The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life

CONTENTS

Foreword

SHORTLY AFTER BECOMING President of Morgan Construction Company in November 1965, I had the opportunity to read Charles Hill Morgan’s 1900 Presidential address to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It was a lengthy review of his accomplishments at Morgan Construction Company, which he had founded in 1888. I was hugely impressed! Growing up and until reading his speech, I had heard almost nothing from my father or my grandfather about this remarkable, self-taught engineer. I needed to know more, and so do you.

It has taken too long, but before we sold Morgan Construction Company to Siemens I persuaded my son, Philip, and the directors to hire Allison Chisolm, the writer of our Square and Crescent and MCCo publicity, to write Charles’ biography. Having never researched and written a biography before, especially going back over 100 years, Allison estimated what it would take, Philip and the directors agreed, and the project was launched.

This biography is truly a remarkable achievement. Charles had kept diaries throughout his life and these had been turned over to WPI Archives in the 1980s. Allison has read every word. In MCCo vaults were letterbook copies of outgoing correspondence and some originals of incoming letters going back to the beginnings. The copies are extremely difficult to read because time has made them very faint, but Allison has persisted as you will see.

She now knows more about Clinton, Massachusetts, paper-bag making machines, cams and American steel plants of long ago than any other living person. We are the fortunate beneficiaries of her deep and thorough research.

It is also our good fortune that she is an excellent writer and story-teller. It takes a lot of imagination and talent to take an historical sentence and turn it into a paragraph. And do that hundreds of times.

One fantastic outcome to all this research and narrative is the knowledge that in 1864 Erastus Bigelow (of Clinton and worldwide carpet fame) was the person responsible for recommending Charles to Ichabod Washburn of the Washburn and Moen wire mill in Worcester. Mr. Washburn was looking for a General Superintendent. Charles moved to Worcester, and the rest, as you can read, is a history of hard work, integrity and entrepreneurial success.

Paul S. Morgan

Duxbury, Massachusetts

June, 2012

Preface

THE LIFE AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS of Charles Hill Morgan were uniquely his own, but also emblematic. He was of a type that is easy to mythologize—the nineteenth century inventor and industrialist—but as Allison Chisolm’s thoughtful and well-researched work attests, Morgan is an altogether real example of the restless innovator and builder committed to perpetually improving most everything in his sphere. That ever expanding sphere ranged from complex industrial processes to dairy farming to the welfare of his employees, the community and his family and very much to his own spiritual life. This history, which was written for the benefit of his family five and more generations on, but without any editorial interference from them, deserves attention well outside the Morgan family. The reasons are diverse, but two are especially worth highlighting.

First, the inventive life of Charles Hill Morgan is a reminder that Internet pioneers have no singular purchase on innovation. Appearing on the Charlie Rose Show in 2012, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley claimed that, The core idea of a technology company is innovation, and that’s very different from a lot of businesses, right? The fundamental output of a car company is cars ... So the challenge tech companies have is they can never rest on their laurels with today’s project, they always have to be thinking in terms of the next five years and what comes next. There are truly countless industrial examples that illustrate just how fundamentally wrong that claim is. This biography, which faithfully recounts the restlessly inventive industrial life of Charles Hill Morgan, is a powerful reminder that the so-called Industrial Revolution was every bit as focused on innovation and change as the technology world is today. The output of the latter is some combination of software code and electrically engineered hardware that suits the moment, but which will be continually improved through relentless innovation. That all-abiding obsession with perpetual technical improvement will sound very familiar to any reader of this book. The machine age and the Internet age have much more in common than digital innovators tend to appreciate.

A second reason the book warrants attention well beyond Morgan’s descendants relates to Worcester itself. Although the city has been at the forefront of so much—famously, the Pill and the liquid-fuel rocket, but also the trade school movement, the first violence of the American Revolution, the birthplace of so many poets and patents, the monkey wrench, the first museum in the world to purchase a Gauguin and so much more—it is a very understudied place. In terms of industrial history, there should be at least half a dozen serious biographies or dissertations written about the likes of Stephen Salisbury II, Ichabod Washburn, Milton Higgins, Tobias Boland, George Crompton and more recently Harry Stoddard and Howard Freeman—to name a few. The same is true of the companies and enterprises associated with them. The richness of Charles Hill Morgan’s life and the extensive documentary record available suggests that the local territory is more fertile than scholars know. A number of celebratory but quite useful histories of the Norton Company, Wyman-Gordon and Morgan Construction have been published as well as a more scholarly study, Family Firm to Modern Multi-National: Norton Company, a New England Enterprise by Charles Cheape, but the rich documentary record available about Worcester’s industrial development has been too thinly tapped. The last—and essentially the only—industrial history of Worcester was published in 1917 by Charles G. Washburn. The case for more serious studies of Worcester history applies to a wide range of non-economic topics explored using any number of forensic lenses. The late George Mason University historian Roy Rosenzweig demonstrated that with his acclaimed social history of labor, leisure and Worcester parks, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and History in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. Rutgers University historian Gerald Grob wrote a similarly praised history of the evolving treatment of mental illness, The State and the Mentally Ill: A History of Worcester State Hospital. Written for a more popular audience, Evelyn Herwitz’ Trees at Risk: Reclaiming an Urban Forest, A Case History of Worcester, Massachusetts is a compelling example of what a well-focused, non-academic historian can contribute to our understanding of the city. Accomplished broader histories like A History of Worcester: 1674-1848 by the late Ken Moynihan, former chair of the history department at Assumption College, and the collected historical essays of Al Southwick, columnist at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, contain dozens of promising research threads to follow. Potentially fruitful topics might include histories focused on labor relations, immigration, urban development, horticulture, Plan E government, the resilience of cultural institutions and medicine. This biography of Charles Hill Morgan strengthens the case.

As for Worcester’s own industrial history, the biography of Charles Hill Morgan highlights five narrower historical themes worth identifying, because they have had such a marked bearing on the economic evolution of the city and its environs. Why might that matter? The reason is subtle, but important. As the economic historian and Nobel Prize winner Douglas North has argued in making his case for path dependence, history does not unfold in a predictably deterministic way. What history does is simply make some developments more likely than others—it sets more and less likely paths. History shapes opportunities, but it does not pre-ordain outcomes. The value of having a good fix on history—local or otherwise—is that it reveals the stickiness of certain forces and themes that have enough staying power to be relevant without ever being immutable.

The first theme, already alluded to above, is Worcester’s particular legacy of innovation. The incremental inventiveness of Charles Hill Morgan and so many of his Worcester counterparts epitomizes the core premise of historian Robert Friedel who argues persuasively in A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Millennium that real technological change is a series of small improvements that periodically coalesce into what appears to be a major innovation, but which in retrospect is better understood as the final piece of a complex and dynamic jigsaw puzzle. This is the argument of Abbott Payson Usher, an economic historian and his more famous Harvard colleague, Joseph Schumpeter. The latter coined the dramatic phrase creative destruction, while the former spent the better part of his career quietly documenting particular examples.

Second, not being on a major river with access to raw, place-specific power, Worcester’s economic development was based on steam power, and the consequence was diverse applications spread more broadly throughout the city and environs. This is why Worcester is much better understood as a manufacturing center with an almost Midwestern feel than a New England mill town. Writing in 1917, Washburn cites some 3,000 different business establishments. The city was among the world leaders in grinding wheels, envelope and textile machines, valentines, ice skates, rolling mills, wire and machine tools.

Third, industrial innovation in Worcester throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was financed almost exclusively through local sources—beginning with the merchant Daniel Waldo and later his first cousin Stephen Salisbury II and William Merrifield, who built buildings to house inventors and eventually through successful local entrepreneurs themselves. Worcester’s industrial development never depended on Boston money—the Charles River Associates and, later, the Boston Associates—that funded the iconic mills of Lowell and Lawrence and which was largely absentee money that took surplus capital out of the mills and re-invested it elsewhere as the comparative advantage of water power shifted to steam and trade and mining and other investment frontiers far beyond New England. As an aside, this local bootstrap funding served Worcester well for well over a century, but the downside has been that no meaningful private equity or venture capital pools were developed, so sources of investment capital have been very scarce relative to Boston.

Fourth, local economic success and the perceived opportunity associated with it, both attracted talent from away—sometimes far away—and also created pathways for clever machinists to become in more than a few cases, very successful entrepreneurs and, in some cases, industrialists like Morgan. Silicon Valley is a contemporary magnet for talent. Worcester and any number of innovative manufacturing centers in the nineteenth and greater part of the twentieth century once were as well. As an anecdotal example, of the eight candidates for biographies cited above only one, Salisbury, was born in Worcester and all but one, Salisbury again, moved from the ground floor up.

Fifth, and related to each of the other four, regional economies benefit from so-called tent poles that give both coherence and a generative dimension to the local economy. Ichabod Washburn’s early wire company morphed from Washburn & Moen to American Steel & Wire and was the largest local employer in 1900. Virtually every major Worcester company bore some original connection to Washburn—Charles Hill Morgan and Morgan Construction being an exemplar. Worcester is no longer the manufacturing center it once was. Consistent with the city’s transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, the largest employer is now UMass Memorial Health Care and the affiliated UMass Medical School. Whether this will provide the same engine for growth that Washburn provided remains to be seen, but the role is there to be filled.

There are numerous other takeaways from this biography that have a bearing on larger issues of business history in general and the development of Worcester more particularly. First and foremost, however, this is a compelling biography of a remarkable figure whose legacy remains resilient and worth celebrating on its own distinct merits. Charles Hill Morgan still stands on his own, and not just as an exemplar of a particular type.

Jock Herron

Cambridge, MA

One

Cloth, Paper, Wire & Steel

Late 19th century set of drafting tools

THE PACKAGE HAD ARRIVED. Charles Hill Morgan leaned forward at a table and opened the velvet-lined case with excitement. One by one, he laid out his new acquisitions: a double point shaft compass, pencil and ink points, an excellent German pen, 3-inch dividers, a complete set of 3-inch steel bows, and eight regular pens with a variety of nib sizes.

The 22-year-old hazel-eyed draftsman sat back, stretched his long legs, and surveyed with satisfaction this major investment in the tools of his trade. He then opened his diary for April 20, 1853, and recorded his purchases in his methodical and steady hand, totaling $22.72 for the drafting tools, plus express shipping to his boarding house in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The price represented more than a few weeks’ wages from the Lawrence Machine Shop, part of the vast Essex Company manufacturing enterprise on the Merrimack River.

Despite his youth, he had travelled far to reach Lawrence. Born in Rochester, New York in 1831, Charles Morgan briefly lived in Michigan as his parents followed the westward expansion of the young nation’s canals. When he was eight years old, however, the family migrated back to central Massachusetts, where they had longstanding roots.

The Morgan family eventually settled in Factory Village (later named Clinton), where Charles spent his formative years. There his parents helped to build a church and passed on to their son their deep-seated faith. Charles learned literacy and numeracy in public schools and at a local academy, but he was introduced to drafting while a teenager working as a mechanic in the coachlace mill of Clinton. He then honed his practical knowledge of machinery and perfected his drafting techniques while working on equipment for mills, looms, and steam engines in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

Charles’s mastery of his drafting tools was so well respected by 1854 that when William T. Merrifield asked the Lawrence Machine Shop to design a steam engine installation to power shared facilities for small manufacturers in Worcester, it was Charles Hill Morgan who drew up the plans for the foundation.

From such humble beginnings, Morgan’s technical skills and business acumen launched his varied career as an innovator, entrepreneur and civic leader. He ran a paper bag manufacturing business in Philadelphia in the 1860s, managed the world’s largest producer of barbed wire in Worcester from the mid-1860s to mid-1880s, and then founded his own rolling mill company in Worcester in 1888. He held several important patents and tenaciously defended his rights to the commercial use of this intellectual property. Morgan’s success was initially due to his ability to use a draftsman’s professional-grade compass to make precisely centered measurements. But Morgan himself attributed his success in life to a strong moral compass, centered around church, family and service to others.

Once Charles learned how to use his specialized drafting tools, his horizons widened with greater possibilities. His business travels took him from New England to Chicago and Texas as well as to Sweden, France, Germany and England. The focal point of his professional life remained the dynamic manufacturing communities of central Massachusetts, especially its industrial hub of Worcester. Morgan’s technical and moral compasses aligned to point him on a path as an innovator that led from Factory Village to the courts of Europe. Over the span of his life, Charles would go from living hand to mouth in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, to taking tea with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle.

His life journey personifies the development and success of the American Industrial Revolution—a time when the power of ideas coupled with mechanical ability fueled many people with a strong desire to find new solutions to practical problems. Morgan’s struggles, first to gain the technical knowledge and ability, and then to apply them in a commercial setting, with only limited personal capital, reflect the wider experience of this generation of American inventors. Armed with patents, and ultimately, a solid business built on his reputation for quality and integrity, Charles Hill Morgan and his life story demonstrate a 19th-century model of entrepreneurial success in the face of daunting odds, in a time when technological advances first provided a competitive advantage over longstanding methods and practices.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE POSSIBLE

1831 was an auspicious year for the birth of someone who was to become an inventor, entrepreneur and fervent Christian. Fiery evangelical preachers crisscrossed the western New York of his childhood preaching a gospel of self-denial, self-discipline and self-improvement. Each man, they taught, should take responsibility for his own morality and salvation. It was, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed that year, the age of the first-person singular.

The emergence of such self-directed spiritual philosophies echoed the country’s developing democratic ideology. That very American ideal of self-reliance, where a man could advance on the strength of his education, ideas, and initiative, was reiterated in November 1831 by Massachusetts Senator Edward Everett. In the inaugural lecture of a series honoring Benjamin Franklin, Senator Everett said, We are all equal in our ability to compare, contrive, invent, improve and perfect, addressing an audience of Boston laborers and mechanics whose backgrounds resembled Franklin’s early years.

Improving and perfecting the ideas of others is the real accomplishment of most innovators. History often pays tribute to inventors with breakthrough ideas, but improvers rarely gain the spotlight. Inventions may offer new or different ways to solve problems, but by commercializing those ideas, improvers, or innovators in today’s parlance, build businesses and create jobs. In 19th-century New England, many mechanics tinkered with better ways to do something. Their incremental improvements fulfilled a desire to solve problems and effect change. A new journal, Scientific American, recognized this impulse in describing its mission in its first issue in August 1845: the Advocate of Industry and Enterprise, and Journal of Mechanical and Other Improvements. Written particularly for mechanics and manufacturers, the magazine had for its first cover illustration an improved rail-road car and articles describing improvements in a variety of fields as well as a list of new patents. Charles Morgan was an avid reader of Scientific American as early as 1852, even before he invested in his high-quality drafting tools.

The virtues of improvement had been a watchword of society in early 19th-century America, according to Robert Friedel in his comprehensive work, A Culture of Improvement. Novelty was not welcomed. Inventions that were too new were suspected of quackery or worse, the source of labor savings that were unwanted in challenging economic times. Craftsmen who made incremental improvements in their tools, methods and materials were clearly interested in raising the quality of a product. Improvements, however, were not always patentable. The distinction between invention and improvement, as Friedel details, mattered to those seeking sources of national wealth and prosperity.

In the United States, establishing a patent system was a priority for George Washington’s administration in 1790. Together with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph, the president signed the new nation’s first patent in 1790, for an improvement on the making of pot ash and pearl ash. The patent system soon needed its own improvements, but not until 1836 did Congress create the Patent Office. No longer a responsibility of the Secretary of State, the country’s patents were administered through a Commissioner of Patents.

As inventions and improvements on them received patent protection, the volume of patents grew. While it took close to 20 years to grant the first 12,000 patents after 1836, that quickly became an annual figure by the 1870s. Charles Morgan offers a prime illustration of this escalating trend: his first patent, issued in 1857, was number 17,184, and his last, in 1909, was number 931,750.

Charles was fortunate to live in an inventive location. Many observers considered the spirit of improvement and innovation of the time to be rooted in the genius of particular individuals or places. The New Englander invents normally; his brain has a bias that way, reported the London Times in reviewing the American exhibits at the Paris Exposition of 1878, where the typewriter, telephone and Remington rifle jockeyed for attention. George Frisbie Hoar, a lawyer and politician from Worcester, relished every opportunity to celebrate the prolific inventors of central Massachusetts while he served in the U.S. Senate from 1877 to 1904. Speaking to that chamber on January 6, 1903, in support of a bill to regulate the power of large corporate trusts, Hoar argued that Worcester’s businesses were founded not on water power, seaports, mines or fertile prairies, but local control and public-spirited citizens: Worcester was a marvelous example of American genius, growing and expanding in the air of American liberty. It was the very center and home of invention, he declared.

Hoar boasted that within a 12-mile radius of his Worcester home were the birthplaces of the inventors Eli Whitney of the cotton gin, Erastus Bigelow of the carpet machine, Amos Whittemore of the carding machine, and Elias Howe of the sewing machine. The city itself was home to inventors of modern plows, wire drawing and industrial looms. Worcester’s workshops produced practical inventions like the monkey wrench, typewriter and a machine that not only folded envelopes, but also attached glue to the flaps. From the mind of Ichabod Washburn sprang the Worcester wire industry, which began in a blacksmith’s shop but grew to such an extent that his company became the largest and most profitable wire manufacturer in the world.

Referring to his Worcester neighbors, which included Charles Morgan, Senator Hoar continued: All around me are homesteads, some bordering my own, who are inventors, foremen, and skilled workmen, who have acquired fortunes in this honorable service, so beneficent to mankind and so honorable to their country. And what made this concentration of invention and industry possible? It was not water power or steam power or electricity. It was man power, it was brain power, that wrought this miracle.

These powers of invention required not just celebration, but thoughtful reflection. A widely circulated 1890 sermon by Reverend C.S. Nickerson, a Wisconsin minister, questioned the value of invention for invention’s sake. It is sometime said the progress of the present age is the result of invention, he began. It is a great deal nearer the truth to say that invention comes from the spirit and need of the age. Can the mere invention of a machine make a people great and prosperous unless they have and recognize a need of it?

Map of Worcester, Massachusetts, c. 1880

Over the course of his lifetime, Charles Morgan made a substantial and lasting contribution to the development of paper bag production, steel manufacturing, patent case law, his own company, his wider family and the civic life of his community. Morgan’s drafting tools helped him begin this personal and professional journey. His formidable manpower and brainpower, as Senator Hoar so forcefully put it, did not develop in a vacuum, however. Charles Hill Morgan’s success was further propelled by the power of capital, the wire industry, the system of education, and the people of Worcester, Massachusetts.

THE POWER OF CAPITAL

The landlocked town of Worcester was built on a rocky soil that nonetheless proved to be fertile ground for mechanical ideas and improvements. Located 40 miles inland from Boston’s harbor, Worcester grew from a village of 2,700 in 1819 to a city of 32,000 in 1864, when Charles Morgan arrived to work in its metal industries. By the time of Morgan’s death in 1911, Worcester had become a bustling metropolis and industrial powerhouse of more than 145,000 people. A combination of practical ideas, ready capital, expanding transportation, innovative education and a diverse population brought benefits to the region beyond any predictions. Charles Morgan was one of many individuals who thrived in 19th-century Worcester’s atmosphere of mechanical improvements and economic development.

Encouraged by the success of the Erie Canal in the early 1820s, a group of Worcester businessmen, politicians and lawyers joined with Rhode Island merchants to bypass opposition from Boston and build the Blackstone Canal to connect Worcester with Providence, a major Atlantic port. Built between 1825 and 1828, the Blackstone Canal was 45 miles long, 34 feet wide, and four to six feet deep. The initial offering for the Blackstone Canal Company was oversubscribed, but after the original construction costs ran over budget, most of the initial investors earned very little as a return on their investment.

Worcester, however, reaped enormous dividends. The canal’s first years saw a dozen boats docking in Worcester each week. Both farmers and manufacturers took advantage of transportation costs that were half those of overland wagons. Initially, Rhode Island’s tidewater wharfs would supply Worcester with household staples such as flour and molasses, and industrial supplies including coal, wool, dyes and imported machinery and hardware. Boats returning from Worcester would carry local produce, cider, hay and firewood, plus textiles and apparel, combs, factory-made cotton and wool cloth, textile and farm machinery, iron castings, paper, shingles and chairs.

The exchange was somewhat lopsided, as northbound tonnage was nearly five times greater than southbound. Worcester’s inland port quickly became a hub for freight to other locations. Within seven years of the canal’s opening, the Boston and Worcester Railroad began service, fueling further commercial development in the city. In 1835, just four years after the first steam locomotive was demonstrated in Philadelphia (when the entire nation had only 73 miles of rail), Worcester had railroad service. Travelers could reach Boston in 3 hours and 15 minutes. In 1839, Springfield was accessible in three hours, as was Norwich, Connecticut, the following year. By 1840, national railway mileage equaled that of canals. Trains could move four times as much freight as a canal barge for the same price.

Worcester’s central location became its destiny. By 1889, trains from Worcester travelled on 13 different rail lines in every direction. A 1913 advertisement touted 200 passenger trains daily running in and out of Worcester. To this day, the city’s motto remains, The heart of the Commonwealth.

This expanding transportation network attracted further investment. Worcester merchant Stephen Salisbury II built shared manufacturing space, facilities that would now be called business incubators. Most of the city’s manufacturing enterprises started in these small, rented quarters. The Old Court Mills, built by Salisbury’s father sometime before 1832 along Mill Brook, at the intersection of Lincoln Square and Union Street, offered the lower-risk option to start a business by leasing factory space. The facility soon became known as the cradle of the Worcester tool building industry.

Salisbury was joined by other like-minded investors who built Worcester’s downtown. These included Dr. Benjamin Heywood, with a machine shop on Central Street near the Blackstone Canal, and Colonel James Estabrook and Charles Wood, with the Junction Shops on Beacon Street. Salisbury erected buildings along Union Street, Prescott Street, as well as Grove Street. Thanks to this infusion of local capital, businesses could lease the required space, grow in size and, when ready, buy the building.

In 1839, William T. Merrifield joined this group. He began constructing a series of buildings, first wooden then brick, the largest of which grew to four stories, spanning an entire downtown block. In a town with slow-moving brooks rather than rushing rivers, Merrifield overcame the limits of water power by equipping his buildings with steam engines of increasing horsepower. The Merrifield Buildings at 100 Exchange Street provided Rooms with Power to Rent. Small manufacturing enterprises flocked to the downtown location soon bordered by new rail lines.

Lincoln Square, Worcester, Massachusetts, with Morgan Construction Company building visible at upper right, 1910

But the Merrifield buildings suffered a devastating fire in June 1854, one of the most destructive in Worcester’s history. Black smoke poured from the fourth floor, while street crowds looked on at the conflagration. A small daguerreotype captured the scene, one of the first examples of photojournalism. The fourth floor was out of reach for firefighters called in from surrounding towns and as far away as Nashua, New Hampshire. Buildings on adjacent streets also burned, including Merrifield’s offices, a bowling alley, church, several houses and shops, and a lumberyard. In all, the fire displaced some 50 businesses and put 1,000 people out of work. Merrifield promised tenants he would rebuild as quickly as possible, and many returned to the new building, now just three stories high.

The effect of Merrifield’s reconstructed buildings on Worcester’s economic development was widespread. Five years after the fire, the 50 tenants employed anywhere from two to 800 people each in businesses manufacturing products as varied as boot-trees, engine lathes, animal traps, sewing machines, carriage wheels and rain gutters.

The steady supply of power and the diversity of local industries were a bulwark against the series of economic downturns in the national and global economy during the 19th century. Steam engines ensured Worcester’s prosperity. In 1875, the city had 108 steam engines generating 8,000 horsepower. By contrast, its 27 waterwheels produced just 721 horsepower. Unlike mill towns that were reliant on river power and whose mills typically clustered around just a few industries, Worcester suffered little through the nineteenth century’s regular economic downturns. As late as 1913, city boosters could claim that it had not lost a penny by a bank failure.

As historian Kenneth Moynihan observed of Worcester’s early years, a pattern of cooperation among creative artisans and imaginative capitalists ... would give a distinctive and long-lasting cast to its economic and civic culture.

THE POWER OF WIRE

Ichabod Washburn was a blacksmith who transformed his skill hammering plows on an anvil to forging and finishing machinery after he moved to Worcester in 1819. Washburn’s machining skills at the Millbury Armory led to a position as a blacksmith in a machinery business in Worcester. He was soon manufacturing woolen machinery and lead pipe in partnership with a master mechanic, Benjamin Goddard. Washburn & Goddard made the county’s first woolen condenser and long roll spinning jack, machinery so novel that Washburn hailed it in his autobiography as nearly the first made in the country. After selling that business, Washburn began to manufacture wire and wood screws.

The wire manufacturing industries thrived within Worcester’s diversified economy. In 1831, Washburn & Goddard began making iron wire, a product formerly made only in England. The woolen mills needed wire to card, or straighten, the wool for weaving into cloth. The two mechanics improved existing wire machines so one man could draw not just 50 pounds a day but 500. Their development of a drawing block increased production to 2,500 pounds per day. Washburn moved to the Grove Street mill, built by Stephen Salisbury to Washburn’s specifications.

Goddard did not join him, so Washburn worked with others to find new improvements for his machinery. Area woolen mills bought much of his wire but Washburn also broadened his markets by encouraging the Read brothers to move their screw manufacturing business from Providence to Worcester. His twin brother Charles became a partner in the business from 1842 until 1849 when Ichabod’s son-in-law, Philip L. Moen took on that position. While he makes no claim to be a practical mechanic, Washburn wrote of Moen in 1866, he has managed with rare ability our finances, a department of the business for which I never had the taste or inclination, always preferring to be among the machinery. It would be 14 more years before another mechanic of Washburn’s caliber would join the company when Washburn invited Charles Morgan to return to Worcester to manage its manufacturing operations in 1864.

One product formerly made only in England was piano wire. Washburn was challenged by a Boston piano manufacturer to develop production closer to his business. Washburn’s series of experimental trials in tempering the steel wire through slow-cool annealing eventually led his company to produce high-grade piano wire sought by manufacturers across the U.S. For years, Washburn remained the only American music wire producer. The popularity of piano wire lay the production groundwork for the coming crinoline craze with women’s hoop skirts. He soon filled the previously unoccupied space in the Grove Mill building to produce steel hoop wire. Sewing machines, invented by local mechanic Elias Howe, also needed steel needles. And as demand for telegraph wire soared, Washburn developed and patented a galvanizing process to improve electrical transmission.

Charles Morgan’s invitation from Washburn to return to Central Massachusetts from Philadelphia would bring him into this creative crucible. With Morgan’s arrival, Washburn built the first rolling mill at Grove Street. For the first time, the company could produce its own metal rods required for wire drawing. Market demand drove more innovation. The expanding western territories needed wire fences, but cattle could rub against them and break the wire. The first barbed wire fence patent came out of Illinois in 1874, a few months after J.F. Glidden began manufacturing it by hand. Washburn & Moen was quick to build improved machinery to automate the process. By 1880, it had acquired hundreds of patents to control the business.

Washburn & Moen’s Grove Street works, Worcester, Massachusetts, c. 1880

Not long after Alexander Graham Bell had revealed his new telephone invention, Washburn & Moen tested different types of wire for this use. The first recorded experiments in talking through a telephone wire were held in Charles Morgan’s Grove Street office in March 1876, the same month Bell received his patent. Iron wire soon yielded to specially strengthened, lighter-weight copper wire for better conductivity. Thus another market emerged. While Ichabod Washburn died in 1868, his company continued innovating through the 1890s until its acquisition by American Steel & Wire in 1899.

Charles Morgan transmitted this spirit of improvement to his own rolling mill company in 1888, and that story is told later in this book. Hundreds of other companies founded in Worcester followed a similar pattern and flourished. Makers of steam engines, all manner of machine tools, grinding wheels, wrenches, guns, power looms, and the modern plow had their start in Worcester and grew together as a business community.

Beyond the wire industry, manufacturing quickly became a majority employer for the city. An 1885 census found one of four residents were employed in manufacturing and mechanical industries, a rate sustained for the next quarter century as the city experienced explosive population growth. With that growth, participation in the manufacturing economy fell only slightly, to 20 percent in 1910. Worcester counted more than 35,000 skilled mechanics among its citizens in 1913, and more than 700 manufacturing establishments. The concentration of business also generated a host culture for an industrial petri dish of new ideas, spurring growth from constant improvements.

THE POWER OF EDUCATION

The city’s development as a leading industrial center required a steady pipeline of workers with appropriate mechanical training. The old apprentice system, which had supplied on-the-job problem solving experiences for Ichabod Washburn in blacksmithing and machining, needed updating. The city’s leading business owners sought a way to supply education for those already working, as well as for students preparing to enter the workforce.

In the 1840s, Ichabod Washburn, steam engine builder William Wheeler and others formed a Mechanics’ Association for the moral, intellectual and social improvement of its members, the perfection of the mechanic arts and the pecuniary assistance of the needy. The subscribers held their first meeting in February 1842, quickly established a library and lecture series, and made plans for an annual exhibition of the city’s mechanical products. Hosted in September 1848, the fair had the hoped-for effect, increasing the demand for Worcester-made merchandise. The exhibitions also created demand for a dedicated space, and the fundraising campaign led by Washburn’s offer of a $10,000 matching gift resulted in the opening of Mechanics Hall in March 1857.

John Boynton, a tinware manufacturer, thought Worcester’s future industrial leaders needed more formal scientific education, and his gift of $100,000 in 1865 helped to found the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science, soon renamed Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Ichabod Washburn had long dreamed of a school of applied science, and he endowed a machine shop for the new college. Gifts of land and $61,111 from 232 individuals, 20 shops and factories, made those dreams a practical reality.

The school differentiated itself from other institutions of higher learning by training both minds and hands. With a motto of Theory and Practice, the founders believed that:

the connection of academic culture and the practical application of science is advantageous to both ... The academy inspires its intelligence into the work of the shop, and the shop, with eyes open to the improvements of productive industries, prevents the monastic dreams and shortness of vision that sometimes paralyze the profound learning of a college.

Students could gain both theoretical and practical knowledge of mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemistry, physics, modern languages (French and German), and drawing. The practice came during 10 hours a week in the shop, lab or drawing table, plus a full month in July.

Washburn turned to his own general superintendent and school trustee, Charles Morgan, to find the best superintendent for the new machine shop. Charles looked far beyond Worcester County, to the town of Hanover, New Hampshire, where he found Milton Higgins, freshly graduated from the Chandler Scientific School at Dartmouth College. A firm believer in practical education, Higgins took on the job with enthusiasm, running the Washburn Shops from 1868 to 1896, while helping to create new businesses, including the Riley Stoker and Norton Emery Wheel companies. Many graduates of the novel hybrid program remained in Worcester, as Boynton had hoped they would, and went on to lead companies and strengthen its industrial base with new enterprises.

Within a few years of his arrival in Worcester, Higgins proposed that the city develop a trade school where students would receive traditional classroom learning with practical training in a commercial shop. Higgins served as consultant to a Massachusetts industrial education commission in 1906 and helped frame the law allowing each town or city to establish a trade school, independent of the existing school system, with its own board of trustees. Higgins was appointed by the governor to the new Commission on Industrial Education in 1907. The city of Worcester approved the trade school proposal almost immediately, local industrialists raised more than $100,000, and the free Worcester Boys’ Trade High School opened its doors to 52 boys in February 1910, with four-year programs for the cabinet making, pattern making and machinist trades. Similarly funded with private and public dollars, the David Hale Fanning School began as a girls’ trade school in 1921.

The businesses of Worcester had designed and constructed a pipeline for future workers, but the dynamic contributions of the city’s diverse population would supply more energy and ideas than anyone anticipated.

THE POWER OF PEOPLE

Construction of the Blackstone Canal brought growth, riches and immigrants to Worcester. Irish workers cleared many of the waterways and built the series of locks to accommodate the changing topography between Worcester and Providence. More Irish arrived after the 1845 famine in Ireland. Many French Canadians also arrived before the Civil War to work in the city’s textile mills and plentiful boot and shoe factories.

As the metals and abrasives businesses grew, several companies, including Morgan Construction, recruited Swedes with experience in their home country’s successful ironworks. The population shift was rapid. Where in 1875 there were only 166 Swedish residents, ten years later that number had increased thirteen times to 2,112. In another 10 years, the Swedish population tripled again, so that by 1900, fully 10 percent of all Worcester residents were from Swedish families. Finns came to Worcester as well. At the turn of the century, almost half of all male Scandinavians had jobs in the metals trades. Typically ambitious and upwardly mobile, Swedes soon filled the more skilled positions in rolling mills and wire making, supervising more recently arrived immigrants among Irish, Lithuanian, Polish, Finnish and Armenian laborers.

The 1910 census lists Russians as one of the top five ethnic populations in the city, and Russian Jewish immigrants tended to settle near but not with the Poles and Lithuanians. Armenians (listed as Turkey in Asia), Turks (from Turkey in Europe), Albanians, Syrians and Greeks arrived in greater numbers in that first decade of the twentieth century. Germans, English Canadians, Scots, Welsh and English were also in the mix. Almost three-fourths of Worcester residents were foreign-born or born of foreign parents in 1920. Each group had its designated neighborhood within the city, and for quite some time, there was little interaction between groups.

The presence of so many newcomers meant that the terms immigrant and blue-collar worker were virtually interchangeable in turn-of-the century Worcester. Business owners benefited from lower-cost labor and, in an era of increasing union activity, profited from the divisions among ethnic groups. The Worcester Merchants Association’s 1913 promotional brochure, Facts about Worcester, noted that 45 nationalities were represented in the city’s population.

Like the generations before them, these newcomers also brought the power of new ideas and innovations, all to Worcester’s gain. Their achievements would take the city in different directions, but not necessarily according to the 19th century patterns of success. Many of our mechanics own their own homes, and are naturally deeply interested in the welfare of the city, wrote Ichabod Washburn’s descendant, historian Charles G. Washburn in his 1917 Industrial Worcester. "Avenues of advancement are always open to the capable and industrious ... From their ranks will come the leading businessmen of the next generation