At the close of the chapter on “Early American Mechanics” we referred to the spread of machinery building northward from Rhode Island to the Merrimac Valley and central Massachusetts. This by no means implies that all the northern shops were started by Rhode Island mechanics, but their influence is so strong as to be clearly seen; and here, as in Rhode Island, the early shops were closely identified with the textile industry.

One of the first and most influential of these was the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. The beginnings of the Amoskeag Company were made by a Benjamin Pritchard, of New Ipswich, N. H., who built a small textile mill at Amoskeag Village, then Goffstown, in 1809. In 1822 it was bought by Olney Robinson, from whom, that same year, Samuel Slater received a letter asking for a loan of $3000. This was accompanied by a magnificent salmon as a sample of the products of Amoskeag. Slater, with the instincts of a good sportsman and a careful business man, went there to investigate, with the result that he bought the property, which then consisted of a water power, a two-story wooden mill and two or three small tenements. Larned Pitcher soon joined him, and in 1825 four other partners were taken in, Willard Sayles, Lyman Tiffany, Oliver Dean and Ira Gay. Three of the partners were Pawtucket men—Slater, Pitcher and Gay. Slater and Gay were very influential in the early history of the company. The business grew rapidly and in 1841 they formed the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, which has had a long and successful career. Their charter was broad, and they extended their operations until they included textile mills, extensive improvements of the water powers on the Merrimac, the founding of the city of Manchester, and the operation of a large machine shop.

The last, which interests us most, was started about 1840. At first it was used only for building and repairing textile machinery, but before very long it was actively engaged in the manufacture of steam boilers, locomotives, steam fire engines, turbine wheels and machine tools. It comprised two three-story shops, each nearly 400 feet long, with foundries and forge shops, and employed in all 700 men—a large plant for seventy-five years ago. William A. Burke, its first head, left in 1845 to organize the Lowell Machine Shop, which built textile and paper machinery and locomotives, and did general millwright work. One of the workmen who helped install the machinery in the Amoskeag shop was William B. Bement. He remained there for two years as foreman and contractor, and in 1845 joined Burke at Lowell. O. W. Bayley, who succeeded Burke as head of the Amoskeag shop, left in 1855 and founded the Manchester Locomotive Works.

Ira Gay came to New Hampshire from Pawtucket in 1824. Besides the Nashua Manufacturing Company and the Nashua Iron & Steel Works, he and his brother, Ziba Gay, founded (about 1830) the Gay & Silver Company, later the North Chelmsford Machine & Supply Company referred to in a previous chapter. Frederick W. Howe, who did such important work with Robbins & Lawrence, the Providence Tool Company, and Brown & Sharpe, learned his trade in the Gay & Silver shop.

It has been claimed that the shop of Gage, Warner & Whitney, established by John H. Gage at Nashua in 1837, was the first one devoted exclusively to the manufacture of machine tools. If this is true, it does not involve as high a degree of specialization as would seem, for Bishop in 1860 says: “Their manufactures include iron planers of all sizes, engine lathes, from the smallest watch maker’s up to a size suitable for turning locomotive driving wheels six or eight feet in diameter, hand lathes of all sizes, chucking lathes of all dimensions, with sliding bed, bolt cutting machines for rapidly transforming any part of a plain bolt into a nice, evenly threaded screw, upright and swing drills, boring machines for shaping the interior of steam cylinders, or other bores of large diameter, slabbers of all kinds, gear-cutting engines of all sizes for shaping and smoothing the teeth of gear wheels with perfect accuracy, power punching machines of various sizes, etc.”[196] In 1852 they began building steam engines. With all this formidable list, it seems never to have been a very large shop.

In 1825 the improvement of the water power at what is now Lowell was begun. Almost at the very beginning of this development work, a large machine shop was built and placed under the charge of Paul Moody, who was regarded as one of the foremost mechanics of his day and was an expert in cotton machinery. This shop was retained by the Water Power Company for nearly twenty years, when it was sold (1845) and reorganized as the Lowell Machine Shop under Burke’s leadership. It employed at times one thousand men, and became one of the most important shops in the whole Merrimac Valley. James B. Francis, the great hydraulic engineer, began his life work as a draftsman here in 1833; and later Bement became its chief draftsman, leaving it to go to Philadelphia.

From 1820 to 1840, other shops sprang up in the Merrimac Valley, such as C. M. Marvel & Company, of Lowell, the Lawrence Machine Shop, and the Essex Machine Shop, where Amos Whitney, of Pratt & Whitney, learned his trade, almost all of them building textile machinery, as well as machine tools. The output of these shops showed little specialization. They built almost anything which they could sell.

Of the Massachusetts towns, Worcester and Fitchburg seem to have been the first to develop successful shops producing machine tools only. In Worcester also the machinery trade had its beginning in the manufacture of textile machinery; in fact, Worcester antedates even Pawtucket in its attempts at cotton spinning, but these at first were unsuccessful. Practically all the early water privileges in and about the town, not used for sawmills, were used for textile mills. Prior to 1810 there was a small clock shop, some paper mills, and a few other enterprises, but they could hardly be dignified as factories. One of these was the old shop where Thomas Blanchard invented his copying lathe for turning irregular forms.

An Abraham Lincoln operated a mill and a forge with a trip hammer as early as 1795. Here, in quarters rented from Lincoln, Earle & Williams started, about 1810, the first machine shop in the city. The town grew slowly and its interests were largely local. It was not until 1820 that Worcester took first rank even among the towns in the county. There was quite an excitement over the discovery of coal in 1823. It was found, however, to be so poor, that, as someone put it at the time, “there was a —— sight more coal after burning it than there was before.” The Providence & Worcester canal was opened in 1828, but its usefulness for navigation was greatly limited by the many power privileges along its route. Its traffic was never large and it went out of business in 1848. It served, however, to hasten the building of the Boston & Worcester Railroad, which was built by Boston capital to deflect the trade of the central Massachusetts towns from Providence to that city. It opened in 1835; and in 1836 there were listed in Worcester “seven machinery works,” one wire mill and one iron foundry. Most of the earlier tool builders were trained in the small textile-machinery shops which had sprung up after 1810, such as Washburn & Goddard’s, Goulding’s, Phelps & Bickford’s, White & Boyden’s. The rapid development of railroads created a demand for machine tools which the Worcester mechanics were quick to recognize, as had Nasmyth and Roberts in England.

Thomas Blanchard, who was born near Worcester, is one of the picturesque and attractive figures in our mechanical history. He was a shy, timid boy, who stammered badly, and was considered “backward.” The ingenious tinkerer, laughed at by all, first secured his standing by devising an apple-parer which made a hit, social and mechanical. At eighteen he began building a tack machine and worked six years on it before he considered it finished. The essentials of its design have been little changed since. It made over two hundred tacks a minute and its product was more uniform and better than the hand-made tacks. Blanchard sold the patent for it for $5000, a large price for those days, but only a fraction of its real value.

A few years later, about 1818, he invented the lathe for turning irregular forms which is associated with his name. It was first built for turning gun-stocks at the Springfield Armory, and the original machine (Fig. 29) is still preserved there in the museum. Blanchard worked at the Armory for several years as an expert designer and invented or improved about a dozen machines for the manufacture of firearms, chiefly mortising and turning machines.

He was a fertile inventor and worked in many lines besides tool building. His principal income came from royalties on his “copying” lathe. Many stories are told of his ingenuity and homely wit. In his later life he was a patent expert. His keen mechanical intuitions, his wide and varied experience and unswerving honesty, gave weight to his opinions, and his old age was spent in comfortable circumstances. He died in 1864.

In 1823 William A. Wheeler came to Worcester, and two years later he was operating a foundry. He did some machine work, and had the first steam engine and the first boring machine in Worcester, and also an iron planer “weighing 150 lb., 4 ft. long and 20 in. wide,” the first one, it is said, in the state. Beginning with three or four hands, this foundry employed at times two hundred men. Its long career closed in the summer of 1914.

Samuel Flagg moved to Worcester from West Boylston in 1839, to be near the Wheeler foundry from which he got his castings. “Uncle Sammy Flagg” was the first man in Worcester to devote himself entirely to tool building, and is considered the father of the industry there. He made hand and engine lathes in rented quarters in the old Court Mills, which has been called the cradle of the Worcester tool building industry. His first lathes were light and crude, with a wooden bed, wrought-iron strips for ways, chain-operated carriage, and cast gears, as cut gears were unheard of in the city at that time.

His first competitor, Pierson Cowie, began making chain planers about 1845. After a few years he sold his business to Woodburn, Light & Company, which in a few years became Wood, Light & Company, one of the best known of the older firms. About the same time S. C. Coombs began making lathes and planers. Flagg meantime had organized the firm of Samuel Flagg & Company, which included two of his former apprentices, L. W. Pond (whose portrait appears in Fig. 46) and E. H. Bellows. Pond later bought out Flagg and Bellows and developed the business greatly. It was incorporated as the Pond Machine Tool Company, in 1875, specialized in heavy engine lathes, and is now part of the Niles-Bement-Pond Company. Bellows went into the engine business, and Flagg started another enterprise, the Machinist Tool Company, which did not last long. It lasted long enough, however, to build one of the largest lathes made up to that time, 35 feet long with ways 8 feet wide.

From the old Phelps & Bickford and S. C. Coombs shops came the two Whitcomb brothers, Carter and Alonzo, who formed the Carter Whitcomb Company in 1849, which became the Whitcomb Manufacturing Company in 1872. From the Coombs company also came successively Shepard, Lathe & Company; Lathe, Morse & Company, and the Draper Machine Tool Company. P. Blaisdell & Company was founded in 1865 by Parritt Blaisdell, who had been fifteen years with Wood, Light & Company; and S. E. Hildreth, who had worked for more than twenty years with Flagg and Pond, became a partner in this firm eight years later. The Whitcomb, Draper and Blaisdell companies were united in 1905 into the present Whitcomb-Blaisdell Machine Tool Company. From the old Blaisdell shop came also J. E. Snyder & Son through Currier & Snyder, who began building drills in 1833 and were both old workmen at Blaisdell’s. The original Reed & Prentice Company was started by A. F. Prentice, who sold a half interest to F. E. Reed in 1875. The Woodward & Powell Planer Company comes from the Powell Planer Company, incorporated in 1876. This maze of relationships is made clear by reference to the table given in Fig. 45. The Norton Company comes from F. B. Norton, who began experimenting on vitrified emery wheels about 1873 and put them on the market in 1879. At his death the business was incorporated as the Norton Emery Wheel Company, now the Norton Company. Charles H. Norton’s work in developing precision grinding has been perhaps the most distinguished contribution to the later generation of Worcester mechanics. He began work in the shops of the Seth Thomas Clock Company at Thomaston, Conn., under his uncle, N. A. Norton, who was master mechanic there for about forty years. At his uncle’s death, Norton became master mechanic. He was with the Clock Company about twenty years in all, most of the time in charge of the design and building of all their tools, machinery and large tower clocks.

In 1886 Mr. Norton went to the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company of Providence as assistant to Mr. Parks, their chief engineer. Soon afterward he became designer and engineer for their work in cylindrical grinding machinery, remaining in that capacity for four years. In 1890 he went to Detroit with Henry M. Leland and formed a corporation called the Leland-Falkner-Norton Company, Falkner being a Michigan lumber man. Associated with them was Charles H. Strellinger, a well-known dealer in tools and machinery. Six years later Mr. Norton returned to Brown & Sharpe and was again their engineer of grinding machinery until he went to Worcester in 1900. The Norton Grinding Company, organized that year and financed by men connected with the Norton Emery Wheel Company, have built cylindrical and plain surface grinding machinery designed by Charles H. Norton, and under his direction have been leaders in refining and extending the process of precision grinding.

The Norton Company and the Norton Grinding Company should not be confused. The former make grinding wheels; the latter build grinding machines. Neither should F. B. Norton, who founded the grinding wheel industry and who died in 1885, be confused with Charles H. Norton, who did not come to Worcester until fifteen years later. There is no connection in their work, and despite the similarity of name, they were in no way related.

The greatest industry in Worcester is the American Steel and Wire Company, formerly the Washburn & Moen Company. While it is no longer associated with tool building, it passed through that phase and traces back to the textile industry as well. It was founded by Ichabod Washburn, who started in as a boy in a cotton factory in Kingston, R. I., during the War of 1812. Making up his mind to become a machinist, he served an apprenticeship and then worked in Asa Waters’ armory and with William Hovey, one of the early mechanics in Worcester. About 1820 he began the manufacture of woolen machinery and lead pipe in partnership first with William Howard and later with Benjamin Goddard. The enterprise prospered. As he was making cards for cotton and woolen machinery, he determined to manufacture the necessary wire himself by a new drawing process. His first experiments were a failure, but by 1830 they were successful enough to justify his undertaking regular manufacture. He superseded the old methods entirely and built up the present great business. Goddard retired, and, after various changes in partnership, Washburn took in his son-in-law, Philip L. Moen, in 1850. By 1868 the firm employed more than nine hundred men, and wire drawing, which began as an incident in the manufacture of textile machinery, had become their sole activity. Today the works employ eight thousand men. In 1833 Washburn, in order to make an outlet for his wire products, induced the Read brothers to move to Worcester from Providence and begin the manufacture of screws. This business was operated separately under the name of C. Read & Company. Later it was moved back to Providence, where it developed into the American Screw Company.

Worcester mechanics have made many things besides machine tools; in small tools and in gun work they have long been successful. The Coes Wrench Company was started in 1836 by Loring and A. G. Coes, and began to make the present form of screw wrench in 1841. Asa Waters, in Millbury near by, was one of the early American gun makers. After Waters came other gun makers, Ethan Allen, Forehand & Wadsworth, Harrington & Richardson, and Iver Johnson, who later moved to Fitchburg.

Much of Worcester’s prominence as a manufacturing center is due to the unusual facilities it offered to mechanics to begin business in a small way. Nearly every manufacturing enterprise in the city began in small, rented quarters. There were a number of large buildings which rented space with power to these small enterprises; one of them, Merrifield’s, was three stories high, 1100 feet long, and had fifty tenants, employing two to eight hundred men. Coes, Flagg, Daniels, Wood, Light & Company, Coombs, Lathe & Morse, Whitcomb, Pond and J. A. Fay, all began, or at some time operated, in this way. One is struck, in looking over the old records, with the constant recurrence of certain names, as the Earles, Goddards, Washburns, and realizes that he is among a race of mechanics which was certain sooner or later to build up a successful manufacturing community.

Fitchburg, while not so large or so influential, is almost as old a tool building community as Worcester. Its history centers about the Putnam Machine Company which was started by John and Salmon W. Putnam, who came from a family of mechanics. The latter’s portrait appears in Fig. 47. They, too, began in cotton manufacturing, John as a contractor making cotton machine parts, and Salmon as a bobbin boy and later as an overseer at New Ipswich and Lowell. In 1836 they went to Trenton, N. J., intending to start a machine shop there, but the panic of 1837 intervened and made it impossible. They had themselves built most of the machines required; they stored these and found employment until business conditions improved. Finally, they started in a hired basement in Ashburnham, Mass., under the name of J. & S. W. Putnam.

A year later they moved to Fitchburg and began repairing cotton machinery. At first they did their work entirely themselves, but their business increased rapidly and they soon hired an apprentice. Their first manufactured product was a gear cutter. This gave them a start and they soon developed a full line of standard tools. Though he was the younger brother, S. W. Putnam was the leading spirit. He first built upright drills with a swinging table so that the work could be moved about under the drill without unclamping. He designed the present form of back rest for lathes, and is said to have invented the universal hanger. The latter invention, however, has been claimed for several other mechanics in both England and America. In 1849 the brothers were burned out, without insurance. They repaired their machinery, built a temporary shed over it, and were at work again in two weeks. The present company was formed in 1858.

The Putnam company has been influential in other lines than machine tools. Putnam engines were for many years among the best known in the country, and the company was also intimately concerned with the early development of the rock drill, through Charles Burleigh, the head of their planer department and the inventor of the Burleigh drill. In fact, the first successful drills, those for the Hoosac tunnel, together with the compressors, were designed and built in the Putnam shops. Sylvester Wright, who founded the Fitchburg Machine Works, was for ten years foreman of their lathe department, and most of the old mechanics in and about Fitchburg were Putnam men.

Scattered here and there are other companies. At Nashua were Gage, Warner & Whitney, to which we have referred, and the Flather Manufacturing Company which was founded by Joseph Flather, an Englishman, in 1867. The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee Falls came from the old Ames & Fisher shop at North Chelmsford. This was started by Nathan P. Ames, Senior, in 1791, who operated a trip hammer and other machinery, making edged tools and millwork. The shop was burned in 1810, and he moved to Dedham, Mass., for a year or so, but returned and resumed his former business on the old site. His sons, Nathan P., Jr., and James T., learned their trade with their father. The older brother, Nathan, moved to Chicopee Falls in 1829. James joined him in 1834. The Ames Manufacturing Company, formed the same year, lived for sixty years and employed at one time over a thousand men. From the start they had close relations with the Government and did an extensive business in all kinds of military supplies, swords, bayonets, guns, cannon, cavalry goods, etc. They cast bronze statuary, and the famous doors of the Capitol at Washington were made by them. They rivaled Robbins & Lawrence in gun machinery and shared with them the order for the Enfield Armory. This contract alone took three years to complete. Their gun-stock machinery went to nearly every government in Europe.

In addition to all this they built the famous Boydon waterwheel, mill machinery, and a list of standard machine tools quite as catholic as that of Gage, Warner & Whitney. They did their work well, contributed material improvements to manufacturing methods and had one of the most influential shops of their day.

Most of the plants for manufacturing woodworking machinery can be traced back to a comparatively small area limited approximately by Fitchburg, Gardner, Keene and Nashua. This section was poor farming land, rough and heavily wooded, and the ingenuity of its inhabitants was early directed toward utilizing the timber. Mr. Smith, of the H. B. Smith Company of Smithville, N. J., came originally from Woodstock, Vt., and Walter Haywood started at Gardner. J. A. Fay and Edward Josslyn began manufacturing woodworking machinery as J. A. Fay & Company at Keene, in 1836. In 1853 they felt the need of better facilities and purchased Tainter & Childs’ shop at Worcester, which was manufacturing the Daniels wood planer. Mr. Fay died soon after, and the business passed through the hands of H. A. Richardson, Josslyn’s nephew, to Richardson, Merriam & Company. They built up a good business before the Civil War, and had branch offices in New York, Chicago, and Cincinnati.

In the early sixties the western agents bought the name of J. A. Fay & Company and started manufacturing at Cincinnati. Later this was united with the Egan Company, and the present J. A. Fay & Egan Company formed. When J. A. Fay & Company was started at Cincinnati, machinery, superintendent and mechanics were brought from Worcester, and, as the name implies, the present company was a direct descendant from the old Worcester and Keene enterprise.

Winchendon, in the center of the district referred to, has long been known for its woodworking machinery. Baxter D. Whitney began there before 1840. He died in 1915, aged ninety-eight years, the last of the early generation of mechanics. For many years he was a leader in the development of woodworking tools, and the business which he founded is still in successful operation under the management of his son, William M. Whitney.

Springfield, although an important manufacturing city, has had few prominent tool builders. One company, however, the Baush Machine Tool Company, has built up a wide reputation for drilling machines, especially large multiple spindle machines.