Whitinsville, Massachusetts: From Revolutionary Forge to Company Town

Memorial Day in Whitinsville, 1898. Image from the National Park Service's page.

The Whitin Machine Works in Whitinsville, Massachusetts, traces the rise and fall of American manufacturing through one family business. The Fletcher and Whitin families turned a small forge on the Mumford River into a maker of textile machinery sold around the world, and ran the village that grew up around it. The company began in the era of the American Revolution and closed in 1976, the nation's bicentennial — a history that raises questions about work, freedom and what the Revolution left behind.

A forge by the falls

The colonists who settled by a small waterfall on the Mumford River had taken the land from local Indigenous peoples for too little in return. They mostly farmed and made small implements to get by. In the early 1770s James Fletcher began making tools in a small forge there, in a place then marked on maps as Uxbridge, home to fewer than 500 people.

In the summer of 1772 a group of colonists incorporated a smaller town, Northbridge. Fletcher had just married Margaret Wood, whose father, Ezra Wood, owned rights to the falls. The couple built a home across from the water; the small colonial house still stands, at 1 Elm Place, and is one of the few 18th-century buildings left in town. James supported the family from the forge while Margaret ran the household's own production.

A letter from Northbridge residents to the Boston Committee of Correspondence. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Revolution

The Massachusetts Government Act of May 20, 1774, revoked the colony's 1691 charter, under which free men called and ran elections for their own local government, and gave governors far more power, including the right to call town meetings. In August 1774 free men in Northbridge formed a Committee of Correspondence. Colonists held meetings of their own, voted to collect weapons and refused to import or use English goods.

Even this small community sent over 100 men to the army. Fletcher served with Captain Josiah Wood, marching on the alarm of April 19, 1775, to Roxbury for nine days. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1776 and enlisted several more times, serving with Colonel Job Cushing from August to November 1777 and with Colonel Nathan Tyler's regiment in July and August 1780, including 16 days on alarm in Rhode Island. Ezra Wood was colonel of the Fourth Worcester County regiment.

Iron, cotton and a family partnership

After the war Fletcher returned to his forge. His daughter Elizabeth, known as Betsy, was born in 1777. At 16 she married Paul Whitin, from Roxbury, who had apprenticed with another local blacksmith, Jesse White, and who soon went into partnership with his father-in-law, then known in town as Colonel Fletcher, making bar iron.

They married in 1793, the same year Slater Mill, the first successful cotton-spinning mill in the United States, opened in Pawtucket, Rhode Island — a key step toward freeing the new country from dependence on British goods. When the War of 1812 stopped trade with Britain entirely, the partnership mattered more. The two men made farm tools such as hoes and scythes, and caught the day's "cotton mill fever" by opening a cotton mill. The Whitins' ten children carried on and expanded the business for decades.

Whitin Machine Works, 1879. Image from the National Park Service's page.

A tool called the Cotton Picker put the Whitins on the map and drew them into making machinery for cotton mills. In time they became leaders in making parts and machines for complex mill operations worldwide. The forge gave way to a manufacturing complex that still fills an entire block, with nearly 2 million square feet of space.

A village that bore one family's name

By the time James Fletcher died in the 1830s, the whole village was named for his son-in-law. The Whitins built their businesses and also put their name on the Memorial Town Hall, a library, a recreation center and many other buildings.

Workers gave up independence and control over their craft for relative security: steady wages and a place to live, as tenants, under the company's management at all times. The Whitins had local builders put up about 1,000 housing units for workers. To people fleeing the Armenian genocide or starting over in a new country, renting from one's employer in exchange for a stable working life may have felt like freedom — though not everyone agreed.

A Sanborn fire insurance map of Whitinsville showing workers' housing, all of it owned by the Whitin Machine Works. Image from the National Park Service's page.

In 1919, after local men had gone to war to make the world "safe for democracy," The Boston Globe asked "Why do they call it Whitinsville?" Its reporter, Willard F. DeLue, called the village "a strange principality of happy inhabitants" ruled by a family "dynasty" and wrote:

In Europe Kings have fallen and mighty empires have passed into history; but here in Massachusetts, within 50 miles of Boston, the reign of Whitin-Lasell yet holds supreme.

He listed what the family owned: the only worthwhile industries, the street railway, the water system, the fire department, the hotel, most of the shore of the only lake, the retail coal supply, much of the land and most of the homes. Family members held or had held important town offices, had large stakes in the banks, and gave their name to the high school. DeLue found "machine shop men" making the town's decisions, and "both suffs and anti-suffs" under Whitin control. Even the building that served as town hall was a privately owned memorial building, and many residents did not know whether it belonged to the town or the family.

Boom and decline

Whitin Machine Works, 1939. Image from the National Park Service's page.

While other industrial towns struggled in the slumps of the early 20th century, the works mostly prospered, and manufacturing boomed through World War II — steadily enough that some employees stayed for over 60 years. But some servicemen back from Europe found a lifelong job in "the Works" much less appealing, especially when the pay disappointed. Visitors saw a place tied to tradition, even something feudal, with owners and managers living on the hillsides above the busy plant.

In 1972 Northbridge celebrated its 200th year with motorcycles, parade floats bearing the number 200, and men marching in Continental uniforms. Around the same time, the Whitin Machine Works was sold to another corporation, breaking the link between the family name and manufacturing. By 1976 the company had closed for good. That year residents again dressed in colonial clothes and sat at spinning wheels to celebrate independence, not knowing that the age of American industry was also ending.

What remains

The works, long out of use as a textile machinery plant, still stands, along with much of the housing the Whitins built. Memorials to those who died in war fill the quiet main village. In the years after the Revolution, thinkers argued over what would happen to a society in which many free people worked for others for wages and owned no land. In the Blackstone Valley that debate was concrete: some veterans who fought British rule built their own kinds of dominion. Many of the old forges and factories now stand empty or have new uses, but the idea that a citizen can and should work for pay, and for others' profit, has lasted.

Whitinsville's Memorial Square. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Sources

• National Park Service, Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park: "Bicentennial Blues." It quotes Willard F. DeLue's 1919 Boston Globe article and draws Fletcher's and Wood's service records from Daughters of the American Revolution and Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revolution applications.