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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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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P: ¿Porque hay tantos Colombianos en una ciudad tan pequeña?

Todo comenzó en el principio de los años 60, cuando Jay Giuttari, el hijo del dueño de una fábrica en Central Falls, estudiaba en el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts, donde se hizo amistades con el hijo del dueño Colombiano de una fábrica. Después de graduarse, Jay consiguió empleo en Colombia por un tiempo. El descubrió que los tejedores locales usaban maquinaria idéntica a las de la fábrica de su padre, y que eran expertos en reparar las tejedoras viejas. Mientras tanto en Central Falls, su padre se encontraba en dificultades reemplazando a sus empleados retirados; cuyos hijos ahora se integraban a la universidad, convirtiéndose en maestros, abogados y doctores en vez de trabajar en la fábrica.

La solución de Giuttari: dar empleo a los Colombianos, y los primeros tres llegaron en un dia frio del mes de Marzo en el 1965. Lyon Fabrics cerró las puertas en los años 90, pero por más de 20 años la fábrica contrató Colombianos expertos en tejer que trabajaban las maquinarias. Ellos se convirtieron en el componente principal de la comunidad Colombiana de Central Falls.

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Strike! Strike! Strike!

It was a warm summer day in July of 1904, and tensions were running high in Fall River, Massachusetts. Earlier in the month, the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association had announced a 12.5% wage cut in all of the conglomerate’s mills. Now, after two weeks of unsuccessful negotiations between the Association and union locals, a city-wide strike was looming on the horizon. The question dominating everyone’s thoughts -- would the operatives across the border in Tiverton’s Bourne Mill join their Massachusetts colleagues in the strike or prove loyal to their employer?

Founded by a group of Fall River textile magnates in 1881, the Bourne Mill complex was constructed at the southern end of Cook’s Pond, joining several other mills already using the pond as a source of water for the mills’ steam engines. This location, however, placed the mill just over the state border into Rhode Island, resulting in the peculiar situation where several of the mill’s structures physically bridged the border. Beginning modestly with a single, five-story granite mill finished in 1883, the Bourne Mill complex eventually expanded to include more than twenty buildings of brick and granite.

Unlike all of the other mills in Fall River, Bourne Mill operated on a unique financial model where employees were involved in a profit-sharing initiative. Under this plan, if the mill made a profit and paid dividends to investors, “faithful” employees also received a biannual dividend that was calculated as a percentage of their wages. The impetus for this innovative strategy came from Jonathan Bourne -- the namesake of the mill and one of the founding investors. Bourne made his fortune in the whaling industry and was accustomed to the “lay” system used on whalers where all of the crew received a percentage of the profit at the end of a successful voyage. At Bourne Mill, this initiative was intended to both increase productivity and bolster employer-employee rapport.

As the New England textile industry began to face increasing pressure in the early twentieth century from southern mills, the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, like other northern mill conglomerates, confronted the challenge of cutting costs in order to continue turning a profit. Introducing more efficient, Northrop automatic power looms that required less supervision was one way that many mills began to adjust to the increasingly competitive environment. In 1898, Bourne Mill purchased a number of Northrop looms, allowing the mill management to reduce the number of weavers in half. Despite the mill operatives’ opposition, the Northrop looms were an inevitable part of progress in the textile industry. Two years after Bourne Mill purchased its first automatic looms, it embarked on a major expansion of its weaving facilities, constructing a new, sawtooth-roofed, granite weave shed that allowed it to double the number of Northrop looms in operation.

In addition to the introduction of the Northrop automatic looms, relationships between the mill corporations and the mill operatives were further strained by a general “slowdown” in the northern textile industry in first years of the twentieth century. In this charged environment, the 12.5% decrease in wages proposed by the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association was a flashpoint. On July 25th, over 25,000 Fall River textile workers -- and most of the employees of Tiverton’s Bourne Mill -- walked out of the mills. Despite its fifteen years of successful operation, the Bourne Mill’s profit-sharing initiative had not generated enough employee goodwill to keep the mill in operation. Like the mills across the border in Fall River, Tiverton’s Bourne Mill would remain closed for the next six months. It was not reopened until after the union locals successfully negotiated for only a 7.5% wage decrease in January of 1905.

Although the Fall River textile industry seemed to recover rapidly from the effects of the 1904 strike, this conflict prefigured the eventual end of the New England cotton manufacturing industry. Northern mills simply could not compete with southern mills’ lower labor costs, newer equipment, and better access to raw cotton. Bourne Mill continued to operate though the 1940s, with World War II providing the mill with a major production boost.

In 1953, the mill was sold to Berkshire-Hathaway, a textile conglomerate formed by Warren Buffett in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, Berkshire-Hathaway, realizing that the textile industry was abandoning New England, decided to divest themselves from the mills they had recently acquired . Bourne Mill, along with six other Berkshire-Hathaway mills, closed in 1961.

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