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
