1890s, Collins was a fresh-faced graduate of St. Charles College in Maryland, who returned to his hometown of Providence to look for work. He took a job working at American Brewing, where he learned about the beer industry first hand. Collins left the company, going back to school, and eventually earned a law degree from Boston University.

At the same time, the temperance movement that sought to restrict the consumption of alcohol was gaining steam and targeted ethnic and working class men’s drinking as a social problem. Further, during WWI many Americans viewed beer as “German” and beer drinking as unpatriotic.

After WWI came the passage of Prohibition in 1920. At the time, John Collins took a job as special assistant to the United States Attorney for Rhode Island, prosecuting the law banning the sale of alcohol. John Collins did his job well and successfully prosecuted The American Brewing Company, which shut its doors in 1922. After the repeal of Prohibition, Collins went on to become a one-term Mayor of Providence from 1939 to 1941.

Throughout the ordeals of the temperance movement, WWI, and Prohibition, James Hanley bided his time and eventually opened another brewery in Providence in 1934, shortly after the passage of the 21st Amendment ended the unpopular prohibition against alcohol.

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In 1764, Thomas Olney established one of the first mill privileges along the Woonasquatucket River. Through the rise and fall of industries and technologies, we now have the Rising Sun Mills . The complex is named for the paper mill Olney’s son built and operated until the early 1800s when it was sold and converted into a textile mill.

Although Rhode Island’s textile industries had originally been based on cotton manufacturing, by the mid 19th century, woolen production dominated. The blockade of southern ports during the Civil War cut the supply of cotton to New England’s textile mills, pushing many local manufacturers to produce yarns and cloths from local and imported wool. Soon there was a new market for worsted wool. Coats, suits, and cloaks made of worsted cloth had a smooth texture and sheen, a look that the public took to with gusto. Worsted fabrics were also highly desirable for military uniforms. Capitalizing on the trend, Providence became the largest producer of worsted goods in the country by the 1880s.

Jumping into the growing industry, Charles Fletcher bought the property in 1875 and converted the old paper mill building into a bustling yarn factory named the Providence Worsted Mill. In the volatile boom-and-bust business climate of the late 19th century, the textile industry consolidated to stay competitive. In the mid 1890s, the Providence Worsted Mill merged with the National Woolen Company to become the American Woolen Company. As Fletcher continued to add buildings to his yarn-making complex, his business expanded to produce a range of fabrics, not only woolens. Eventually, Fletcher incorporated his woolen and cotton textile factories to form the National and Providence Worsted Mills. At its height the company employed 750 workers, produced 900,000 yards of worsted goods yearly, and became the largest single consumer of wool in the United States.

The mill closed in the 1950s, along with many New England textile factories, as the industry moved south in search of a non-unionized work force. Oversized, distinctive mill complexes like Rising Sun stood empty and underused as Providence’s once mighty industrial base of textile and machine-tool production dispersed. Fortunately, mills like Rising Sun have more recently become beacons of innovation and adaptive reuse. Rising Sun, for example, is now home to 135 residential lofts, 120,000 square feet of corporate and professional office space, and houses architects, designers, software and pharmaceutical firms, and a yoga studio.

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The Woonasquatucket River, with its generous drops and fast moving streams, was lined with textile factories in the early 19th century. Once textiles were made, they required dyeing and bleaching to be transformed into usable fabrics. In turn, a growing market emerged for vendors capable of taking in yarn or cloth for washing, bleaching, printing, or dyeing to the specifications of the customer. This process required large vats to hold chemical dyes and vast amounts of water to flush them off fibers. The Woonasquatucket became home to such textile finishing companies and the recipient of their toxic run-off.

In 1810, Dr. Benjamin Dyer of Cranston established the Providence Dye House Company on Sabin Street in downtown Providence. Dyer had an eye for innovation. He purchased rights to the differential calendering machine, a new technology that imparted different finishes to cloth by squeezing it under tension through rollers moving at varying speeds. His new machine, which could put down a more complex pattern, was eventually powered by a 20 HP “Colombian” steam engine, a small-sized high-pressure steam engine. Dyer's eye for innovation proved extremely successful for his company, reputed to be the first steam-driven textile finishing plant in the country.

In 1842, the company renamed itself the Providence Dyeing, Bleaching & Calendering Company and purchased the old Brown George Paper Mill building on the Woonasquatucket River in Olneyville. The property was strategic for a number of reasons: it came with the water privilege established first by Christopher Olney in 1773; it could take advantage of the newly completed New York Providence and Boston Railroad (finished in 1837); and it could service the cotton and worsted mills that shared the river–Lymnsville, Manton, Dyerville, Merino and Union Mills upstream–and the Valley Worsted Mill downstream. By 1850, PDB&C processed 13,500 yards of bleached goods annually and employed 200 workers. By 1880, the river corridor was the industrial centerpiece of Providence’s textile world, Olneyville buzzed with mills, and the river ran in multiple colors, reeking with foul odors.

A new sewage system installed in Providence in 1877 proved unable to mitigate the full environmental effects of manufacturing along the river. Eventually, the stench from the river drove concerned citizens to fund a study in 1905 to figure out how to clean up the river and a commission was formed. Businesses cooperated, adopting the commission’s suggestions to limit the amount of chemical waste they poured directly into the water. The efforts were somewhat successful.

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The modest sign remaining on Kinsley Avenue does not do justice to this former industrial behemoth. The contribution of machines, and the parts and tools needed to run them, can sometimes be lost on the consumer who purchases the end product.

Nicholson File is a toolmaker that today’s consumers might not appreciate or even notice. Yet if you had opened any newspaper from any region of the US at the turn of the 20th century, chances are you would see an ad for a Nicholson File. Nicholson File Company was the world’s first commercially successful manufacturer of machine-made files (rather than hand sharpened). Founded at the end of the Civil War in 1864 by William T. Nicholson, the company dominated the file market for a century. The company occupied these buildings for 90 years.

William T. Nicholson was born in Pawtucket, RI in 1834. His coming of age story reads like a journey across Providence’s major industrial giants. At age 14 he joined his father and learned the machinist’s trade (shaping, cutting and forming of metal) and at 17 worked in the manufacture of screw machines for Eagle Screw Company in Providence. In 1852 Nicholson worked for Joseph Brown (founder of Brown and Sharpe) in the manufacture of surveyors’ instruments, watches, clocks, rules and gauges for precision measurement. By 1858 he formed a partnership with Isaac Brownell to manufacture jeweler’s tools and light machinery. He took over the company in 1859.

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Nicholson got into the arms business, making parts for the Springfield rifle, the standard infantry weapon for the Union Army. At the end of the war, he started making files to be used in machine tool production. By 1886 his company manufactured 1500 files a day that ranged in size from 10 pounds to featherweight files used by watchmakers.

Ever vigilant of the market, and following a trend in American manufacturing at the time for horizontal integration, Nicholson began acquiring file manufacturers around the country in the 1890s. By 1909 the various Nicholson plants produced 120,000 files a day, employed 2,500 people, and comprised 80% of the national market for files.

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The US Rubber Company Mill has a complex history of ownership and use that stretches over 80 years. From its inception as the Joseph Banigan Rubber Company (1896-1910), through its acquisition and expansion as a regional plant of the US Rubber Company (1910-1975), to its current use as the Waterfire Arts Center and other industrial, commercial, and residential uses, this complex is representative of the reinvention and reuse of industrial buildings throughout New England.

The story of the complex begins with Joseph Banigan, Rhode Island’s first Irish-Catholic millionaire. Born in Ireland in 1839, he fled the ravages of the Irish potato famine as a child and came to Providence, where he joined nearly 16,000 of his fellow Irish immigrants. As a young man Banigan apprenticed at the Providence Rubber Company where he learned the industry. In 1889, at the age of 50, Banigan established his own company in Woonsocket. The Alice Factory, named for his mother, was the largest rubber factory in the world.

After a few years, Banigan returned to Providence to find that the city’s industrial base had changed; machine tool manufacturing now surpassed textile production. With the rechanneling of the Woonasquatucket River, the introduction of rail service along the city’s expanding industrial corridor, and the availability of process water (water that is no longer clean enough to drink but can be used in a factory), a number of new manufacturing firms moved to the banks of the river. Banigan purchased a building owned by the Saxon Worsted Company and constructed a number of new buildings to house the production of rubber shoes and boots.

While building his rubber empire, Banigan did not forget his Irish heritage and humble beginnings. He donated generously to the city’s orphanages, the Lying In Hospital (now Women & Infants Hospital), the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Home for the Aged, and St. Maria’s Home for Working Girls. After Banigan’s death, his business was sold to US Rubber Company, which shifted its production from footwear to rubber tires and rubber thread.

US Rubber doubled down on Providence in what the Providence Journal described as “one of the largest real estate transactions that has ever been recorded in this city.” The company expanded, purchasing the idle ALCO buildings in 1918 and began outfitting them for the manufacture of solid and pneumatic tires. In its adaptation of pre-existing buildings for new uses, the US Rubber Company was typical of expanding manufacturers of the period.

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Prominent textile manufacturer Henry Lippitt, his wife and six children lived in this opulent Italian Renaissance Revival house, a testament to the burgeoning wealth of industrial Providence. Lippitt’s business ventures and investments proved so successful that he could afford to begin construction on the house in 1863, at height of the Civil War.

Henry Lippitt’s proclivity for the intricate processes of textile manufacturing lent itself to other areas, as well. He designed innovative systems for heating and plumbing for his new home on Hope Street that had never been used before in non-commercial buildings. Perhaps concerned that his heating system would not function as well as he imagined, Lippitt included a financial penalty in his contract with the construction company in case the heating did not work when the family took up residence in the winter of 1865.

Henry Lippitt was not the only innovator in the Lippitt family. His wife, Mary Ann (Balch) Lippitt, promoted the oralism (lip-reading) method in the education of deaf children. The Lippitt’s daughter, Jeanie, had lost her hearing at the age of four due to a bout with scarlet fever. Mary Ann Lippitt advocated high-quality education not only for Jeanie but for deaf children across the state: she founded the Rhode Island School for the Deaf, still in operation today.

The Lippitt House remained in the family for 114 years. Preserve Rhode Island now operates this National Historic Landmark as a museum.

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Rhode Island is perhaps inordinately proud of its superlatives and firsts: first to establish religious freedom, first to rebel against the British crown, longest hold-out before ratifying the newly minted Constitution.  And, in the 20th century, Rhode Island grabbed the title of longest workers’ strike in the US. Brown and Sharpe, once headquartered here, holds that dubious honor. The strike began in 1981 and lasted through the late 1990s. The strike is only one of many significant moments in the storied history of Brown and Sharpe, which began operations in 1833 on South Main Street in Providence.

Joseph Brown, clockmaker and mechanical designer joined forces with savvy businessman Lucian Sharpe, and the wildly successful Brown and Sharpe company took off, revolutionizing the machine-tool industry. Manufacturing everything from the Wilcox and Gibbs game-changing sewing machine to the machine that produced Shredded Wheat cereal to the universal grinding machine that created an effortless spin of a car’s wheels, Brown and Sharpe had an immeasurable impact on the daily lives of Americans for two centuries.

Gorham Manufacturing Company, which also formerly operated in this area, had an equally transformative influence on Rhode Island and beyond. A behemoth in the world of silver manufacturing, Gorham produced high-quality goods, including flatware, dishware, decorative objects, and statues in both silver and bronze, beginning in 1831 and continuing to today.

In addition to Brown and Sharpe and Gorham Manufacturing Company, the buildings along Steeple Street are the former homes to other sites of industry and innovation: a jewelry factory and the restaurant Al Forno, which invented wood-grilled pizza.

These buildings are testaments to Providence as an early powerhouse of American industry. They preserve the scale and density of buildings in this commercial area before 20th century demolitions created the open spaces of the surrounding parking lots.

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This extravagantly embellished house is still called the Wedding Cake House in spite of its current desperate search for rehabilitation. The first owner John Kendrick was an inventor whose American Supply Company dominated the global market in loom and reed harnesses, a crucial element of textile mill power looms. The c. 1867 mansion attributed to Broadway architect Perez Mason reflects the euphoric froth of new money. For a while owned by railway and button-fastener tycoon George Prentice, in 1915, the house was purchased by Italian immigrant dressmaker Anna Tirocchi. In the elegant salons of the Wedding Cake House, Anna and her sister Laura fitted Providence’s elite in their couture creations that echoed Paris fashions. At Anna’s death in 1947, everything was wrapped in tissue paper and put away. Some forty years later, RISD Museum curators were stunned as if entering a fashion time capsule when Laura’s son invited them into the house to catalog and preserve the collection.

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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. An extensive weave shed on the other side of Riverside Avenue has also been demolished. Manomet’s owner and President, William Whitman, developed or oversaw operations of a variety of textile mills throughout the East Coast including the nearby Whitman Mills.

In promotional materials for his companies, Whitman claimed an enlightened attitude toward the well-being of workers: “The health and comfort of the operatives are very carefully considered, both because these precautions are the rightful due of the working people, and because an enlightened self-interest to-day demands health and comfort as essential to the highest industrial efficiency.”

Whitman sold Manomet Mills to Delaware Rayon Company in 1928, the same year a disastrous textile workers strike took place in New Bedford. When Delaware Rayon went bankrupt in 1954, the Acushnet Process Company continued to use Manomet 1 for rayon production and used Manomet 2 for golf ball manufacture. Cliftex Corporation, a New Bedford Manufacturer of men’s suits, moved its operations to the complex in 1970.

It 2000, when Cliftex announced its plans to "permanently and immediately terminate all operations and terminate all employees,” the future of this site looked bleak. It grew worse seven years later when the New Bedford City Council approved demolition of the complex despite objections from the mayor and historic preservationists.

Through the efforts of Mayor Scott Lang and his successor Jon Mitchell, Manomet Mills were spared from demolition. Today, the buildings contain seventy-six units of mixed income senior housing. The ribbon cutting ceremony included Barbara Biliko, who once worked in the mill that she now calls home.

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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 in the city.  Built from 1939 to 1941, Bay Village consisted of twenty-two brick buildings containing 197 multifamily units with one to four bedrooms. The sprawling nature of the complex evokes the post-World War II suburban housing boom more than the tightly packed public housing “projects” that followed. In theory, early public housing provided the working poor with clean and modest housing during their inevitable rise to the middle class, and suburban-style housing provided by the government would help to ease that transition.  Bay Village replaced much older, working-class housing stock on this site, much of it dating from the whaling era. The project was supported by federal Housing and Urban Development funding as part of nationwide "slum" clearance. 115 homes and businesses were razed including Monte Pio Hall, the oldest Portuguese social club in New England, and the “Irish House,” once home to itinerant whalers and other seafarers.  When completed, Bay Village represented a step up in amenities for most of its occupants. The apartments contained indoor plumbing and more space for families accustomed to crowding into one or two rooms. There was a playground and open area for children to play. On the other hand, the construction of Bay Village destroyed an existing community, and replaced the older housing, however substandard, with far fewer units, leaving some people displaced.  Bay Village foreshadowed the destructive urban renewal projects in New Bedford during the 1960s and 70s. The New Bedford Redevelopment Authority demolished entire neighborhoods to create a waterfront industrial area to service the fishing industry and to build a highway link to Interstate 195. This highway, Route 18, eventually connected the declining industrial areas of the north and south ends of the city, passing close by Bay Village. Many longtime New Bedford residents remain bitter over the loss of 203 homes and 113 businesses, many of them historic. Route 18 created a literal divide in the city, cutting off the waterfront from the rest of the city.  Bay Village provided the means for many people to move from substandard, often dangerous housing to safe and affordable homes that are still in use—and still being improved—more than seventy-five years later. Urban renewal helped the fishing industry to grow into the largest in the country. The destruction of much of New Bedford’s historic buildings spurred the creation of a vibrant preservation movement that recalled the glory days of New Bedford whaling. In recent years, the city has taken steps to reconnect the historic downtown areas of New Bedford with the working waterfront. However, some scars will always remain. 

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Thomas Tew gained such renown for his exploits from 1692 until 1695 that he was nicknamed the Rhode Island Pirate. Tew, a privateer from Newport who turned to piracy, led two major voyages, and accrued more treasure than he could spend before he met a violent death. Due to his colorful role in the city’s history, the Newport Distilling Company named their first product after him--Thomas Tew Rum. Tew’s namesake is not the first rum to be made in these parts. Before the nineteenth century, Newport was the “rum capital of the world.” Today’s rum distillers use a process similar to that employed in the eighteenth century, mixing blackstrap molasses with local water and fermenting it in tanks using yeast from the adjacent brewery. This process yields a liquid called a “wash” that is then distilled twice. The resulting spirit is aged for several years in oak barrels before water is added to lower the proof. Finally, the rum is individually bottled, corked, and sealed with wax. Rum played a central role in “the triangle trade,” a term used to describe the selling of rum, sugar, goods, and enslaved Africans among the nations of Europe, Western Africa, the Caribbean, and the Eastern United States. Rum-making and the triangle trade historically provided much of Newport’s wealth, and depended on the labor and selling of enslaved Africans and African Americans whose contributions are too often ignored. In addition, African Americans contributed a great deal to the culinary heritage of the Ocean State, such as the oysters and other foods offered by restaurateur George T. Downing at the Sea Girt Hotel in Newport, another stop on this tour and on the Rhode Island Black Heritage Tour. Today, visitors to the Newport Distilling Company can go on free tours of the facility, also home to Newport Storm Brewery, and reflect on the shifting social and political climates of the past three centuries that have led to the revival of this once-ubiquitous spirit.

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Is it a stretch to see Benefit Street as a sweatshop for girls of the cultural elite? Probably; but it is interesting to note that in the years that Mary Balch’s School was teaching its young pupils the art of needlepoint, a young girl named Betsey Metcalf started Day’s Academy in Providence, teaching girls to braid straw hats that resembled the straw bonnets then in vogue in England from patterns she developed. When asked why she did not patent her technique, Metcalf replied that she did not want her name to be sent to Congress; her contemporary, Mary Kies, who lived in Connecticut, did not suffer this qualm and applied for and won a patent to protect her method of braiding straw into bonnets in 1809.

Betsey married Obed Baker in 1807 and moved to Westwood, Massachusetts. She continued to teach women to braid straw bonnets at the local Baptist and Unitarian Churches so they could raise funds for causes such as relief during the Irish Potato Famine. She and her husband were anti-slavery activists and may have helped slaves escape to the North through the Underground Railroad.

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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.

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In the 1780s, a visitor traveling through the Blackstone River Valley might have smelled the rich aroma of roasting cacao beans wafting from a small wooden building as they passed through the hamlet of Central Falls. Americans consumed chocolate products with a passion in the late eighteenth century, and for nearly two decades, Central Falls was a center of chocolate production, earning itself the title of “Chocolateville.”

Chocolateville’s namesake mill opened in 1782, operated by confectioner William Wheat. Wheat, who had previously established a chocolate-making business in Providence, moved to Central Falls to take advantage of the power provided by the Blackstone River. His chocolate mill was one of America’s earliest water-powered chocolate manufacturing facilities.

Within the mill, imported cacao beans were roasted and ground into a chocolate slurry, with plenty of sugar and spice added for taste, before being shaped into small blocks. Don’t think of a delicious chocolate bar when you imagine these blocks – even after processing, the chocolate of this era was chalky and gritty. Most people purchased chocolate to use in baking or in concocting the fashionable beverage of “drinking chocolate.”

“Drinking chocolate” or “hot chocolate” became enormously popular during the late 1700s; Thomas Jefferson even predicted that it would overtake tea and coffee in usage. In 1773 alone, over 320 tons of cacao beans were imported into the American colonies. By this period hot chocolate was affordable to nearly everyone and was frequently served in coffee houses, where colonists would gather to talk about politics and the news of the day. When colonists boycotted tea during the American Revolution, hot chocolate was favored as an alternative drink.

Chocolate was also sought for its supposed medicinal powers. Thought to aid everything from the stomach to the brain, people used chocolate as a home remedy for illness. At least one doctor in the period even prescribed chocolate with a biscuit as part of one’s preparation for a smallpox inoculation.

Chocolate production connected the small community of Central Falls with the wider Atlantic world. Caribbean and South American slave plantations provided William Wheat, and other New England chocolate manufacturers, with cacao beans. Once processed, Wheat found a ready market for his chocolate in the bustling port cities of Providence and Newport. It’s even thought that chocolate from Wheat’s mill may have fed European soldiers fighting in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars – a far cry from the waters of the Blackstone.

However, Chocolateville didn’t last. The chocolate mill changed ownership in 1784, and as economic tides shifted, cotton production soared in the region – surely a blow to the area’s chocolate aficionados. Following a major flood in the early 1800s, the empty and dilapidated building became known to locals as “the Quail’s Trap.” By around 1834, all traces of the mill that gave “Chocolateville” its name were gone. In recent years, Central Falls has reclaimed its identity and nickname, opening the Chocolate Mill Overlook Park. Visitors can imagine the smell of chocolate drifting over the park, linking the area to its tastiest product.

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In 1980, up to $1.5 million worth of silver flowed from Providence factories into the Narragansett Bay, giving new meaning to the phrase “a waste of money.” Much of this silver originated from the electroplating firms located in the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park on the north shore of Mashapaug Pond.

Discovered in the 1800s, electroplating revolutionized jewelry production by using electricity to apply thin layers of gold or silver to items cast from other, cheaper metals. By 1880, Rhode Island was home to more jewelry businesses than any other state. Providence became  known as the costume jewelry capital of the world, its downtown called the jewelry district. A century later, however, the center of the jewelry industry had relocated three miles to the southeast, to the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park next to Mashapaug Pond.

Looking at its current arrangement of warehouses and parking lots, it may be hard to imagine the industrial park as a space that almost 500 families called home. Children played games in the road, buzzed around on homemade scooters, and snuck peaches and plums from their neighbors’ trees. Former resident Ed Hooks recalls the paper route that took him through a grid of streets, some paved and some not, whose names are now only found on historical maps. As a child, Ed swam in Mashapaug Pond, played with frogs, and caught crawfish in the brook that flowed toward Niantic Avenue. Some neighbors, he remembers, preferred the brook’s snapping turtles, and used them for soup.

When the Providence Redevelopment Authority bought this 117-acre parcel in 1961, it displaced those residents and adapted the land for commercial use. New sewer lines and broader, flatter roadways made the space an attractive location for factories involved in electrotyping and electroplating – casting and coating objects in metal. These operations involved dangerous ammonias, cyanides, and toxic heavy metals that flowed, like the silver, into Providence’s waterways.

Today, the quiet expanse of the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park betrays its current economic and environmental challenges. In 2010, the complex had only 33 tenants. However unremarkable it may appear, though, the industrial park continues to have an important impact on the local environment. Its wide paved roads, flat-roofed buildings, and sparse vegetation create a “heat island” with higher daytime air temperatures than other areas of Providence. The absence of trees also contributes to stormwater runoff. As rainwater hits asphalt surfaces, it mixes with road salt, animal waste, fertilizers, car fluids, and other pollutants. Without pervious surfaces or plants to filter this toxic water, it flows unobstructed until it reaches a storm drain or larger body of water. This pollutes the park’s immediate neighbor, Mashapaug Pond, and the broader watershed, which includes the ponds in Roger Williams Park and Narragansett Bay. The cost of cleaning these toxic chemicals from the watershed greatly exceeds $1.5 million in silver.

Happily, several organizations are actively working to reduce the amount of pollutants flowing through Mashapaug Pond’s watershed by educating citizens and commercial tenants about stormwater runoff, repaving hard surfaces with crushed stone or permeable concrete, planting trees and other native plants, and redirecting water into rain barrels and rain gardens. Several of these initiatives are planned for the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park.

Discussion Questions

Besides financial losses, what different “costs” have there been to doing business in the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park?

What steps could be taken to inform the businesses currently located in the industrial park about their impact on Rhode Island’s waterways?

Where are places that jewelry is manufactured today?

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Rhode Island has a long history of industrial manufacturing. Slater Mill, on the banks of the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is considered  the “birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.” By the early 1800s, that fervor for manufacturing had spread, and companies, like the Gorham Manufacturing Company, appeared throughout the state. Known for its world-class products in bronze and silver, Gorham left behind a toxic legacy at the site where its Mashapaug Pond factory operated for nearly 100 years.

Today, the Gorham Manufacturing Company is infamous in the Reservoir Triangle neighborhood for polluting the water, soil, and air of the community. For all of the nineteenth century, and most of the twentieth century, there were few restrictions on companies’ use of potentially harmful materials.  At Gorham, workers regularly used cleaners with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), solvents, heavy metals such as lead, and other contaminants. With little thought to the environmental impact, these pollutants leached into the surrounding soil and water.

By the 1960s, industrial manufacturing had largely left Rhode Island and other states, and Americans were left to deal with the waste that factories had produced. The Environmental  Protection Agency (EPA), established in 1970, set guidelines to control industrial dumping and provided ways to force polluters to clean up contaminated sites. Two years later, the Clean Water Act of 1972, set water quality standards and prohibited the dumping industrial waste directly into waterways.

Textron, Inc., bought Gorham’s assets shortly before the passage of the Clean Water Act. In doing so they became responsible for the cleanup of the Gorham site, including Mashapaug Cove and the ground water. With help from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, Textron has funded the effort to make the Gorham site safe for human use. It is a long process that is taking many years. Thus far, Textron has completed the ground remediation of the area that is now home to Alvarez High School and the Mashapaug Commons shopping center. Air filtration systems have also been added to both the school, shopping center, and nearby homes on Adelaide Avenue, ensuring the safety of local residents.

Further cleanup work includes covering contaminated soil with clean infill, dredging the Gorham “cove” of Mashapaug Pond to remove toxic sediment, and undertaking groundwater remediation throughout the area. Although it has been a slow process, this parcel will soon be safe for human recreational use. Eventually, the polluted land will hold a new neighborhood park and athletic fields for Alvarez High School.

Today, high levels of heavy metals, VOCs, PAHs, and dioxin are still found in the sediment of Mashapaug Cove. Carp, bass, and perch swim valiantly through the water, collecting chemical contaminants in their tissues. None of the fish in the pond are safe for human consumption. It is impossible to know whether these toxins are due solely to Gorham or if they have continually accumulated through storm-water runoff. Despite the extensive remediation work, Mashapaug Pond and the fish within it will remain contaminated, a legacy of the state’s industrial heritage.

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