Dedham’s Granite Cotton Mill 1835, Southern Cotton and Slavery

Dedham’s oldest and most important mill structure dates from 1835 and provides a unique window into slavery’s foundation of the American economy. Unlike the mills of the first and second privilege (at Maverick and Bussey streets) which had been consistently used to manufacture woolen goods, the mill at the fourth privilege was used to produce cotton goods. As it did to many cotton mills, however, the Civil War, by shutting off the supply of raw material, brought closure of the mill in the early 1860s. The mill reopened after the Civil War manufacturing woolen fabric.

Dedham’s oldest and most important mill structure provides a unique window into slavery’s foundation of the American economy. By the time of the Civil War, slave produced cotton was most responsible for American economic growth, accounted for more than 60% of all U.S. exports and fueled the enslavement of 4 million African Americans. The value of slaves as a financial asset exceeded that of all American manufacturing, railroads and production capacity.

Prior to the mill’s construction, New England’s economic ascent depended heavily upon producing and shipping food and supplies to the plantations which blanketed the West Indies (to feed millions of slaves, supply plantations with farm machinery, cotton gins, fertilizer, iron, cutlery, candles, soap, hoses, liquor, et al.) Ship building and maritime jobs burgeoned to transport humans and products to and from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the American South on flatboats, sloops, brigs, schooners, clippers and steamboats. Merchants, shippers and financial institutions (bankers, cotton “factors,” brokers, accountants, insurers) of New England were major players in all phases of the cotton trade. Northern banks extended credit to plantation owners to plant, buy equipment, purchase slaves; then provided further mortgages and insurance on the lives of slaves, which securities were sold in financial markets. The wealth of the North was balanced on the lives of slaves and the profits of cotton. Northerners also deeply invested in bonds for infrastructure development to support the cotton and plantation industry. Boston-area manufacturers guarded interdependent relationships with Southern planters and politicians to protect slave made cotton to secure their wealth. 

New England became crowded with hundreds of textile mills (472 by 1860) built on rivers and streams to process raw cotton for domestic use, sell fabric back to plantations as “Negro cloth” and on the international market, which mills included Dedham’s Granite Mill.  The invention of the cotton gin in 1794 by Eli Whitney, son of a Massachusetts farmer, made cotton so profitable that much of America’s South was converted to cotton plantations, which, by 1850 required more than 2 million slaves to service. By 1840, about 100,000 bales of Southern cotton came to Boston annually for use in Northern mills; this demand increased as did the need for both income earning and slave labor. By 1860, the U.S. produced about 5 million bales of cotton (one bale stands 5 feet and weighs 500 pounds), or, 2.3 billion pounds, supplying almost 70% of the world’s cotton. By 1860, Massachusetts and Rhode Island mills manufactured about 50% of all American textiles. Lowell, Massachusetts (named after Francis Cabot Lowell) was built specifically to manufacture textiles with nearly a mile of mills along the Merrimack River which turned waterwheels that drove 320,000 spindles and 10,000 looms. Lowell and his business partners built the first cotton mill in America on the Charles River in Waltham which became  America’s first factory; the mill’s profits helped to build the city of mills in Lowell.

By 1850, Dedham’s Granite Mill gave jobs to 56 people. In that year, the Granite Mill produced 650,000 yards of cotton cloth. Like many similar mills, the mill closed due to the Civil War. Industrialists poured their cotton and plantation dependent profits into investments in railroads, banks and insurance companies. This wealth helped to finance hospitals and high-profile universities. Mill operators and employees had earned livings and/or accumulated wealth. The African American slaves (who felled trees, leveled fields, transformed conquered Native American lands into fertile plantations, provided the labor to produce rice, sugar, tobacco and cotton, and worked as carpenters, Blacksmiths, shoe makers, masons, artisans, cooks, caretakers and housekeepers) on whose labor American wealth and that of its laborers and businesses were dependent, however, received nothing for 250 years of expropriated labor. Researchers and economists estimate that African Americans lost $ 24 to $ 100 trillion in the value of just their labor over 17 generations. 

The Granite Mill serves as a reminder of the dark history and debt owed to African Americans as well as to the benefits and prosperity their labor gave to America and its people.

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery, Anne Farrow, Joel Lang and Jenifer Frank, 2005

The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom, US History / AY Collection, Module 8, American Yawp http://www.americayawp.com/index/html

Why Was Cotton King, Henry Louis Gates, The African Americans

Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, Edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, 2016

Cotton was King: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts, Arthur L. Eno, Jr. , 1976

The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835 – 1955, Laurence Gross, 2000

The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910 – 1960, Mary Blewett, 1990