The place known as Pawtucket began as a river, in a valley carved by ancient Ice Age glaciers. Native Narragansett, Nipmuc and Wampanoag tribes cut trails across the shallow river that would later become roads for the early English settlers.
The first hint of the role Pawtucket would play in American history came in 1671, when Joseph Jenks Jr. opened an iron works. The rushing river provided the current that Jenks corralled to drive bellows for his smelting furnace. An artisan community sprouted, laying the foundation for the city’s emergence as an industrial powerhouse.
But it wasn’t until late in the 18th Century that Pawtucket would become the Silicon Valley of the era after Samuel Slater emigrated from England. It’s a tale every Rhode Island school child learns. Slater began his apprenticeship at age 14 in an English cotton mill. He came to Pawtucket in his 20s having memorized the English plans for textile machinery. By bringing this technology to the New World, Slater was breaking British law, which banned the export of textile machinery blueprints.
Slater’s original factory –now a museum—harnessed the Blackstone River to provide power for the machines and wrote the first chapter of the American Industrial Revolution. Within decades, mills opened and thrived along the Blackstone, yoking the valley villages to the fortunes of the nascent textile industry.
The mills created wealth among the owners and managers who built mansions. But there were costs. Workers, many of them women and children as young as six or eight, would chafe under the long hours in factories that were like saunas in summer and ice boxes in winter.
The first blush of worker activism came as early as 1800 and flourished into the 1820s. In late spring of 1824, about 500 Pawtucket textile workers shuttered the spinning and weaving factories for a week in the first successful American industrial strike. Workers were protesting a cut in pay and imposition of longer hours by mill owners. The strike was led by women weavers.
It wouldn’t be the last flexing of labor muscle in Pawtucket mills, or the last example of economic class jousts. The earliest workers were recruited from rural farms, where the stony soil kept agriculture from adequately supporting large families.
Between the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties, Pawtucket and the surrounding Blackstone Valley soared economically. But the workforce changed. The rural Yankees gave way to waves of immigrants, beginning with the Irish, who came first in the 1820s to perform the back-breaking work of digging the Blackstone Canal. Successive generations of immigrants from French Canada, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Syria, Poland and Greece would supply factory labor. By 1874, Pawtucket’s population was nearly 20,000.
The turn of the century brought more labor unrest. The second generation of immigrants were not as willing as their parents to work long hours for low pay amid the mind-numbing clatter of a power loom. So they formed unions. The streetcar workers strike of 1902 in Pawtucket and Providence was crucial. Historian Scott Molloy says it laid the foundation for modern Democratic Party, which galvanized unionized Roman Catholic workers to break the grip the Protestant mill owners and the Republican Party held on state politics.
By the late 1920s, cracks were forming in the textile industry. Southern states, recovered from the devastation of the Civil War, began recruiting textile owners. The slogan was “bring the mills to the cotton” growing states. Transportation of the raw material was cheaper and the south had the virtue of having cheaper, non-union labor, than New England.
The Depression hit the industry hard. A large textile strike in 1934 was put down only after the governor called in the national guard. Shots were fired and a young onlooker was killed. The textile factories revived during World War II, making blankets and uniforms for the military. But after the war the exodus of textiles south accelerated.
In politics, Pawtucket gained considerable clout when a Democratic machine fueled by Irish-Americans captured city government. It was led by Mayor Tom McCoy, a tough urban boss, was known for getting what he wanted, whether city jobs for his allies or construction of the baseball stadium that bears his name still. The gallows humor was that the city’s pols didn’t believe that death should end a voter’s participation in democracy. Pawtucket native Thomas Corcoran, a scion of Irish immigrants, became a close aide to Franklin Roosevelt and an architect of The New Deal. Nicknamed “Tommy the Cork,” he later became Washington’s first modern super lobbyist.
After the war, Pawtucket changed. Interstate 95 sliced the city in half. Residents fled the wood frame triple-deckers for the leafy suburbs of Cumberland and Lincoln. A new generation of Latino immigrants from South America arrived, filling up the triple-deckers and taking jobs in the declining textile and electronics industries.
The city’s most celebrated company, Hasbro, which started as a tiny manufacturer of children’s pencil boxes, evolved into one of the world’s largest toy makers. Baseball helped keep Pawtucket on the map long after the city’s identity as an industrial center faded. The Pawtucket Red Sox, purchased by Ben Mondor, an avuncular local businessman, became the Boston Red Sox top minor league team, playing in McCoy Stadium. The team drew millions of fans over the years to Pawtucket and was the site of the longest professional baseball ever played, a 33-inning marathon.
The city had long had its own hospital, Memorial. It was also a center for the arts; the red brick mills that once churned our thousands of yards of cotton now house a new generation of artists. Where that loom once stood may now house a craft brewery or glass-blower’s studio. The city also became home to an annual arts festival and hosted the Gamm Theatre, one of New England’s top stage venues.
Today, Pawtucket faces more change and an unsettled future. The Gamm left for a larger theater space in Warwick. The PawSox are moving to a new stadium in Worcester. The hospital, too, is history and Hasbro executives are considering a move out of the city.
So the city once again has to reinvent itself, digging into the past for resilience and the survive-against-all-odds attitude that flows through its history like the Blackstone River.
This week, the Public’s Radio begins our One Square Mile series with a look at Pawtucket: A Town in Transition.
