The outermost layer of the spacesuits Apollo astronauts wore on the Moon was made in an old brick textile mill in Cumberland, Rhode Island. A short walk away, across the Blackstone River, is a natural ford that people crossed for nearly a thousand years. Between them lies almost the whole story of how Americans learned to move people and goods — told at the Captain Wilbur Kelly House Museum of Transportation.
The Ashton Mill and the Providence and Worcester Railroad. Credit: National Park Service.
The setting
The Kelly House, in Lincoln, Rhode Island, was once home to the manager of the Kelly Mill complex. It stands in Blackstone River State Park — about eighty acres of green space amid suburbs, beside a quiet canal towpath — at one of the six sites of Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, which tells the story of America's Industrial Revolution. For millennia, people moved themselves and their goods much the same way; those who lived through the American Revolution shipped goods much as Julius Caesar moved his legions. The past 250 years changed that.
Crossings and weirs
The river is named for William Blackstone, the first English colonizer to settle on its banks. The Nipmuc, Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples, who lived here first, called it Kittacuck or Pawtucket, among other names. With its many falls and rapids, the river was hard to navigate; its most important use was fish, especially in spring, when fish swim upriver to spawn and could be trapped in wooden weirs at narrow, shallow spots. Those spots also made good crossings. At the Martin Street Bridge, archeology shows a natural ford long in use, and Pray's Wading Place, behind the Kelly House, was another; such crossings were key links in Native trade networks across southern New England.
Roads, mills and a canal
| Late 17th century | European settlers build farms along rivers and Native trade routes |
| 1790 | Moses Brown and Samuel Slater's successful mill experiment in Pawtucket sets industry spreading through the valley; roads are improved and turnpikes built |
| Around 1815 | Investors build the Smithfield Cotton and Woolen Mill (later the Kelly Mill), with workers' housing and a gristmill, as the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812 spur textile mills |
| 1823 | Former ship's captain Wilbur Kelly buys the mill — and struggles, like its earlier owners, with high costs for moving raw materials and goods |
| 1825–1828 | The Blackstone Canal is dug, largely by hand, by hundreds of laborers, many of them Irish immigrants, with about $700,000 raised from subscribers; the park's section is finished in 1827 and the canal opens in 1828 |
| 1848 | The canal closes, just 20 years later |
Merchants had wanted the canal since the 1790s, to link Worcester, Massachusetts, with Providence, but Boston, fearing trade would bypass it, blocked the idea for three decades. When it came, two-horse teams on the towpath pulled barges about four miles an hour, taking two days for the 48-mile trip, carrying food, iron, nails, leather, cotton, paper, brick, scythes and shoes — 1,536½ tons in April 1830 alone. It was far cheaper than hauling by wagon.
A Blackstone Canal barge at Millbury, Massachusetts, in a woodcut. Credit: National Park Service.
The iron horse
Railroads soon beat the barges on tonnage, speed and cost. The Boston and Worcester opened in March 1834 and the Boston and Providence a year later, but it was the Providence and Worcester Railroad, opened in 1847, that put the canal out of business. Worcester industrialists toasted "The two Unions between Worcester and Providence – The first was weak as water, the last is strong as iron." By the mid-1800s trains made the trip in a little over an hour — about as long as it takes by car today — and the line is still running.
The highway
Automobiles let workers live farther from their jobs, leading to suburbs and sprawl, and made horse-and-carriage roads obsolete. Work on the New Deal–era Ashton Viaduct, which shadows the Kelly House, began in 1934, stalled for lack of money during the Depression and World War II, and was finished in 1945, opening Route 116, the George Washington Highway. Then came Eisenhower's interstates. "We needed them for safety, to accommodate more automobiles," said Gen. Lucius Clay, who headed interstate planning. "We needed them for defense purposes… And we needed them for the economy." Interstate 295, built in 1969, now borders the park.
To the Moon
Just south, in Cumberland, a small municipal airport once sent planes past the four-story Ashton Mill. Opened in 1869 and nearly twelve times the size of the original Kelly Mill, it made textiles for sixty years. In 1941 Owens-Corning Fiberglass bought it and converted it to fiberglass production, with a research lab on the fourth floor. There, scientists developed beta cloth, a fiberglass fabric heat-resistant to 2,500°F. Made in the mill, it formed the outermost layer of the Apollo astronauts' spacesuits, and their patches too. Materials from this mill touched the surface of the Moon.
What moves us
Most mill workers walked to work. Today, cars, planes and trains take us 10 to 1,000 miles from home with an ease no earlier generation had — at the cost of more pollution from fossil fuels, and carbon emissions that are among the largest contributors to climate change. As the United States marks 250 years of independence, the Kelly House asks how our relationship with transportation will change next.
Sources
Based on "To the Moon and Back: A Revolution in Transportation," Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
In these publicationsBlackstone River Valley National Historical Park
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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