Forged in the Fire of Revolution: David Wilkinson and the Rise of American Industry

David Wilkinson.

In the spring of 1776, while delegates in Philadelphia argued their way towards
a Declaration, a five-year-old boy three hundred miles away sat on a bench in
his father's blacksmith shop and watched a craftsman named Eleazor Smith build
a machine.

The machine cut and bent wire for hand cards — the paddles that comb wool
straight before it is spun. So the boy was watching a machine being made, that
made a tool, that made yarn easier to produce. He would spend his life at the
first link in that chain. Seventy years later he claimed he could still draw
every part of it: "So durable are the first impressions of the mind of youth."

His name was David Wilkinson, and he was the fourth son of a prominent
Smithfield blacksmith called Oziel.

A farmer who was also a blacksmith

Oziel Wilkinson (1744–1815) came from blacksmiths and trained at least four of
his own sons in the trade. The historian Anthony J. Connors calls him a "farmer
blacksmith", and the hyphen is the point: the farm fed him, and the forge on
Mussey Brook — in what is now Lincoln, Rhode Island — is where he experimented.

He built screw presses for candleworks rendering spermaceti from sperm whales,
a skill he learned from his relative Israel Wilkinson (1711–1784), who was at
the front of that technology. And he cut nails from cold iron, a method his
second cousin Jeremiah Wilkinson (1741–1831) was among the first to use.

The timing of the cold-cutting experiments is not a coincidence. Jeremiah
and Oziel were working on it around 1775–76, when imported nails were becoming
scarce because of the quarrel with Britain. Scarcity forced colonial
production, and production forced invention. Connors puts it plainly: war with
Britain "provided the opportunity for inventive men to lend their talents to
the revolutionary cause… The war and rise of industrialization reinforced each
other." Israel and Oziel both cast iron cannon.

What a Quaker could and could not do

The Wilkinsons were Friends, and for Friends participation in war was
forbidden. The family's answer to that was a fine distinction that a family
biographer recorded of Israel: he "did not fire the cannon — he cast them… he
put no obstacles in the way of others using whatever was necessary to utterly
destroy oppression and tyranny."

Not everyone kept even that line. Several of Oziel's relatives served openly in
colonial forces, and the Cumberland Society of Friends disowned several of his
second cousins for it. The war ran through Quaker families as much as through
the colonies.

*Mussey Brook, the tributary of the Blackstone that powered the Wilkinsons'
first shop, in modern Lincoln, Rhode Island. NPS/Mello.*

Six years old, heading nails

David went to work for his father in 1777, aged six. "My father made a small
pinch press, with different sized impressions, placed on an oak log, with a
stirrup for the foot, and sat me astraddle the log, to heading nails."

He spent the whole of the Revolutionary War in that shop, and at fourteen he
built a centreless grinder — probably one of the first working examples in the
country.

Oziel, meanwhile, wanted to move. Pawtucket Falls offered a drop of over
twenty feet and with it a great deal of power, but a British force at Newport
could come up the Providence River, and he was not going to put his family in
front of it. He waited for the peace of 1783 and then moved the operation to
Pawtucket. It was the most consequential decision he made.

The machine shop in the Wilkinson Mill.

The next revolution

The Wilkinsons had long made screw presses and anchors for the Brown family's
maritime business in Providence. So when Moses Brown set out to run the first
water-powered cotton spinning machines in the country, he came to the forge
already at the falls.

Brown wanted English industrial scale in North America, and he had recruited a
young English immigrant, Samuel Slater, who had been apprenticed in a textile
mill from the age of eleven and promised he could make the machines work. Oziel
and David got them working, in December 1790. Oziel's youngest son, Smith
Wilkinson, ran the carding engine; he was ten. Without the Wilkinsons the
experiment would probably have failed. Slater married Oziel's daughter Hannah
in 1791, which turned a working arrangement into a family one.

By 1810 the Wilkinsons had put up a three-and-a-half-storey rubble stone mill
next door to Almy, Brown & Slater's cotton factory — the building known today
as Old Slater Mill. The new mill spun and eventually wove, but its machine shop
mattered more than either: under David it trained the next generation of
American machinists. When war with Britain came round again in 1812, places
like that shop are what made the industrial expansion of 1807–1820 possible.

David stayed at the front of the technology for most of his working life. He
developed a screw-cutting lathe, worked on early mechanised looms, and
experimented successfully with steam — installing an engine in the Wilkinson
Mill as auxiliary power, one of the earliest in the Americas. The mill was named
a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1977 and is now part of
the Old Slater Mill National Historic Landmark District, inside Blackstone
River Valley National Historical Park.

The Wilkinson Mill, December 2024. NPS/Mello.

What they actually did

Neither man fought in a single battle. Both spent the war making the things
that let the colonies stop buying from Britain, and then spent the peace making
the machines that let the United States stop needing to. Independence was
declared in Philadelphia; a good deal of it was made in a workshop at the
Pawtucket Falls.

Further reading

• Anthony J. Connors, *Ingenious Machinists: Two Inventive Lives from the
  American Industrial Revolution* (State University of New York Press, 2014)

Where this belongs

• Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park

Sources

Written from the National Park Service's
Forged in the Fire of Revolution,
a work of the United States government in the public domain.