Harris Mill

Current view of Harris Mill The main building built in 1850. Other components were added in 1883 and 1911. Source: Larry Manire Date: 2021

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 21^st 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.

Kids! Work in a mill, it’s good for you! Many mill owners sought to escape both the heavy capital investment required by the installation of new equipment and the high labor costs involved in the employment of adults. Instead, they continued to operate simple but obsolete machinery which could be tended by children. In 1824 some 2,500 children, ranging in age from seven to fourteen, worked in Rhode Island textile mills, and in 1831 cotton factories employed almost 3,475 children under twelve years of age, or three quarters of all the children reported working in American cotton mills.

The traditional Rhode Island suspicion of idleness encouraged manufacturers to hire children in the belief that work conferred positive moral, social, and economic benefits upon child, parent, and employer alike. Thus the local press defended the system with the argument that “honest labor is much better than the most romantic indolence," and even though one visitor to Slater's mill thought that tending machinery dulled the spirit, “the misery [of] an overflowing and underemployed population” was even more fearful. It was better to be overworked, asserted one editor, than “to pine in sloth, rags, and wretchedness.”

By 1840 a movement began in Rhode Island to prevent the employment of children in the mills. The movement protested the “immolation of the innocents upon the altar of greed.” But it took until 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act to significantly address child labor.