AN ECOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE COASTAL COMMUNITIES OF SWANSEA AND SOMERSET

AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF FALL RIVER

BY

CARL HERZOG

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

IN

HISTORY

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

2010

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MASTER OF ARTS, HISTORY

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CARL HERZOG

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2010

ABSTRACT

The history of the 19th century textile mills in New England has largely

focused on inland mill towns that experienced significant social and

environmental turmoil as a result of the development of the mills. This study

examines the experience of the coastal communities of Somerset, Swansea and

their surrounding areas in relationship to the development of the textile mill

industry in Fall River, and contrasts that experience with more widely studied

inland towns. The coastal geography and culture of Swansea and Somerset

promoted these towns' development much earlier than Fall River, but also allowed

them to remain an independent, diversified economic force that contributed to Fall

River’s nineteenth-century ascendance and benefited from it. These coastal

communities help redefine the economic powers behind New England

industrialization in the nineteenth century. By taking an environmental historical

perspective of coastal development, this study demonstrate the complex role that

environmental factors played in driving New England industrialization beyond the

more commonly studied inland examples.

i

Table of ContentsAbstract....................................................................................................i

Chapter One, Introduction.......................................................................1

Chapter Two, Geography and Early Development..................................18

Chapter Three, Economic Diversity........................................................35

Chapter Four, Farming and Fishing.........................................................56

Chapter Five, Conclusion........................................................................70

Maps........................................................................................................75

Bibliography............................................................................................80

ii

Chapter 1

Introduction

“To really appreciate Fall River, one should never approach nearer

than the opposite side of Mount Hope Bay." -- Edgar Mayhew Bacon,

19041

In 1904, Edward Mayhew Bacon, buoyed by the publishing success of his

travelogue of the Hudson River, came to Narragansett Bay to give it the same

treatment. He explored much of the area by small boat and canoe, traveling the

rivers that emptied into the Bay and examining its shorelines from the water. As

he worked his way in counter-clockwise fashion around Narragansett Bay he

eventually passed through the Bristol Narrows, under the shadow of Mount Hope

where the Indian chief King Phillip had once reigned, and into Mount Hope Bay.

Then, as now, this square-shaped body of water served as a border between

Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Four different rivers empty into the Bay and six

different towns in the two states share its shoreline.

Bacon's waterborne choice of travel gave him a unique perspective on the

diverse economies of the towns surrounding Mount Hope Bay. In particular, he

noted the boisterous mills of Fall River, which visually dominated the Bay's

1 Edgar Mayhew Bacon, Narragansett Bay: Its Historic and Romantic Associations and Picturesque Setting (Putnam, 1904), 132.

1

landscape. At that time, Fall River's textile industry was at its peak. Dozens of

huge mills producing vast amounts of cotton cloth and driven by steam crowded

the hillside overlooking the Taunton River and Mount Hope Bay. A pall of smoke

choked the air over the town, and Bacon recommended admiring its

accomplishments out of the range of its impacts. “By day smoke hangs heavy

over its chimneys, that are so thick as to suggest the idea that every building has

shouldered an inordinately long musket and is staggering with it to a general

rendezvous.”2

The environmental and social histories of New England's mill economies

suggest that Bacon was right to keep his distance. The mills and the towns that

sprung up around them have been largely depicted as undesirable locales that had

myriad negative impacts on their surrounding environment. Initially driven by

water power, mills were located along rivers, and their effluent and waste were

dumped downstream. In inland, freshwater ecosystems, this frequently killed off

pre-existing fishing economies. Dams to control water for millpower reduced

downstream flows and cut off natural access for fish.3 Mill jobs replaced

subsistence farming occupations, and the culture of neighboring towns was given

over to the factories. Relying upon a few high-profile examples, historians for a

long time tended to credit Boston elites with having founded, funded and

2 Ibid.

3 For a discussion of environmental impacts of the Lowell/Lawrence mills on the Merrimack River, see Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

2

controlled these mill towns.4 Although mills were initially located in rural

settings as determined by water supply, local residents are largely perceived as

having had no sense of agency in creating these mills or benefiting from them as

investments.

Fall River's mill economy is occasionally lumped into this model of

development, and Fall River does provide some significant examples of the

eventual downsides of the mills.5 But returning to Bacon's marine perspective

shows how differently Fall River's neighbors fared compared to communities in

the more frequently studied northern mill towns. Bacon noted that along the north

shore of Mount Hope Bay and across the Taunton River from Fall River lay the

bucolic landscapes of Somerset and Swansea:

Each turn of the (Taunton River) presents a surprise, a picture to treasure always in the house of memory. The farmhouses near the shore are delightfully old-fashioned, nearly always trim and comfortable in appearance, and generally glorified by a setting of noble trees, among which elms predominate.... Who can forget the first glimpse of the three white spires of Somerset, rising from a little mosaic of roofs and tree tops and suggesting to the mind of the poet and the bosom of the river delightful, if conventional, reflections.6

Bacon's picturesque assessment of Somerset stands in stark contrast to his

description of Fall River, which sits just on the opposite side of the Taunton River.

4 Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (The Department of History of Smith College, 1935); Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993).

5 Mary H. Blewett, Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 309.

6 Bacon, Narragansett Bay: Its Historic and Romantic Associations and Picturesque Setting, 134.

3

At its surface, Bacon seems to depict Fall River's western neighbors as having

escaped its grimy industrial fate, but at the price of being left out of modern

prosperity. The towns along the north shore were cast by Bacon as having been

uninvolved bystanders to the phenomenal industrial development taking place

across the river. While they may not have suffered the environmental, social and

economic trauma of other mill town regions, they did not benefit from it either –

except to the extent that suburban expansion allowed landowners to sell off

otherwise unproductive property and leave. This view was bolstered through the

twentieth century as interstate highways allowed the north shore of Mount Hope

Bay and the lower Taunton River to become suburbs of Providence and Boston.

But the path of cause and effect was not at all the one-way trip that these

interpretations would suggest. The economic fate of Somerset and Swansea was

not a collateral result of Fall River fortunes. The towns on the northern edge of

Mount Hope Bay prospered for more than a century before Fall River came into

being, and their prosperity contributed to the creation of Fall River. Their

residents leveraged the environmental conditions of the region to establish

diversified industries that included agriculture, fisheries, shipbuilding, pottery,

ironworks and coastal trade. This diversity gave them many more avenues to

economic success, which allowed them to survive and thrive through the changing

economic fortunes of the colonial era, new republic expansion and nineteenth-

century industrialization. With the profits from earlier enterprises, business

owners from Somerset and Swansea crossed the Taunton in the early nineteenth

4

century and provided the capital that started the mills of Fall River. But rarely in

this process did the residents west of the Taunton River abandon their original

enterprises. Instead, they worked to insure that the benefits of Fall River's growth

would accrue back to their other businesses along the north shore of Mount Hope

Bay. They made Fall River a market for industrial, agricultural and consumer

goods they were already producing, and produced new goods for the factories

there. They encouraged the construction of railroads passing through their towns

on the way to and from Fall River in order to move their own goods to other

metropolitan markets. They provided shipbuilding and shipping services to Fall

River. These towns were able to forge a dynamic relationship with Fall River's

industrial development in which they contributed to the growth of the Spindle

City and benefited in return, while still maintaining their own identity and a high

degree of economic independence.

Why did these towns successfully encourage and profit from industry when

the history of New England mills suggests that most towns abutting textile mills

suffered from the arrival of heavy industry in the early nineteenth century? This

paper argues that the coastal geography of Mount Hope Bay provided the

residents of Somerset and Swansea with the resources to craft a different

experience. While some of the benefits that they enjoyed were specifically unique

to Mount Hope Bay, much of the region's economic development reflected

advantages shared by other coastal communities in southern New England. The

characteristics of these communities have been frequently ignored in the

5

historiography of New England industrialization – which has tended to focus

more on inland communities and on northern New England communities.

Examining Somerset and Swansea shows that coastal communities contributed to

the diversity of the New England industrial experience in ways that have not been

fully recognized in previous histories. This paper will show that three elements of

the Mount Hope Bay experience distinguish it from the more commonly

recognized history of New England mill communities: First, coastal resources

helped create a diverse and flexible economic base prior to industrialization.

Secondly, the success of that economy created local capital that was used to build

the mills. And thirdly, the coastal geography helped mitigate the ecological

impacts of the mills on neighboring communities.

The historiography of New England industrialization has largely focused on

the experiences of Samuel Slater (first in Pawtucket, R.I. and later in Dudley,

Mass.) and of the Merrimack River mills. While these examples have offered two

different models of industrial development, they share inland characteristics that

have generated a deceptively homogenous view of New England mill

communities. Much of the study of how these mills affected their communities

has focused on the social changes wrought by the shift from largely self-sufficient

agrarian existence to a wage labor economy in which women played a new, more

6

significant role.7 The Waltham-Lowell system, as it has become known, is

credited with creating the formula for large scale production at the cost of

dehumanizing its massive workforce. Analysis of the brutally rigid work schedule

has demonstrated the dramatic shift that workers experienced going from a

subsistence farm that operated in harmony with the sun and seasons to a 12-hour,

six-day workweek governed by the sound of the factory whistle. Other studies

have looked at the harsh dormitory-style living conditions of the workers and the

tenement communities that sprung up around the mills. Shifting labor markets

have been depicted as having negatively impacted the agricultural landscapes of

the communities surrounding the mills. While they drew labor away from

traditional farming lifestyles and contributed to massive influxes of new

immigrants, the Lowell mills also had profoundly detrimental effects on the

Merrimack River. Damming of the river created water shortages and altered fish

habitats, while dumping of mill effluent, waste, and employee sewage polluted the

waters for miles downstream.8

The flow of capital that created the massive mills at Lowell, Lawrence and

Waltham has been largely perceived as having been inserted from the outside by

the “Boston Associates”, a loose-knit collaborative of elite investors from the city.

7 William Moran, The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove (New York: St Martin's Press, 2004); Thomas Dublin, Transforming women's work: New England lives in the industrial revolution (Cornell University Press, 1995); Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

8 Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, chap. 6,7.

7

Originally used as a term by historian Vera Shlakmen in the 1930s9 to refer to a

broad group of investors who may have been familiar with each other and

occasionally overlapped on projects, the term has since been mistakenly assumed

to be the name of a formal business partnership. This latter interpretation has

caused Boston capital to be credited with the formation of many mills throughout

New England that were actually largely locally developed.10

Towns where the textile industry maintained more of local shop-like

integration with its neighboring communities have been referred to as the “family

system.” Also frequently called the Rhode Island system, it was pioneered by

Samuel Slater with his first mill in Pawtucket, R.I. Slater attempted to duplicate it

in mills in Oxford, Dudley and Webster in southwestern Massachusetts. This

earlier form of mill development relied more strongly on a family home and

village structure as a basis for support. The operations of the mills themselves

tended to more closely resemble an artisan's shop and borrowed many of its

management styles from the shop environment.11 While the Waltham-Lowell

mills created large dormitory-style housing and employed temporary labor

brought in from other locations, the Rhode Island-style mill village more closely

resembled the rural New England village that predated the mills.12 By attempting

to incorporate the new mill environment into the existing social and civic

9 Shlakman, Economic history of a factory town.

10 Francois Weil, “Capitalism and Industrialization in New England, 1815-1845,” The Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (March 1998): 1338.

11 Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (Cornell University Press, 1984), 139, 147.

8

structure, Slater tried to ease the transition from agriculture to industry.13 The

impacts on existing towns were still significant, however, as large segments of the

population moved from farming into merchant trades and factory work, as

described by Jonathan Prude's study of the Slater mills in Dudley and Oxford.14

The impacts of the mill development in Fall River on the coastal towns of

Swansea and Somerset along the north shore of Mount Hope Bay fail to fit into

Prude's rural model either. In Prude's inland towns, there was an exclusive

reliance on agriculture prior to the arrival of the mills that impacted the ability of

successive generations of families to remain in the same towns. As landholdings

were diminished by inheritance, or as individual siblings were left out, new

generations were forced to move out of town.15 The development of mills brought

new workers to the towns, and created a market demand for local agriculture to

feed that population as well as a merchant class catering to the needs of the mills

and the larger population. In contrast, along the north shore of Mount Hope Bay

and up the Taunton River, there were options for family members to pursue

careers in fishing, shipping, shipbuilding and trade before the arrival of the mills.

12 Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860, 126; Kenneth Frazier Payne, “Early Rhode Island Textile Mill Villages: A Study of the Origins and Early Examples of a Community Form” (Kingston, R.I: University of Rhode Island, 1977), 53.

13 Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 37-38.

14 Ibid., xii.

15 Ibid., 6-7.

9

This pattern reflects in part the longstanding connection between agriculture

and commerce that Carl Bridenbaugh described in Fat Mutton and Liberty of

Conscience.16 Coastal farmers throughout colonial Narragansett Bay were able to

exploit markets for produce in the southern colonies and Caribbean islands in part

because they could easily develop the shipping infrastructure needed to get their

produce to market. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, farmers began

vertically integrating their businesses to be both growers and shippers. The

development of shipbuilding, shipping ports, and other commercial infrastructure

in the coastal region created new opportunities for the children of farmers who

were willing to pursue mercantile or maritime occupations – and many in Mount

Hope Bay did. This allowed a diverse, thriving and stable community to develop

long before the creation of the first local textile mills. Those communities

continued to provide a broader array of opportunities after the mills were

established.

Unlike other mill towns along inland river regions, the coastal environment

and unique geology of northern Mount Hope Bay helped shape a dynamic

relationship that has frequently been ignored in the historiography of the region.

Contrary to common history of New England textile mills, which focuses on the

investment by urban elites from Boston, evidence suggests that the early

development of Fall River was largely the result of local capital earned in other

pursuits – many of which were unique to the coastal environment. This pattern, in

16 Carl Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience: Society in Rhode Island, 1636-1690 (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1974), 93-97.

10

turn, helped establish a sense of economic and social reciprocity between

neighboring rural and urban communities whereas traditional historiography of

the period has often asserted that industrialization yielded a largely one-way

transfer of benefits from rural communities to the cities.

The coastal nature of the towns along Mount Hope Bay gave them

advantages over inland communities in establishing a broader diversity of

industries such as shipbuilding and fishing, and allowed them to leverage their

maritime access for the benefit of traditional rural activities like farming. But

these same geographical features also buffered the towns from the environmental

impacts of nearby textile mill development. Whereas rural communities that

relied on the same rivers as mills suffered from the effects of industrial water

demands and polluted runoff, Mount Hope Bay's north shore towns were in a

completely different watershed from their industrial neighbor. While runoff from

Fall River's Quequechan River did affect Mount Hope Bay, the largest

environmental impacts of the river's mill development were on public health

within the city of Fall River. The coastal towns, however, did experience their

own unique environmental changes and impacts as a result of land uses that

differed from rural communities inland. In particular, the early cultivation of

regional forests for shipbuilding meant that the lower Narragansett Basin was

likely more actively cleared at an earlier time than Massachusetts inland forests,

which remained much more intact until the development of a market farming

economy made widespread clearing economically worthwhile.

11

Returning for a moment to Bacon's waterborne perspective helps paint a

clearer picture of the characteristics of Mount Hope Bay. Looking west from a

boat in the middle of Mount Hope Bay, one sees Mount Hope itself rising from

the Bay. But as the eye sweeps to the north, the horizon falls away to a series of

marshy river mouths. Four rivers enter Mount Hope Bay at its northern shore:

from west to east, the Kickamuit, the Cole, the Lee's and finally the Taunton. (See

Figure 4a & 4b) Across this landscape the elevation changes little. A long

shoreline runs north from Kickamuit mouth to the low-lying cove at the mouth of

the Cole. A rocky neck separates the Cole from another cove at the mouth of the

Lee, and low-lying marsh wraps from the Lee around Brayton Point to the

western shore of the Taunton. But as one's eye crosses the Taunton, that river's

eastern shoreline abruptly rises up to a long, steep hillside that runs nearly

unbroken from the mouth of the Taunton south along the bay to Tiverton at the

Bay's southeastern corner. This abrupt change in the horizon marks a geological

rift separating the biologically rich Narragansett Basin west of the Taunton and

the granite fault line under Fall River.

By Bacon's time at the turn of the twentieth century, one would have been

unable to see much of the Quequechan River from which Fall River took its

name. Prior to being covered over by mill construction and diverted for steam

power, the Quequechan was a series of waterfalls running down the granite cliff

face from two large ponds on the hilltop. At the base of the cliffs, the

Quequechan emptied into the Taunton River very near where the Taunton empties

12

into Mount Hope Bay. The Quequechan dropped more than 150 feet in less than

two miles. It was the power of this falling water that made Fall River perfect for

mill development in the pre-steam era. Numerous mills were built on both sides

of the river on the granite hillsides. But by 1904, the river had been completely

covered over by mill buildings and culverts that were now drawing water from the

river to feed steam turbines. Bacon makes no mention of seeing the Quequechan

in his travelogue, and it is unlikely he would have made out much more than a

trickle from the outfall pipe among the waterfront factories and mills.

The development of Fall River and the Quequechan defies the common

environmental history of New England textile mills in several ways. Other mills

located at falls along long, winding rivers still had to get their output to market.

In most places this meant building roads and, later, railroads. But the unusual

geography of the Quequechan provided the additional benefit of being

immediately accessible to a deepwater port. The development of Fall River as a

port not only assisted Fall River itself, but also contributed to the ongoing success

of the neighboring towns, whose business leaders leveraged Fall River's

infrastructure to serve themselves. Ships coming and going from Fall River with

textile goods also carried agricultural produce from Swansea and pottery from

Somerset. Shipyards in Somerset provided repairs for ships coming and going

from Fall River. Iron forges in Somerset fed by local ore provided equipment to

ships, mills and other industry on both sides of the Taunton.

13

When the railroads connecting Fall River to Providence were first

considered, business owners in Somerset and Swansea exerted their political

influence to ensure that the lines passed through their towns at the most beneficial

locations. Railroads intended to serve Fall River were made to serve Somerset

and Swansea as well, moving industrial and agricultural produce to markets in

Providence. Eventually, the layout of railroads also opened the door for property

owners in these towns to begin developing waterfront recreation and suburban

homes.

Agriculture and waterfront industries were continuing to operate successfully

in Bacon's time, but the north shore of Mount Hope Bay was also becoming an

early suburb for Fall River, a description that has tended to disenfranchise existing

residents. As suburbs, the towns were perceived as having no identity of their

own. They were perceived to serve only as bedroom communities for residents

whose public and business lives were far more grounded in Fall River. This took

longer to become the case in Somerset and Swansea. By virtue of the diverse

economy they had created and their contributions to the wealth of Fall River,

Somerset and Swansea at the end of the nineteenth century were still dominated

by families who could trace their local lineage back numerous generations. The

distinctly rural nature of Swansea and much of Somerset, abutting the highly

urbanized Fall River fails to fit the more common historiography of early suburbs

14

as empty land that was simply filled in with new residents.17 Like the flow of

capital, the early flow of suburbia was not solely one of people coming into

Somerset and Swansea, but also the settlement of people already there into new

jobs across the Taunton in Fall River.

The landscape contributed to opportunities that shaped industry and

economy along the north shore of Mount Hope Bay, but the pattern of

development was also heavily influenced by the cultural history of the region.

Although the north shore of Mount Hope Bay is largely within the boundaries of

Massachusetts, many of the area's earliest settlers came from Rhode Island and

had more in common with that colony's religious dissidents than with the puritans

of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This too, was a product of the region's

geography. Crossing the Taunton River may not have constituted crossing the

Massachusetts Colony's border, but in many ways it was a crossing over to

another region outside the practical impacts, if not the legal reach, of Bay Colony

church leaders. Quakers were common residents of the Massachusetts towns of

Mount Hope Bay, and they pursued the same flexibility of enterprise

characteristic of the Quaker Grandees of Rhode Island. In his history of Rhode

Island, William G. McLoughlin describes the Quakers as having little use for the

sermons and dogma that dominated cultural life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

As a result, he suggests Rhode Islanders were less inclined to create colleges or

17 Henry C. Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1988); Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs (Harvard University Press, 1978).

15

send their youth off to one for extended study of the scripture. Instead, they were

more focused on business, particularly as they rebuilt communities devastated by

King Phillip's War.18 McLoughlin's argument can be easily extended to the

residents of the north shore of Mount Hope Bay. From King Phillip's War through

the Civil War, the region was noted for its diversity of enterprise. Records of the

families that lived and worked in the area through those generations suggest a

focus, not just on business, but on a creative, flexible approach to business that

mirrors the characteristics McLoughlin imbues in Rhode Islanders. The Mount

Hope region residents took advantage of their geography as well as the changes in

the communities around them, notably Fall River, and adjusted their approaches

to business in ways that allowed them to continue to prosper through the

nineteenth century.

Recasting the development of these towns in this light returns some agency

and a sense of self-determination to people whom the historiography of

industrialization has tended to dismiss largely as victims. It also serves to

demonstrate some of the differences in responses to industrialization that were

available to coastal communities as compared to rural inland communities. The

resources of the waterfront in the form of shipping, shipbuilding and fishing gave

these communities opportunities that inland communities along industrial rivers

did not have. At the same time, the nature of the coastal geography shielded them

18 William Gerald McLoughlin, Rhode Island, a history (W. W. Norton & Company, 1986), 46.

16

to some degree from the environmental impacts that devastated many industrial

watersheds.

17

Chapter 2

Geography, Early Development and Environmental Impacts

The Taunton River, as wide as half a mile at some points, would seem an

obvious natural obstacle to transportation, buffering the communities on the

river's western shore from the industrial development of Fall River on the river's

eastern shore. While the river was a boundary that prevented urban sprawl from

crossing town borders, the river as merely an obstacle does not explain the

dramatic differences in the economic development of Fall River and the north

shore towns. For that, one must look to the river's underlying geology. The lower

Taunton River developed along a geological boundary separating two very

different environments – a widespread, fertile lowland on the western side of the

river and a largely barren granite ledge on the Fall River side. The differences in

these places affected where and how early Europeans settled the land, as well as

the type and extent of environmental impacts that their settlement had on the land

and its adjacent waters through the nineteenth century.

The economic opportunities afforded to residents of Somerset and Swansea

had their beginning in plate tectonics starting about 600 million years before the

first textile mills were built in Fall River. In the period geologists refer to as the

Precambrian era, a chain of volcanic islands formed off the coast of one continent

and over the eons moved to join with the Laurentian supercontinent, which would

eventually break up to form North America and Europe. The long stretch of

igneous rock left behind by the volcanoes created a formation geologists know as

18

the Avalon Terrane. This large block of the earth's crust is a complex of igneous

rock that, with the formation of the Atlantic Ocean, is now scattered from

Belgium to Massachusetts.19 In Massachusetts, the Avalon Terrane stretched

across the southeastern part of the state, from south of Boston to Mount Hope

Bay. There, about 315 million years before the first textile mills were built in Fall

River, a rift tore in the terrane, thrusting up a tall granite formation and leaving a

deep basin adjacent to it. The Assonet fault line, the demarcation between these

two features, runs along the eastern edge of Mount Hope Bay and up the Taunton

River. To the east, the high-rising crust of the Avalon Terrane formed the steep

hills of Fall River, whose granite would later provide the building blocks of the

massive textiles mills that fed off the water plummeting down the hillside into the

bay.

As the glaciers settled and melted, the basin to the west of the Assonet fault

filled with sedimentary deposits pushed ahead by the glaciers. Modern geologists

believe this depression, known as the Narragansett Basin, was also “probably

actively subsiding as the surrounding mountains rose.”20 The phenomenon

fostered the development of coal deposits, allowed surrounding hills to drain into

the basin and eventually created a fertile ground for the development of low-lying

swamps and forests similar to the Mississippi River delta. Reports of early

European incursions suggest that a thick forest of white oak existed at the north

19 James W. Skehan, Roadside Geology of Massachusetts, 1st ed. (Mountain Press Publishing Company, 2001), 43.

20 Ibid., 140.

19

side of the present-day Somerset and extended down the interior of the neck

toward Brayton Point – a key factor in attracting shipyards to the Taunton and

Lee's River in the 1690s.21

The wet, low-lying interior lands of the Narragansett Basin22 were also

conducive to the formation of bog ore – a variety of iron ore created by the

oxidation of iron in the groundwater when it reached the surface of springs and

ponds. The most prevalent form of iron ore in Massachusetts, it was found loose

on the bottom of ponds in such abundance that “a man with a sort of oyster tongs

could get half a ton in a day.”23 Although bog iron is relatively common

throughout Massachusetts, it was particularly abundant in the Narragansett Basin.

The first ironworks in the colonies was established on a tributary of the Taunton

River near the town of Raynham in 1652.24

To drain off its excess water, the region fed into five different rivers that still

exist today: Taunton, Lee's, Cole, Kickamuit, Palmer and Warren (See Figure 4b).

Beginning southwest of Boston, the basin today occupies a region roughly

between the current Route 79 and I-95 or the Blackstone River (See Fig. 1). From

21 William A. Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts (Town of Somerse, 1940), 11.

22 Among geographers and policymakers today, the term “Narragansett Basin” is frequently used to refer to Narragansett Bay and all the watersheds that feed into it. Throughout this paper, I will use this term in its geological intent to refer to the low elevation lands bordered on the south by Mount Hope Bay.

23 John Abbot Goodwin, The Pilgrim Republic (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1888), 528.

24 Enoch Sanford, History of Raynham, Mass: from the first settlement to the present time (Hammond, Angell & Co., 1870), 5.

20

these northern reaches, the rivers wind slowly southwest toward Mount Hope Bay

and Narragansett Bay. Water managers today consider them divided into two

watersheds, one following along the Taunton River and its tributaries, and one to

the west, encompassing the other rivers that empty into Mount Hope and

Narragansett Bay. (See Fig. 2)

These split watersheds are caused by glacial deposits and larger rock

formations along the north shore of the Bay, which prevent it from still being

considered a river delta. On the eastern shore of the mouth of the Taunton River,

low-lying marshland stretches west to the Lee's River. From there the land rises

somewhat and reaches south in the form of Gardner's Neck25, which is bounded

on the west by the cove at the mouth of the Cole River. To the west of the Cole

River, the Touisset peninsula stretches south and west to the mouth of the

Kickamuit River, and then further south to the tip of Bristol neck and Mount Hope

itself.

The river mouths produced several fertile ecosystems that benefited early

settlers. Salt marshes and marsh grasses grew along the deltas of the rivers,

produced livestock feed in addition to the meadow grasses of the river's flood

plain. In the bay and the river mouths, the silty bottom provided an ideal habitat

for oysters, clams and other shellfish. A variety of fish existed in the brackish

25 Gardner's Neck is occasionally referred to as Gardiner's Neck in both historical literature and current usage. For purposes of clarity and consistency, I have chosen Gardner, the preferred spelling of the branch of the family that settled there in the mid-1600s. Another branch of the same family keeping the Gardiner spelling settled in southern Rhode Island about the same time.

21

waters of the bay and river mouths. All these resources contributed not only to

the ability of early settlers to survive, but to the ability of later residents to

continue farming and fishing in a market economy.

Early Settlement

The first to recognize and exploit the fertile area along the west shore of the

Taunton River and the north shore of Mount Hope Bay were the tribes of the

Wampanoag Indian federation. At the mouth of the Taunton River, on the

modern-day Brayton Point, they created the village Shawomet, a fishing and

farming community that was one of the major settlements of the Wampanoags.26

To the west the next major settlement was Pokanoket, believed to have been

located near the modern day town of Warren. To the north, the village of Pocasset

was located near modern day Taunton. It is uncertain when Shawomet or

Pokanoket or Pocasset villages were established, but archaeological evidence

suggests that the Wampanoags, or their predecessors occupied settlements along

the Taunton River at least as early as 1000 A.D.27

Settlement along the rivers and Bay of the Narragansett Basin gave the

Indians access to the salt marsh, fishing and shellfishing, and easily cleared lands

26 The term Shawomet has a variety of spellings and references to different places and people. In addition to the village at the mouth of the Taunton, the term Shawomet has been used to refer to the specific tribe of the Wampanoags who lived there. It is also commonly referenced as the name of a village that was located in modern day Warwick, Rhode Island – also called Sowams. For the purposes of the paper, the term Shawomet refers to the land and the village located at modern-day Somerset.

27 Edmund Burke Delabarre, “A Possible Pre-Algonkian Culture in Southeastern Massachusetts,” American Anthropologist 27, no. 3, New Series (July 1925): 359.

22

for agriculture. It also offered easy water access to other communities both up the

Taunton River and across Narragansett Bay. Despite indications that the Indians

at Shawomet ran a ferry across the Taunton and frequently transited through the

Fall River region, there is no record of the Indians attempting to settle on those

rocky shores.

Although there are records of French ships trading with the Wampanoag

tribes in upper Narragansettt Bay in the 1500s, the first popularly recorded

European incursions into the region occurred in 1621 when Edward Winslow and

Stephen Hopkins travelled west from the Plymouth settlement in search of the

Wampanoag leader, Massasoit. They reported crossing the Taunton River and

stopping in a field cultivated by Indians at Shawomet.28 Winslow made one other

trip past Mount Hope Bay to see Massasoit at Pokanoket, but colonial settlement

did not occur until the 1660s. A Dutch trading vessel stranded at the mouth of the

Taunton in 1623 and initiated trade with the Indians at Shawomet.29 While it is

likely the Dutch, who had also been trading with the Narragansett Indians further

down the bay, may have continued to trade with Shawomet, there is no evidence

the Dutch ever settled on Mount Hope Bay either.

The complex merging of rivers and fertile lands made the north shore of

Mount Hope Bay as attractive to the colonists as it was to the Indians. By the

28 Nathaniel Morton et al., New-England's Memorial (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1855), 363.

29 Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland or, New York under the Dutch (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1846), 107.

23

time of King Phillip's War, the town of Swansea was actually composed of several

scattered settlements of homes and farms: one at Hundred Acre Cove on the

Palmer River, one at Metapoiset (present-day Gardner's Neck) and a larger

settlement of 18 homes on the east side of the Kickamuit River near the narrows

at Mount Hope Bay.30 The location of the largest settlement on the shore of

Mount Hope Bay suggests that the colonists, like the Indians, recognized the

value of the deepwater access that the Bay provided.

King Phillips War paved the way for the expansion of Swansea and the

development of Somerset. The Indians living on Mount Hope Bay had all either

been killed or fled. The Shawomet Lands were among many Indian sites that the

Plymouth Colony leaders chose to treat as conquered territory -- spoils of war.

Plymouth decided to parcel off the Shawomet property and sell it to help pay

debts associated with the war. The Shawomet Purchase, as it became known, sold

off all the Indian land along the west side of the lower Taunton between Dighton

and present-day Brayton Point. This was the rich timber and farmland with

deepwater access that colonists had wanted for decades but that the Indians had

never been willing to sell.31

Although many of the purchasers of these parcels were investors who never

set foot on the land, the division of the land into discrete lots established the

30 Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict (Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman Press, 2000), 21.

31 Mary Ann McDonald, “The Shawomet Purchase,” in Somerset, Massachusetts: Portrait of the American Experience in a New England Town (Somerset, Mass.: Somerset Historical Commission, 1981), 29.

24

parameters and layout of what would become the town of Somerset. A map of the

allocation created in 1683 demonstrates the value of the access to water and helps

explain the significance of the Shawomet Lands as a settlement (See Figure 3).

Each lot is a long narrow strip from the waterline to a central axis. This

arrangement allowed each landowner to build their own wharf for shipping out

agricultural produce.32 A separate set of parcels was established to the west of the

axis, and the region around the point, including an island, was established as a

third set of lots. The lots were between 36 and 45 acres each.33

As noted earlier, the town of Swansea was spread over a large area and

consisted of numerous settlements. But even these settlements were fairly spread

out during the colonial era after King Phillip's War. Initially, the division of land

in Shawomet suggested a similar arrangement was likely, but the soon-to-be

Somerset developed into a more tightly knit center village. The difference in

these patterns is a product of the diverging nature of economies in the region.

While agriculture continued to disperse the population in the western reaches of

Swansea, the development of economies like shipping and shipbuilding

contributed to the creation of densely populated villages around the key docks and

shipyards. These diverse village forms and their relationship to their surrounding

geography are discussed at length by Joseph Wood in The New England Village.

Wood argues that the allocation of land for agriculture and cattle adapted to the

32 Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 35.

33 Ibid., 22.

25

geography of the region, creating a dispersed village form with no clearly defined

village center.34 Along a river or in a valley, for example, the village could

develop as a long, narrow strip with homes and public buildings scattered for

several miles in either direction. This form was quite different from the public

perception of the colonial village as a densely developed nucleus of public and

commercial structures that gave way to farms on the periphery. Wood's thesis

helps explain the nature of Swansea and the eventual development of Somerset as

a separate town. The rivers running through Swansea, their associated meadows

and floodplains, and the necks of land in between helped define the arrangement

of properties and long-term development. The early garrison houses, which

provided a sense of defense and the closest thing to a village meeting place, were

widely scattered and saw little “urban” development occur around them.35 No

discernible village center in the commercial sense developed for Swansea during

the colonial period.

Shawomet, on the other hand, developed several villages centered around the

most active waterfront shipyards and trading docks, and stretched along the

shoreline north and south from there. As the central business functions and

reputations of each village changed with time, so did their names, but several

retained their identities for more than a century. Bowers Shores was named for

34 Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 20.

35 The Miles Garrison House was located at the Palmer River crossing near Hundred Acre Cove. The Bourne Garrison House was located at the head of Metapoiset (present-day Gardner's Neck). Both houses served as refuge for colonists from different Swansea settlements during King Phillip's War.

26

the family of shipbuilders whose yards were there; Slade's Ferry was named for

the region surrounding the ferry depot to Fall River; Pottersville was named for its

pottery factories; and, with a nod to the Old Testament, Egypt was the moniker

given to the docks of a merchant named Joseph Brown who specialized in

importing wheat.36 Even today, these names are familiar to many local residents.

Nautical charts produced of the region in 1776 provide a sense of the

maritime value of Mount Hope Bay and its northern rivers, but also indicate the

differences in development of the region. The charts produced for the Atlantic

Neptune atlas by Joseph des Barres include small squares to indicate buildings

along the shore. From these, the scattered settlements along the Cole and Lee's

river can be distinguished from the more clustered village of Somerset (labeled

Swansea) along the Taunton.(See Figure 4b).

As these commercial, industrial waterfront businesses continued to grow,

Shawomet's identity took greater shape and the community of Swansea seemed

further and further away both in terms of identity as well as physical proximity.

Numerous efforts to separate the towns had occurred before the Revolution, but

the issue finally came to a head in 1790. The division of the two towns and the

delineation of the boundaries separating them reflected the differences in the

towns' developing economies. Somerset managed to include within its borders all

the waterfront land on the Taunton River, down around the present-day Brayton

Point and back up the Lee's River, where another substantial shipyard had

36 Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 83.

27

developed. By including the Lee's River and the land on its eastern shore in the

town borders, Somerset maintained the income from that river's shipyard. At the

same time, several farms on the southwest side of Shawomet remained in

Swansea. Somerset would become a coastal, maritime trading town, and Swansea

would remain an agricultural community.

Opposition from residents in Swansea reflected fears about debt and

duplication of services. In a petition to the legislature requesting that the towns

remain unified, they wrote: “We are much in debt already by being obliged to

keep a guard on our shores in the late unhappy war with Britain to prevent the

incursions of the Enemy when they occupied Rhode Island for if your Honors

should favour the proposed division we humbly conceive will be an addition to

our former burthens which we have not been able as yet to discharge.”37

The shipyard owners and waterfront industry of Somerset, on the other hand,

apparently felt they were in a better position to pay off debts from the Revolution,

and that continued association with Swansea would require them to effectually

subsidize the debts owed by the inland farms. Their desire to separate marked

their degree of confidence in the future of their maritime enterprises. In addition,

Somerset residents were apparently not swayed by arguments that separating the

two towns would require an unnecessary expense in terms of duplication of

services such as town clerks, etc. Although Swansea was substantially larger in

37 James Buffington, “Petition to Stop Separation from Swanzey,” February 10, 1790, 1, Transcribed By Diane Goodwin from original at Massachusetts Historical Society, Somerset Historical Society.

28

acreage than Somerset, when the legislature finally approved the petition, they

divided the debts based on the relative valuations of the two towns' property. As

the nineteenth century began, agriculture continued to be the primary land use in

the western and northern area, while maritime and other industries continued to

dominate the waterfront along the Taunton River and Mount Hope Bay. Across

the river, however, the not-yet-established town of Fall River, remained a largely

unused granite landscape that would not become attractive until the arrival of the

textile mills in 1813.

Environmental Impacts of the Mills

The geology of the region affected how the two sides of the Taunton River

developed, but it also guided the extent and nature of the environmental impacts

that resulted from that development. Farmers and towns along the north shore of

Mount Hope Bay relied on the Narragansett Basin wetlands, rivers and associated

groundwater to provide water for irrigation and public consumption. Across the

Taunton, as the population of the town of Fall River began booming with mill

workers in the 1820s and 1830s, the city was still forced to rely almost

exclusively on the two connected ponds that formed the headwaters of the

Quequechan River. Despite their proximity to Fall River, the towns of Somerset

and Swansea were buffered from the impacts of industrialization by virtue of

being located in what amounted to a different watershed.

Located at the top of the granite cliffs of Fall River, the north pond fed into

the south pond which in turn fed the Quequechan. The river slowly traversed the

29

highland plateau for about two miles before plummeting down the granite hillside

in a series of falls. There was farmland to the north and east of the ponds before

the first mills were built in the 1810s, but there were no inhabitants along the

steep sloping hillside that led down to the mouth of the Taunton and Mount Hope

Bay.

The first dam across the upper Quequechan at the ponds was constructed in

conjunction with the first mill in 1813, but in 1826, a consortium of mill-owners

established the Watuppa Reservoir Co. and through an act of the state legislature,

gained the water rights to both ponds. Competing demands for water do not

appear to have been a substantial issue until the rapid acceleration of development

along the river and in the town after the Civil War. At that point, steam power had

changed the mills' relationship with the river. The need for moving water that

could power turbines was gone; the mills now looked for ways to draw the huge

quantities of water used to feed boilers. In 1872, the City of Fall River, seeking

public water for the booming population of mill workers, took back rights to 1.5

million gallons of the water in the North Watuppa Pond by condemnation, and

was forced to enter an ongoing process of paying the Reservoir Co. for the

industrial value of the water being taken for city purposes.38 In 1886, when the

city sought to double its take, it decided to appeal to the state for an exemption

from the costly payments by essentially eliminating the mills' rights to the water

by act of the state legislature. The act managed to pass in a last-minute rush by

38 William Rotch (civil engineer.), Report on the Case of the Watuppa Reservoir Co. Vs. the City of Fall River, Dec.1880 (Fiske & Munroe, 1881).

30

lawmakers at the end of one of the seasonal sessions. The Reservoir Co.

immediately sued, but the courts declared that under the 1641 colonial charter,

which was an incorporated element of common law, no “great pond” could be

deeded to an individual owner.39 The ruling was overturned in 1889, but lawsuits

and debates continued through the remainder of the century with the city

eventually being allowed to take water from the North pond, but only as long as

they were certain to maintain the level of the North Pond in line with the South

Pond, from which the mills were drawing.

Although mill waste and human sewage were almost certainly being dumped

into the river from the opening of the first mill, there appear few indications that

the issue of pollution in the river became substantial until Fall River's

development peak in the 1870s and 1880s. The booming use of river water for

steam generators and the sheer number of employees working in the mills by the

late 1800s led to a substantial decline in water quality in the river at the same time

that public demand for water was on the rise. Between 1850 and 1880, Fall

River's population increased by more than 400 percent, rising from 11,170 to

47,883.40 By the beginning of the 1900s, Fall River was facing a significant

public health crisis as a result of the competing water demands from industry and

the public, as well as issues of pollution from a wide variety of mill discharges:

workers' sewage, printing inks and dyes and the superheated water that ran

39 Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, “The Watuppa Pond Cases,” Harvard Law Review 2, no. 5 (December 15, 1888): 197.

40 Henry Fenner, History of Fall River (New York: F.T. Smiley Publishing Co., 1906), 23, 33.

31

through the boilers. In the 1910s, the city embarked on a major project to

redesign the ponds, the river, and their storage and release mechanisms.

The environmental issues that faced Fall River were not unlike those shared

by mill towns along the Merrimack River or the Blackstone Valley rivers of

Rhode Island. In all these locales, competing demands for water pitted mill

owners against residents, but the impacts were far more widespread than in Fall

River. In northern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, residents, freshwater

fishermen and farmers living ten to 20 miles downstream from mills could still be

adversely impacted by reductions in the supply of freshwater as well as pollution

flowing into the streams. The Quequechan River watershed is virtually self

contained, and although it was wrought with significant issues, they had nowhere

near the wide-ranging consequences of pollution that occurred in other towns.41

Fall River's neighboring communities across the Taunton River benefited the

most from the mill town's self-contained environmental problems. Farming on a

completely different watershed only a couple miles away, Somerset, Swansea and

its northern neighbors sold their produce to Fall River without being particularly

adversely affected by its water consumption and pollution. Fisheries were

eventually affected by the pollution flowing from the Quequechan and Taunton

into Mount Hope Bay, but the size and tidal flushing of the bay appear to have

41 In addition to the Quequechan River, the Watuppa Ponds also drained south into Stafford Pond on the Rhode Island border. Some disputes were lodged in the 1880s against the Watuppa Reservoir Co. for its impacts on Stafford Pond, but even considering these the watershed and its area of effect were still dramatically smaller than most other New England textile mill rivers.

32

mitigated the impacts for substantially longer than would have been the case in a

more constrained ecosystem. (See fisheries discussion beginning on page 64.)

The towns of the lower Narragansett Basin likely had their own effects on

the environment as a result of their diverse industrial and agricultural pursuits,

however. Chief among these were the impacts from forest clearing for

shipbuilding and farming. In general, early settlers to New England only cleared

the land they needed to create a subsistence farm – which was limited by the

amount of food needed as well as the labor capacity of the farm family. Because

land grants in New England could often exceed the acreage capable of being

cleared and farmed, overall rates of deforestation were lower than in other areas

of the country.42 But in regions such as the lower Narragansett Basin, where thick

forests coincided with coastal shipyards, it is reasonable to assume that forest land

was cleared at a higher rate in a much earlier period than in areas that waited for

the development of market agriculture. The impacts of this likely accrued to the

silting of the rivers leading into Mount Hope Bay.

While the Taunton River was not dammed in the same way as the

Quequechan for mills, the construction of the railroad bridge in 1875 over the

river at Somerset Village was considered responsible for ending the herring runs

up to Broad Cove.43 Additionally, by the end of the nineteenth century, dumping

42 Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History of Environmental Change in Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 154.

43 Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 88.

33

by industry on both shores of the Taunton River had begun to impact the shellfish

beds that had been a staple fishery along the north shore of Mount Hope Bay for

two centuries. However, because most of the rivers leading into Mount Hope Bay

were very slow-moving and lacked the kind of waterfalls and steep runs attractive

to mill development, the Narragansett Basin failed to experience the type of

widespread industrial waterway development that caused so many issues in Fall

River and other mill regions.

“So close and yet so far” summed up the relationship between the east and

west shores of the Taunton River. It was their proximity that led to the initial

development of Fall River by residents of Somerset and Swansea, and that

closeness allowed the western towns to continue to take economic advantage of

Fall River's development. But the ecological and physical boundary that the river

represented also allowed the western towns to remain largely separate from the

social and environmental consequences of the massive mill development in Fall

River; they continued to prosper from their own maritime and agricultural

industries.

34

Chapter 3

Economic Diversity

The ecology of the lower Narragansett Basin provided a diverse wealth of

natural resources within easy access of a coastline that was highly conducive to

maritime trade. Mount Hope Bay and the Taunton River served as safe harbors

that provided excellent protection with deep draft access for ships of all sizes.

And, just as significantly, they were within easy sailing of numerous New

England ports. As a result, European settlers established a variety of profitable

industries along the shore, some of which were able to operate continuously from

the mid-seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. Other

industries rose and fell as a result of political and economic influences, but

throughout the time period, the residents of the region always seemed to be able

to shift from one occupation to another – frequently ending up in better economic

shape as a result and without ever being forced to leave the region. This stable

population base allowed capital to grow and remain in the region, which in turn

contributed to the local investments that helped create the early Fall River mill

economy. This pattern of events was the consequence of a coastal geography and

contrasts sharply with the economic experiences of inland towns abutting textile

mills. In this way, the economic development of Somerset and Swansea

demonstrate a different experience of New England industrialization than that

35

commonly depicted by the histories of northern and inland New England mill

towns.

The unusual lack of an economic diaspora from the lower Narragansett Basin

is partially attributable to the variety of opportunities that the landscape of the

region provided. But the creative and cooperative business enterprises that sprung

up there also reflected the cultural and religious nature of the people who initially

settled the area. Many of the early settlers to the region were Quakers, who had

come to this western edge of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in lieu of Rhode

Island, or crossed back over the Massachusetts border after banishment to Rhode

Island in the early 1600s. They were the second most common religious group in

Somerset and Swansea through the eighteenth century, and even by the late

nineteenth century Quakers remained one of the region's dominant religious

groups.44 As a result, many residents of the north shore of Mount Hope Bay held

more in common with the Quaker grandees of Rhode Island than with the

descendents of puritan forefathers from the old Plymouth Colony.

As noted earlier, the ingenuity and economic adaptability attributed to the

Rhode Islanders also seems to have served as a philosophical backbone for the

residents of Swansea and Somerset.45 The Mount Hope communities took

advantage of their physical geography to establish a diverse range of businesses,

but they made those businesses prosper by continuing to exploit and adapt to the

44 Ibid., 47.

45 For a discussion of Rhode Island's early economic adaptability, see William G. McLoughlin, Rhode Island: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978).

36

changing conditions around them. Farms were adjacent to deepwater shipping

access, which allowed farmers to easily transport goods to urban markets.

Similarly, the coastal location allowed the easy import of raw materials for

manufacturing, as in the case of pottery that was produced with clay bought from

Indians on Martha's Vineyard. Ironworks near shipyards were able to supply ship

parts and shipbuilding materials. When the first textile mill opened in Pawtucket

in 1793, residents of Somerset and Swansea were among the first to seize on the

new business opportunity that textile mills presented. The first textile mill built in

Fall River was owned by a consortium of businessmen from the western side of

the Taunton River, and by the mid-nineteenth century, many of the leading

business figures in Swansea/Somerset had leveraged the equity and income they

had earned in other industries to invest in the development of Fall River and its

textiles. Many of the investors continued to pursue their original businesses in the

“Old Homestead,” as the region on the west side of the Taunton River became

known.

Shipbuilding

The low-lying forests of the Narragansett Basin provided a bounty of white

oak, fir and pine. Combined with Mount Hope Bay's deepwater access, the region

was perfectly suited to shipbuilding. The first shipyards on the Taunton River and

adjacent Mount Hope Bay were established in the 1690s, and by the turn of the

nineteenth century Somerset (and Dighton, further upstream on the Taunton

River) had become significant ports for shipping out timber, iron and agricultural

37

produce – particularly livestock headed to the West Indies. By the 1850s, this

status had positioned the shipping and shipbuilding industries to take advantage of

the booming mill industry in Fall River, while not being solely reliant on it.

Somerset ships brought raw cotton from the southern states to Fall River's mills

and carried the resulting cloth to market, but other customers and cargo allowed

the shipyards to weather the economic downturns and retain an independence

from Fall River. Shipbuilding declined during the second half of the nineteenth

century, as Fall River was on its most dramatic rise, but there appears to be little

correlation between shipbuilding's decline and the neighboring textiles' ascension.

A particularly bad shipyard fire in 1854 destroyed one of the region's most

important shipyards, but the depression of 1857, the Civil War and the advent of

larger steam vessels seem to have been the primary factors ending Somerset's

shipbuilding industry. Other small shipbuilding communities on Narragansett Bay

like Bristol, Newport and North Kingstown experienced similar declines in the

1850s.46

The first evidence of shipyards on the north shore of Mount Hope Bay and

the lower Taunton River began within a few years after the Shawomet Purchase.

In 1693, Samuel Lee came to the region from New York, representing an English

shipbuilding firm and set up a yard on the mouth of what has since become Lee's

River. Two years later, Jonathan Bowers, an English shipbuilder in Newport, set

up a shipyard on the Taunton River at the south end of what would become

46 Peter J. Coleman, The Transformation of Rhode Island, 1790-1860 (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1963), 35.

38

Somerset village in an area that was known as Bowers Shore into the 20th century.

In 1697, English shipwright Thomas Coram arrived in the village of Dighton, just

up the Taunton River from Shawomet. Coram had been building ships in Boston,

but was paying much more for timber in the city, than shipbuilders in the outlying

areas. “The convenience of the vast great planks of oak and fir timber, and iron

ore I find abounding at a place call'd Taunton... encouraged me to take some of

my English shipwrights from Boston,” he later wrote.47

Coram's, Bowers', and Lee's yards established a pattern of shipbuilding on

the Taunton River that helped shape waterfront development and commerce on

the Taunton River through the Revolution. As described by Somerset historian

James Bradbury, there were two types of yards: “commercial yards” that produced

ships primarily for sale, and “family yards” that produced ships largely for their

own business use.48 Larger ships tended to be built on commission for owners

throughout New England and south to New York, but myriad smaller ships were

produced by family yards that put them to work trading goods locally around New

England and along the Eastern Seaboard. The protected waters and shallow

sloping shorelines of Mount Hope Bay and the Taunton River were ideal for

producing ships at the water's edge, but the immediate access to agricultural

produce and manufactured goods made shipping an attractive business as well.

47 Joseph A. Goldenberg, Shipbuilding in Colonial America, 1st ed. (University of Virginia Press, 1976), 37.

48 James Bradbury, Seafarers of Somerset (J.E. Bradbury, 1996), 7. It is unclear whether these were historically used labels or ones that Bradbury created.

39

Jerathmel Bowers, in particular, seems to have specialized in this vertical

integration of business functions. Bowers, a descendant of Jonathan Bowers, was

a Quaker, but a notoriously harsh businessman. At a town meeting in 1775, after

the Battle of Bunker Hill, Bowers argued strongly against plans to raise a town

company of minutemen, claiming it would cost too much and be unnecessary. He

apparently intimidated enough of his fellow representatives into agreeing with

him and the plans for a militia were rejected. But after the meeting disbanded and

Bowers left, a number of the other town leaders felt so put off by Bowers, they

attempted to have him brought up on charges of treason. Bowers responded to the

accusations, claiming that it was only his religious convictions that prevented him

from supporting the militia.49 Although he opposed raising a militia, Bowers

made a good deal of money during the Revolution by buying up the mortgage

foreclosures of soldiers who had gone to war and selling off their property.50

Bowers had built a shipyard in Somerset, but built few ships for sale.

Beginning about 1760, he maintained ownership of his ships and established a

bustling trade with the West Indies until the Revolution. Livestock from regional

farms was shipped out of Somerset to the West Indies, and sugar and other

imports came back. The level of his business interests and his aggressive

reputation suggest that there may have been more to Bowers' loyalist tendencies

49 Hermann Wellenreuther, Maria Gehrke, and Marion Stange, The Revolution of the People: Thoughts and documents on the revolutionary process in North America 1774-1776 (Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2006), 228.

50 Mary Ann McDonald, ed., Somerset, Massachusetts: Portrait of the American Experience in a New England Town (Somerset, Mass.: Somerset Historical Commission, 1981), 51.

40

than religious convictions. The British blockade during the Revolution brought a

temporary halt to both shipbuilding and shipping efforts on Mount Hope Bay, but

immediately following the Revolution, the industries rebounded in response to the

pent-up demand for New England foodstuffs and commodities in other regions on

both the British and colonial sides that had been subject to embargo during the

war. The Bowers business continued to expand in the early years of the Republic,

eventually extending to the China trade. Once again, the coastal yet agricultural

nature of the lower Narragansett Basin allowed local businesses to exploit

opportunities. It is likely the Bowers business could have continued successfully

through the first half of the nineteenth century, but upon his death, Jerathmel

passed the business onto his son, Jonathan – a playboy who secretly squandered

the family fortune and bankrupted the business in 1804. Bowers' investors were

said to have been shocked at how quickly the firm had collapsed.

Despite Bowers' collapse, the shipbuilding industry continued to grow along

the Taunton River until the embargos and ensuing war of 1812. Numerous

Somerset ships were lost to the war, either having been captured and burned by

the British or sold off in foreign ports. Although the war had a devastating effect

on Somerset's commerce and associated maritime industries for its duration, the

return of peace re-invigorated business much as it had done after the Revolution.

In addition to renewed trade relations with British colonies in the Caribbean,

westward expansion in the U.S. helped fuel the region's shipbuilding and shipping

industries after the war. In the 40-year period following the war, 196 ships of

41

more than 20 tons were built in Somerset, making it a significant shipbuilding

port. As mills and foundries began to develop across the river in Fall River, the

shipbuilding and repair infrastructure of Somerset began serving Fall River

shipping interests as well. In 1818, the sloop Industry arrived at the port of Fall

River desperately in need of repairs that could only be provided at the larger

shipyards of Somerset. With the ship unable to be moved up the icy river,

sailmakers and caulkers were brought over and put up in a Fall River boarding

house for the winter while they completed the repairs.51

While many of the earlier vessels were coastal schooners and smaller boats

built for conducting trade along the eastern seaboard, the most famous of

Somerset's vessels were the clipper ships built for running to San Francisco after

the 1849 gold rush. In 1825, Nathan Davis and Joseph Simmons opened a

shipyard at the north end of town, and in 1849, the site was bought by Captain

James Madison Hood. A native of Somerset born in 1815, Hood spent his early

years sailing a small sloop owned by his father. The ship, the Rose Bud, ran along

the Eastern Seaboard trading a variety of goods, and eventually under James'

command began a regular run to the West Indies. He delivered salt cod, salt beef

and pork, and returned with molasses as well as cotton and rice from the southern

states.52 With the Taunton River frequently iced in in the winter months, Hood

spent his winters establishing a trading store in Wilmington, N.C. In 1849, after

51 Alice. Brayton, Life on the Stream, vol. 1 (Wilkinson Press,, 1962), 13.

52 J.H. Beers & Co, Representative men and old families of southeastern Massachusetts: containing historical sketches of prominent and representative citizens and genealogical records of many of the old families (J.H. Beers, 1912), 591.

42

being shipwrecked in Mexico during the Mexican-American War, Hood returned

home to Somerset to enter the shipbuilding business, having seen firsthand the

demand for vessels in the Central and South American trades as well as San

Francisco.53

Over the next five years, Hood's yard built some of the most famous ships of

clipper era. The 712-ton Raven, launched from the Hood yard in 1851,

participated in one of the most famous of the clipper races. On a passage of 106

days from New York to San Francisco, she beat the Sea Witch and the Typhoon by

one day. Though many of Hood's ships were built for New York owners, the

1,430-ton Gov. Morton, launched in 1852, was half-owned by local interests,

including Hood himself. The Morton recorded a 104-day run from New York to

San Francisco the next year and remained in service until 1877. During the late

1860s she sailed in the South Pacific, running from Australia to Peru.54 Although

Hood became famous for its clippers, the yard also produced a large number of

smaller vessels under federal government contracts, including four revenue cutters

and five lightships that took up duty across Massachusetts and New York.

In 1854, a ship under construction in the Hood yard caught fire and the fire

spread to the rest of the yard, destroying everything. Hood had suffered another

devastating fire in 1851, but the second fire was too much for the yard to recover

from and it was never reopened. The cause of the fire was considered suspicious,

53 Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 93.

54 Ibid., 100.

43

and an insurance company investigation tentatively accused a company's chief

clerk, though never by name. The clerk in question was later cleared, but rarely

ever mentioned by name. He was William P. Hood, James M. Hood's nephew,

who returned to his father's property years later to begin an ironworks there.55 In

the wake of the fire, James Hood sold the property and moved to Illinois for the

remainder of his life. There he pursued a variety of industries and government

posts, including a stint as the U.S. Consul to Siam.

Shipping

Construction of large ships in Somerset dropped off dramatically after the

1850s, but the role of the town as a port and entrepot only increased in the second

half of the nineteenth century. In part this was attributable to the volume of

industrial and agricultural products created in Somerset and Swansea that were

being shipped out from the docks along the Taunton River, but the region also

developed into an intermodal shipping hub for cargo and passengers moving

through the region to other locales. The community's coastal location with a

protected harbor in Mount Hope Bay and along the lower Taunton River had

helped facilitate it as a shipping hub, but it was made truly successful by its

proximity to the growing industrial centers of Fall River, Providence and Boston.

In addition to the commerce derived from ships that were built on the

Taunton River, numerous merchants were shipping goods in and out of Somerset

throughout the nineteenth century. The town participated in an active trading

55 Co, Representative men and old families of southeastern Massachusetts, 591.

44

relationship with southern states in the years before the Civil War. This

relationship was particularly strong with South Carolina, which had been

receiving Mount Hope Bay vessels since Jerathmel Bowers ships began stopping

there on the way back from the West Indies in the mid-1700s. By the the mid-

nineteenth century, Somerset pottery was sold extensively in South Carolina, and

James Hood had established a store there before entering the shipbuilding

business. In 1833, Joseph G. Marble started a packet service with one vessel,

running shipments of manufactured goods to Charleston, S.C. and returning with

southern-grown commodities. It is uncertain how much of Marble's cargo from

the south was cotton for the Fall River mills, but considering Marble owned stores

in both Somerset and Charleston, it is possible he was also bringing back other

materials to sell in Somerset. Eventually, Marble added a second ship to his

service and began accommodating passengers on the route.56

New York shipping services included not just goods from New York City, but

agricultural commodities from upstate New York. In1801, Joseph Brown began a

shipping route from Somerset to Albany, N.Y. with the sloop Harriet. He shipped

out hoop-poles, wooden battens cut from local hardwood saplings that were used

for making barrel hoops. In return, he brought grain from upstate New York and

dairy products which he traded along the way. Because his docks became a

popular place to go buy grain, the village around Joseph Brown's became known

56 Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 110.

45

as Egypt.57 Egypt was located at the south end of town, and the docks there

brought in a wide variety of goods for the region. In the pre-railroad days of the

early nineteenth century, much of this was transported via wagon on the roads to

Swansea, Taunton, Rehoboth and other neighboring communities. In 1853, a

steamer packet service opened between Somerset and Albany, making stops in

Fall River, Tiverton, Newport and New York.

With the advent of the steam locomotive, Somerset businesses wasted no

time pursuing a rail line that would connect Mount Hope Bay to Boston. In 1832,

at the request of Somerset, the state authorized a railroad bridge across the

Taunton at Broad Cove, with the city agreeing to pay half the maintenance costs.58

The plan was similar to many plans and right-of-ways being purchased in the

early days of railroads, and did not become a reality. The first railroad along the

north shore of Mount Hope Bay was the Providence, Warren and Bristol Railroad.

Its extension from Warren to Somerset in 1864 terminated at Brayton Point. There

a steamship connection took passengers to Fall River. This connection was the

first to encourage Fall River residents to visit Somerset for recreation. Visitors

came by steamship for the day, and wandered the rural landscape of Brayton

Point, which overlooked Mount Hope Bay.59 The first railroad bridge over the

Taunton came in 1875, built by the Old Colony Railroad and connected with

57 A reference to the biblical story of people coming to Joseph in Egypt for grain. Genesis 41:55-57.

58 Ibid., 109.

59 Ibid., 118.

46

another line in Somerset.60 The bridge included a highway level for horses and

pedestrians below the railroad level.

With the arrival of a railroad in Somerset, the town became a significant

entrepot for coal. It arrived from ports all along the Eastern Seaboard and was

transferred to train at the depot near where the Hood Shipyard had been located.

Railroad networks connected Somerset to Providence, Boston, Fall River and out

to western Massachusetts. According to the monthly records kept in a personal

notebook by an unidentified agent of the Old Colony Railroad, 121,000 tons of

coal were discharged from Somerset in the year ending Sept. 30, 1874. By 1883,

it had risen to 196,000 tons.61

Pottery

The Quaker connection to the region contributed to the development of a

pottery industry that also made use of Somerset's access to shipping. The first

earthenware potters in the region were Quakers who settled on the upper Taunton

River in the early 1700s. The business migrated with a couple of its key

practitioners to Shawomet and grew dramatically in the nineteenth century. By

the start of the Fall River boom in the mid-1800s, there were as many as nine

different pottery factories operating in an area of Somerset that became known as

60 Charles Eben Fisher, The story of the Old Colony railroad (C.A. Hack & son, inc., printers, 1919), 29; Henry Hilliard Earl, A Centennial History of Fall River, Mass. (Atlantic Pub. and Engraving Co., 1877), 191.

61 “Old Colony Railroad Agent's notebook,” n.d., uncatalogued archives of the Somerset Historical Society, Somerset Historical Society.

47

Pottersville. The locations of these potteries adjacent to deepwater shipping

wharves allowed goods to be easily shipped to markets throughout the east coast.

Although earthenware pottery manufacturing began in New England as early

as the 1620s, the earliest record of pottery on Mount Hope Bay was in 1753 when

the Quaker Clark Purington set up shop in Shawomet, then still a part of Swansea.

Purington came from a family of potters in Danvers and went into a partnership

with other Plymouth colony potters, George Shove and William Boyce. During

the Revolution, the trio invested in a sloop which they used to transport their

wares to markets around Narragansett Bay. Their ship was taken by the British

during the war, and the trio -- all Quakers ostensibly with non-combatant status --

appealed to the Crown for damages after the vessel was left stripped and beached

with its cargo badly damaged.62 The incident reinforces the role of the Quaker

merchants in building the pottery trade in Swansea/Somerset, and the value of the

Shawomet waterfront in facilitating access to regional markets early on. During

the reign of Pottersville, Somerset potters supplied household earthenware and

stoneware goods throughout the region, but they also shared the same relationship

with the Carolinas that other Somerset merchants had helped establish. Collectors

of Somerset pottery have found large caches of pots and jars that were used in

South Carolina.63

62 Lura Woodside Watkins, Early New England Potters And Their Wares (Archon Books, 1968), 77.

63 Pottery collection and display at the Somerset Historical Society.

48

Purington passed the business onto his son, who in turn passed it on to

another generation in 1817. Estate records for both individuals suggest that they

passed on both pottery and farming equipment, and the original Purington also

passed on shoemaker's tools.64 Although the pottery business was still growing at

the time, the breadth of artisan interests suggested by the shoemaker's tools

indicates the diversification that continued to characterize Swansea residents well

into the nineteenth century.

The most notable of the Somerset pottery businesses was run by the Chace

family for several generations, beginning with Asa Chace, who likely apprenticed

with Clark Purington. Chace, like Purington, was both a farmer and potter, and

passed his equipment and supplies on to his son. One record of potters of

Somerset suggests that as many as 30 different named artisans produced

individually recognizable pottery in Somerset in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries. Twelve of those were from the Chace family.65 The Chaces continued

in the pottery business until 1882, when the lead brothers retired from the

business. They sold the business to another firm who renovated the facilities and

increased the stoneware production. The new Somerset Pottery continued

traditional lines of household pottery, but also leveraged the presence of Fall

River as a customer and began producing a variety of pieces for industrial use –

including acid resistant baskets used in jewelry making, and large dye vats for the

64 Ibid.

65 Gerald Simons and Michael Alexander, “Potteries of Somerset,” in Somerset, Massachusetts: Portrait of the American Experience in a New England Town, by Mary Ann McDonald (Somerset, Mass.: Somerset Historical Commission, 1981), 111.

49

Fall River Bleachery.66 The Chace firm also developed contracts with the

Lorillard Tobacco Company to provide snuff jars which were shipped out by a

local schooner that also brought the raw clay in from New Jersey. By the 1890s,

the firm was producing about 85,000 jars annually.67

The artisan nature of the early pottery firms lent themselves to a local

workforce that could also maintain other business interests. In this way, pottery

was another of the industries that gave work to local residents at a time when the

more regimented labor environment of the mills was attracting immigrant

workforces to Fall River.

Ironwork

In addition to fostering hardwood growth for shipbuilding, the low-lying

geology of the Narragansett Basin provided a wealth of iron ore deposits in the

form of “bog iron”. As a result, the region developed a significant iron industry

very early and retained a reputation as a center for iron manufacturing up to the

twentieth century. The first ironworks in the region were developed along

tributaries of the Taunton River in the present-day towns of Taunton and Raynham

in the mid-1650s by the brothers, Henry and James Leonard. The Leonards

traded their iron products with the Indians, and local legend claims that during

King Phillip's War, the Indian leader ordered that the Leonard family not be

66 United States. Army. Corps of Engineers, Report of the Chief of Engineers United States Army (U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1900), 109.

67 Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 147.

50

harmed. By 1700, there were five different ironworks located in and around the

Taunton area.

The Leonard family stayed in the ironworks business in the lower

Narragansett and Taunton region for the next 250 years, and were involved in

most of Somerset's iron businesses in the late nineteenth century. Ore from

throughout the lower Narragansett Basin fed into the Old Colony Iron Works and

the Mount Hope Iron Works, both of which were located along the river in

Somerset and both of which were owned at one point by Henry Leonard's

descendent, Job Leonard. As production capacity exceeded local supply, raw

materials were able to be brought in by ship and rail. By 1884, the Mount Hope

Ironworks had a capacity of 4,500 tons a years, and the Old Colony was

producing 5,000 tons a year.68

The Mount Hope Iron Works began as the Somerset Iron Works, established

in 1853. Initially the business focused on forging ship anchors and other

specialized cast iron fittings for ships, but the decline in shipbuilding put the yard

out of business in 1855. Job Leonard purchased the firm and refitted it for the

production of plate iron, nails and shovels. The Iron Works' location immediately

along the waterfront gave Leonard the advantage of access to shipping.

Schooners owned by the ironworks brought in the ore, scrap iron, and coal that

was used in the production, and the same schooners hauled out the finished iron

68 James Moore Swank, Directory to the Iron and Steel Works of the United States, 1884, 85.

51

plate for delivery to markets.69 Both Mount Hope and Old Colony advertised

themselves as being in the business of making iron plate for nails, tacks and

shovels, but extant accounting records from the Old Colony Iron Works paint a

picture of a business with a diverse set of local customers that included several of

the textile mills across the river.70

While Mount Hope was using the schooners on the Taunton River to ship

goods in and out, the Old Colony's records suggest that a great deal of product

was being transported via the Old Colony Railroad terminal in Somerset, which

took the firm's products to manufacturers in Boston, Providence and Pittsfield

among others. The combination of waterfront and railroad access also allowed

Old Colony to bring in coal for its operations from Maryland, West Virginia, and

Ohio.71

In 1855, at the site of the Hood Shipyard, another iron works opened

specializing in cast iron stove construction. The Boston Stove Foundry would

later become a collective, owned by its employees – a development that

contributed to the stability of the workforce and the ability of workers to invest in

the community.72

69 James Bradbury, Somerset (Arcadia Publishing, 1996), 34.

70 Ledger B, Old Colony Iron Works Records, Somerset Historical Society.

71 Ledger E, Old Colony Iron Works Records, Somerset Historical Society.

72 Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 140-141.

52

The First Textile Mills

Many of the families that became wealthy in Fall River in the mid-nineteenth

century were intermarried with families from Swansea and Somerset and in many

cases, it was the western relatives who were instrumental in developing Fall

River's textile industry. Although Fall River's heyday was considered to be the

1870s and 1880s, the earliest mill development occurred in the 1810s as a result

of early mill entrepeneurs from Somerset, Swansea and Rehoboth desiring to

move to a locale with more water power.

Dexter Wheeler and his cousin, David Anthony, the two founders of Fall

River's first mill were both from the west side of the river, having started their

careers in other pursuits. Dexter Wheeler was born in Rehoboth in 1777 (possibly

1770 – sources differ). Following an apprenticeship in Pawtucket, he returned to

Rehoboth and started his career as a blacksmith producing tools for farming –

shovels, rakes, hoes, etc. In 1804, Wheeler and his brother Nathaniel (who had

become a blacksmith in Swansea) bought a 43-acre farm in Swansea and two

years later built a small cotton mill on the site that was initially horse driven.

Wheeler had designed the horse-driven mill but was also apparently looking for

new ways to harness the water power along the coastline. In 1811, he received a

patent for a tide mill.73

David Anthony was born in Somerset and began work as a clerk for John

Bowers, later becoming a bookkeeper. When Bowers went bankrupt in 1804, 73 George Derby and James Terry White, The National cyclopedia of American biography ... v.1-

(J. T. White, 1904), 98.

53

Anthony was kept on as the receiver for the business. He later took a job as a

buyer for a Providence pottery retailer, purchasing goods from the Somerset

pottery firms and transporting them to Providence for resale.74 Anthony's

involvement in a variety of the businesses that built the region's capital speaks to

the diversity of opportunities that were available and helps explain why ambitious

young local would-be businessmen did not feel the need to leave the region for

larger cities in order to make their fortunes.

Wheeler came to Fall River in the winter of 1812-1813 scouting out sites for

a new mill. He formed the Fall River Manufacturing Company on March 8, 1813

and hired Israel Pearse, a builder from Swansea, to build his company store. It

was to be the same as had been built for the Swansea Manufacturing Company.75

A year later (March 1, 1814), the directors of the company met and chose

Abraham Bowen, Dexter Wheeler and David Anthony to run the company for the

coming year. About half of the $40,000 in start-up capital that Wheeler and

Anthony solicited for the project came from subscribers outside of Fall River, but

within its neighboring towns: Somerset, Swansea, Rehoboth, Tiverton, and

Warren.76 Thus the first textile mill built in Fall River relied on management,

capital and skilled labor that had been cultivated in the neighboring Narragansett

Basin. The energy to develop Fall River may not have come solely from Fall

74 Earl, A Centennial History of Fall River, Mass., 12.

75 Brayton, Life on the Stream, 1:11-12.

76 Earl, A Centennial History of Fall River, Mass., 11.

54

River itself, but it also did not come from an urban elite in Boston or Providence,

as the popular history of New England's textile mills suggests.

The diversity of business interests that were sustained along the north shore

of Mount Hope Bay and up the Taunton River demonstrate the advantages the

region's coastal environment offered to its entrepreneurial population. By

doggedly pursuing a wide range of businesses in addition to and in conjunction

with the textile industry, residents on Mount Hope Bay created an experience of

New England industrialization that ensured their own economic independence.

55

Chapter 4

Farming and Fishing

“The men who ran the factories ran the farms, often these were the 'Old

Homestead' in Somerset or Swansea.” 77

As noted earlier, the fertile ground of the Narragansett Basin and the rich

waters of Mount Hope Bay and its rivers attracted early settlers to the region, but

it was the ability of both farmers and fishermen to successfully convert from a

largely subsistence occupation to a market-based model that allowed farming and

fishing to remain a viable option for residents along the north shore of Mount

Hope Bay during the nineteenth century. Farmers in the region tapped into the

growing population of Fall River as a market for their produce, but also took

advantage of their proximity to shipping to access other markets throughout New

England and along the Eastern Seaboard. Fishermen on Mount Hope Bay

similarly took advantage of their proximity to urban markets in Fall River and

Providence. These strategies contributed to stabilizing farm businesses and land

ownership over generations of families.

Doing so was not without its challenges. The shift from a market-based farm

economy in New England accelerated dramatically at the beginning of the

nineteenth century. The growth of labor-intensive industries such as the textile

mills and the growth of cities caused the population to skyrocket, creating intense

77 Brayton, Life on the Stream, 1:71.

56

demand for food. The economic impact of the changes on farming communities

occurred in a variety of ways. As demand increased, larger areas were cleared for

farming. Although productivity increased as a result, the growing food supply

lowered prices. As real wages paid to farm labor declined in turn, more laborers

left the farms for jobs in the mills, shipping, and merchant businesses.78 While the

development of larger cities created the markets, improvements in transportation

networks and westward expansion also exposed local New England farmers to

competition from cheaper and often better farm produce from other regions.79

To some extent, farmers in Somerset and Swansea were able to overcome

some of these challenges more easily than inland farms because they leveraged

the advantages of their coastal location. They relied on the water for resources

such as seaweed that was used for fertilizer in the fields and salt hay for feeding

cattle. Their easy access to shipping allowed them to sell more easily to a wider

range of markets than inland farmers who had to bring crops overland to market.

High value crops that thrived in the longer growing seasons of the temperate

coastal environment also gave farmers an edge. Strawberries and celery became

big crops in the region during the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The railroad in

Somerset and the Fall River Line boats shipped out the crops throughout New

England and to New York. According to the personal notebook of one of the

78 Robert E. Rothenberg, “The Produtivity Consequences of Market Integration: Agriculture in Massachusetts: 1771-1801,” in American economic growth and standards of living before the Civil War (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 311-312.

79 Percy W. Bidwell, “The Agricultural Revolution in New England,” The American Historical Review 26, no. 4 (July 1921): 692.

57

railroad agents for Old Colony, the top six growers of strawberries in Somerset

and Swansea shipped out nearly 377,000 cases of berries in 1880 by rail.80

Although the size of the average farm declined as generations of landholders

divided property among their heirs, the variety of other occupations available to

locals as well as the comparative success of farming prevented some of the

transience that seems to have occurred in other communities. In the towns of

Dudley and Oxford, located in central Massachusetts near the border of western

Rhode Island and later home to the Slater mills, half of the heads of households in

1810 had not been born in that community.81 In Somerset and Swansea however,

farmers on land that had been held by family members for generations were able

to continue farming while at the same time pursuing other occupations in the

maritime, mercantile and mill trades. Frequently, members of farming families

would leave the “old homestead” to pursue some other career, but eventually

return to the farm. The careers of numerous farm family members attest to this

trend.

For example, Daniel Chace, born in 1821, was raised on the farm that had

been in his family for at least three generations. Although he was trained as a

farmer, he left the farm and went into the meat business in Fall River “when he

came of age” – presumably about 16. In 1855, Daniel's father Nathan died, and

Daniel, then 34, returned to the family farm to take over. He operated the farm

80 “Old Colony Railroad Agent's notebook.” Located among the uncatalogued archives of the Somerset Historical Society.

81 Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order, 21.

58

for the remainder of his life. His son, Frank Clinton Chace was born on the farm

in 1867 and continued working it after Daniel's death.82

While a wealth of farming occurred well north of the bay, the lands on the

bay and along the Taunton River display the advantage of farming along

navigable water. As noted earlier, when this land was divided by the Shawomet

Purchase, it was split into long narrow strips designed to assure that each

landowner had access to the water. The town was noted for its pattern of parallel

stone walls leading to the water, and each property owner had a private dock from

which to ship out his farm's produce.83 How many of these farmers may have

owned and operated their own vessels is uncertain, but the pattern points to the

early vertical integration that farming on the coast offered, and its value to the

farmers. Moving a crop directly from the field to a boat that could take it to

markets throughout Narragansett Bay was substantially more cost-effective than

transporting by wagon over roads. The development of a market farming

economy in coastal Massachusetts developed in the early 1700s largely in

response to demands for foodstuffs both in the growing urban areas as well as for

the West Indies colonies. But it was not until the nineteenth century, that

agricultural methods began being changed to reflect the scientific approach to

improving efficiency and yields per acre.84

82 Co, Representative men and old families of southeastern Massachusetts, 1220.

83 Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 35.

59

In 1831, Henry Gardner, 28 at the time, was operating 40 acres on Gardner's

Neck. His father Henry Sr. had been a ship captain, but Henry Jr. returned to the

family land and the farming business of his grandfather. Henry Jr. is

representative of the options that were available to the long-time local families

who continued to maintain farmland through successive generations. From his 40

acres, he produced 15 tons of English hay, 100 bushels of Indian corn, 100

bushels of rye, 700 bushels of onions, 800 bushels of potatoes and 500 bushels of

turnips. In addition he produced cider, apples, pears, peaches and culinary

vegetables for family use.85

The English hay was apparently feeding his livestock. He was producing

about 4,000 pounds of beef and 1,800 pounds of pork each year. Cultivating

English hay took more effort than grazing livestock on pastures, and Gardner told

New England Farmer magazine that he heavily fertilized his fields. But for

fertilizer he was relying on about 300 loads of locally harvested seaweed (about

11,458 cubic feet86) in addition to what he got from animal manure in the

stables.87 On average, Massachusetts farms during the period were laying between

84 The history of agricultural reform suggests that Britain developed and adopted scientific methods of improving crop yields earlier than America. With little land but cheap labor, Britain was prone to finding more labor-intensive ways to improve the yield per acre. Americans, by contrast, had abundant land but a shortage of labor. This distinction inclined American farmers to graze cattle over wider areas of land, and move to find new fields when soil in an existing field was exhausted. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 235.

85 Roland Green, “Bristol Agricultural Society,” New England Farmer, October 26, 1831, 114.

86 A “load” is considered 30 bushels. A U.S. bushel is 2,150.42 cubic inches. This unit has not substantially changed since Gardner's era.

87 Roland Green, “Bristol Agricultural Society,” New England Farmer, October 26, 1831, 114.

60

10 and 20 loads of manure per acre as fertilizer.88 If Gardner had relied solely on

manure to fertilize his fields, he would have required between 400 and 800 loads.

His livestock consisted of “four oxen, 2 cows, 4 young creatures, 1 horse, 20

sheep and 6 hogs.”89 At best, this herd would only have allowed him to fertilize a

few acres.90 By utilizing the locally accessible seaweed, Gardner was able to

heavily fertilize fields otherwise likely left as pasture. The locally available,

coastal resource helped Gardner cut his fertilizer costs, allowing him to generate a

higher yield of English hay and consequently more efficient yields of beef than if

he had been purchasing manure or had been relying solely on the manure

produced by his animals.

Details of Gardner's farm were featured in an October, 1831 issue of New

England Farmer magazine. Gardner had specifically invited representatives of the

Bristol County Agricultural Society to inspect his operation and publish their

assessment in the magazine.91 This circumstance suggests Gardner's own

sophistication and commitment to the science of agriculture. The Bristol County

Agricultural Society, which included the coastal communities from Rhode Island

to New Bedford, was established in 1820, and is representative of the trend

toward such societies that started in Boston in the 1790s with the creation of the

88 Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 234.

89 Green, “Bristol Agricultural Society,” 114.

90 Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain, 234.

91 Green, “Bristol Agricultural Society,” 114.

61

Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture(MSPA).92 The MSPA was

largely the creation of Boston elites for whom farming was as much a symbol of

their wealthy style of estate living as it was a means of income. However,

through societies such as the MSPA these elites fostered a sense of improving

agricultural output for the benefit of their own mercantile enterprises.93 This

pattern appears to have been passed on to societies such as that in Bristol County,

which had a tradition of shipping and trade with other communities along the

Eastern Seaboard.

This mercantile tendency among local farmers helps explain how they made

the shift to becoming textile investors. Families that had been involved in a mix

of farming and shipping for several generations had become elites in their own

right, eager for new opportunities. The Wilbur family of Somerset was among the

earliest farming families of the community, who not only made it into the market

era, but eventually utilized the income from the farm to invest in the development

of Fall River. Samuel Wilbur was a Quaker who had been exiled from the

Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 and fled to Rhode Island. He was one of the

five original investors who purchased portions of Aquidneck Island from the

Indians. He also purchased land in the portion of Swansea that would later

become Somerset, and in 1680, his son Daniel settled there. The next seven

generations of the Wilbur family farmed in Somerset, although various branches

92 Duane Hamilton Hurd, History of Bristol County, Massachusetts: with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men (J. W. Lewis & Co., 1883), 912.

93 Tamara Plakins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life Amongthe Boston Elite, 1785-1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 57, 75.

62

also became involved in shipping. Daniel Wilbur the fifth, born in 1818, had

continued in the family tradition, but also took an active role in Fall River. Wilbur

was on the board of directors of the Slate Mills and the Wampanaug Mills and

served as President of the National Union Bank in Fall River.94

Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, Daniel the Fifth epitomized the role

of Narragansett Basin agriculture in the development of Fall River. Longtime

farmers were able to continue farming while using their farm income as

investment in Fall River. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, it is

uncertain how much of the wealth possessed by farmers such as Wilbur was still

being generated by agriculture as opposed to industry investment. In the Wilburs'

case, the latter may have been true, as indicated by the slow sell-off of Wilbur

farmland for suburban housing that occurred in the first decade of the 20th century.

However, the Gardners appear to have continued making a living farming into the

twentieth century. Henry Gardner's grandson, Francis Leland Gardner continued

the family tradition, but further adapted to the market era. In 1892, he built a

huge greenhouse on Gardner's Neck and began growing crops through the winter

for the New York and Providence markets. His operation was particularly well

known for its celery, which was shipped to hotels in New York.95

The ongoing operation of these farms across the Taunton River from Fall

River provided a rural contrast to the urban industrial lifestyle of the mills and

94 Co, Representative men and old families of southeastern Massachusetts, 1273.

95 Ibid., 1212.

63

their workers. By maintaining profitable, operational farms through the industrial

era, the patriarchs of the Mount Hope Bay area farm families created the

conditions that allowed their children to pursue other careers in the mercantile and

mill trades while always being able to return to the “old homestead.” At the same

time, profits from the farm operations allowed farmers to take leadership roles in

the ongoing development of Fall River's industry.

Fishing

Despite existing in the shadow of the textile mills, fishing remained a

substantial industry on Mount Hope Bay throughout the nineteenth century. The

tidal nature of the fishing ground, along with easy access to markets, allowed

fisheries to continue in these coastal communities during industrialization,

whereas freshwater fisheries located in such close proximity to inland mill towns

were more quickly strangled by water rights and pollution. While the heart of the

fishing industry on the bay was in Tiverton, R.I., south of Fall River, the towns

along the north shore and on the Taunton River also boasted some fishing

economies. The primary fisheries based out of Somerset and Swansea were

menhaden and shellfish. Smaller catches of herring also appear to have been

successful for some time. By the early twentieth century, however, the fisheries

on Mount Hope Bay were becoming extinct due to a combination of overfishing

and pollution from Fall River outfalls that tides could not flush out.96

96 While it is outside the scope of this paper to delve into the broad issue of overfishing in inland waters during the nineteenth century, it is worth considering the impacts of industrial water control and pollution in Mount Hope Bay compared to freshwater fisheries around other mill towns.

64

That fishing on these inshore waters was able to continue for as long as it did

in the shadow of Fall River's industry points again to the benefits of the

geography of the region. Mount Hope Bay seems to have been less affected by

neighboring industrial development than were similar fisheries in communities

along industrial rivers such as the Merrimack. At the same time the growing

middle and upper classes in Fall River and Providence provided a market for

high-end shellfish, and transportation networks allowed catches to be easily and

quickly sent to market.

In contrast, the Lowell mills on the Merrimack River devastated the region's

fish fairly quickly. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a combination of

dams and pollution had eliminated several species. The impacts of the mill

development on river fisheries reflected both the delicate nature of freshwater

river fish ecology as well as the enclosed nature of the river system. Construction

of the Lawrence dam in 1848 to provide power for the Waltham-Lowell mills

stopped fish from being able to go upstream to spawn.97 In 1865, a state

committee investigating the issue of fish depletion on the Merrimack, Connecticut

and Saco Rivers hired renowned naturalist Louis Agassiz to assess the problem.

Agassiz blamed industrial waste disposal in the river, rather than the millpower

dams.98 Dyes and chemicals from the Pacific Mills had killed off the shad fishery

completely within a year of the mill's opening.99

97 Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 167.

98 Ibid., 189.

99 Ibid., 191.

65

From Lowell, the waters of the Merrimack flowed for more than 35 miles

before reaching open tidal water. Neither the fish nor the fishermen along that

watershed could be exempt from the impacts of the mills. Fall River's

Quequechan, however, ran less than three miles before dumping into Mount Hope

Bay's 12 square miles of tidal water. The ability of the bay to withstand the

pollution was clearly greater than that of the riverine systems where other mills

were located.

Although the impacts of dams and pollution were mitigated by the

geography of the region, bridges continued to impact the movement of fish along

the rivers that led into Mount Hope Bay. George P. Hood, James Madison Hood's

nephew, was in the herring fishery setting seine nets at high tide in Broad Cove at

the north end of Somerset on the Taunton River and retrieving the nets at low tide.

The herring fishery continued until the railroad bridge over the Taunton south of

Broad Cove cut off the herring runs in the 1870s.100

One of Somerset and Swansea's biggest fisheries was oysters. Early

statistics on oyster productivity in the region are difficult to come by, but the

significance of the oyster fishery to the towns of Somerset and Swansea is seen in

political debates and regulations that erupted over the fisheries. In 1834,

Somerset attempted to regulate the business but ran afoul of local fishermen. A

special meeting called on April 30, 1834, was set up to protest the town selectmen

who had wanted to tax oysters 5 cents per bushel; give exclusive privileges for

100Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 88.

66

taking oysters and charge permits for shipping oysters out of town. A

compromise was reached that allowed residents to take oysters within a certain

distance from shore.101 In 1867, Swansea passed a law that regulated the taking of

oysters on the Cole and Lee's Rivers. Residents were limited to two bushels a

month for personal use, and the town retained the exclusive right to license any

oyster taking for profit.102

By 1860, however, oysters from Somerset had begun to acquire a green

coloring and copper taste, which was commonly blamed on the pollution from the

mills of Fall River and other industry further upstream on the Taunton River. It

remained debatable whether this was the cause, but the declining taste of the

oysters relegated the beds in the region to providing seed stock that was then

transplanted to other beds throughout Narragansett Bay and Buzzards Bay where

they would grow to full-size. The Somerset seed stock became highly prized,

prompting bidding wars among buyers, and sending a regular fleet of sloops and

schooners to Somerset to ship out the stock.103 Locals took pride and some

amusement in the oysters that were replanted on the nearby Providence River and

then sold to the Providence markets as being the “famous Providence River

oysters” in the 1870s and 1880s.104 In 1880, the Taunton River and Mount Hope

101Ibid., 110.

102Ernest Ingersoll, History and Present Condition of the Fisher Industries: The Oyster-Industry (Washington: Department of Interior, 1881), 46.

103Ibid., 45-46.

104Hurd, History of Bristol County, Massachusetts, 645.

67

Bay region generated about 51,000 bushels of seed oysters, according to a report

that year by the U.S. Department of the Interior. “During the months of April and

May, about 60 persons are employed in Somerset alone, and in other towns in

proportion – perhaps 400 along the whole river – who, as a rule, live along the

bank, and often own the boats they operate,” the report said.105

By 1900, more than 3,000 acres of submerged land in the Providence River

were leased for oyster beds,106 but the sewage outfall from the City of Providence

had begun noticeably contaminating the oysters. Similarly, sewage outfalls at Fall

River appear to have impacted the Somerset beds by that time, but a growing

number of beds were still being cultivated on the other side of the Bay near the

mouths of the Kickamuit River.107 According to a 1904 report by the U.S.

Commissioner of Fisheries, oysters in those beds showed no sign of

contamination.108

Despite threats from industrial pollution and sewage in the mid- to late-

nineteenth century, the resilient oyster industry continued to offer Mount Hope

Bay residents alternatives to mill work that kept people connected to their coastal

identity and tradition. In establishing a wide reputation for the value of its catch,

105Ingersoll, History and Present Condition of the Fisher Industries: The Oyster-Industry, 45.

106Caleb Allen Fuller, The Distribution of Sewage in the Waters of Narragansett Bay; Appendix to the Report of the Commissioner of Fisheries to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for the Year Ending June 30, 1904 (Govt. Print. Off., 1905), 202.

107United States Fish Commission, Report of the Commissioner for Fish (G.P.O., 1901), 376.

108Fuller, The Distribution of Sewage in the Waters of Narragansett Bay; Appendix to the Report of the Commissioner of Fisheries to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for the Year Ending June 30, 1904, 217.

68

the industry helped instill a sense of local pride that allowed Somerset and

Swansea to retain a sense of independent identity rather than becoming merely a

hinterland of Fall River.

69

Chapter 5

Conclusion

The railroads that had helped Somerset and Swansea serve as shipping hubs

and access regional markets for their own agricultural goods also brought people

to their shores. The rural attraction that Edgar Mayhew Bacon had found so

compelling in his 1904 account was not lost of the booming population of Fall

River. Beginning in the 1890s, railroads and trolley lines began connecting Fall

River with recreational as well as residential opportunities in the countryside

environment across the Taunton River. Ferries had begun to bring people over

from Fall River for afternoon jaunts on Brayton Point in 1864,109 but quick,

inexpensive trolleys opened the opportunities for a broader range of the

population. The establishment of commercial bayside recreation areas

encouraged millworkers and the middle class to get out of the city.

In 1895 the first electric trolley connected Fall River to Somerset. The

Dighton, Somerset and Swansea Street Railway Company picked up passengers

on the Fall River side of the Slade's Ferry Bridge and took them along the western

shore of the Taunton River to Somerset village. The railway continued up to

Dighton where a commercial park owned by the railway company had been built.

109Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 118.

70

According to a 1898 travel guide, Dighton Rock Park110 included much than a

picnic lawn overlooking the river: “Inside the Park are bowling alleys, a dancing

hall, billiard rooms, an immense dining hall and merry-go-rounds, while on the

river are wharves with a fleet of steam launches and row-boats. Band concerts

and entertainments are given here on summer afternoons, and in the evening the

park is brilliantly illuminated by thousands of electric lights.”111

The “snake line” of the Providence and Fall River railway company opened

in 1901 and extended directly westward across the Taunton River to Swansea and

the Ocean Grove beach park, another shoreside amusement area. Ocean Grove

became more than a day visit though. Middle class in Fall River and Providence

began seeking out homes along the snake line route, which could take them to

work and back each day. The Wilbur farm family, which owned extensive

property on the northern end of Gardner's neck, became the Wilbur Land

Development Corporation. Hundreds of acres of farmland were split off into lots

and the suburbanization of Swansea began in the first decade of the 20th century.

One summer, the Wilbur company hosted an advertising promotion for its

suburban dream by dispersing balloons over the crowded beach at nearby Ocean

Grove. Select balloons contained deeds to property lots. The rail line stayed open

until 1917 when it gave way to an automobile road.112 Similarly, the waterfront

110The current Massachusetts state park of the same name is located on the opposite side of the Taunton River.

111Robert Derrah, Derrahs Street Railway Guide for Eastern Massachusetts (Boston: Keeden Press, 1898), 141.

112Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts, 162.

71

village of Somerset that had been home to shipbuilding, pottery and ironworks

developed into a suburb on the Dighton to Fall River streetcar route.

Environment, Industry and Local History

The story of Somerset and Swansea from their establishment through

suburbanization is a local history with wider implications for the understanding of

New England industrialization in the nineteenth century and for understanding the

broader role of environmental features in driving economic history. While the

shift in land use to suburban housing developments and recreational centers

changed much of the economic basis of Somerset and Swansea, the fate of the

region continued to be heavily influenced by the value of its environmental

features. Where the water, woods and meadows had once been seen as natural

resources to be exploited for shipping, agriculture and industry, these landscapes

became just as highly prized for their scenic value by tourists and residents

seeking an escape from urban stress. This study of the roles of environmental

features in the early economic development of Somerset and Swansea widens our

understanding of the role of coastal communities on industrialization, and

imposes a sense of agency on people who have been largely dismissed as mere

victims of industrialization.

Somerset and Swansea show that the textiles mills did not produce the

uniform effects that frequently studied mill towns would lead us to believe. The

unique geography and rich resources of Mount Hope Bay's northern shore and

72

rivers offered a wide range of economic opportunities that the Quakers and other

early settlers were quick to take advantage of. Through a mix of farming,

shipbuilding, trade and heavy industry, they generated an diversified economy

well before the establishment of the mills in neighboring Fall River. The diversity

of this economy enabled land-owning families to stay in the community over

numerous generations despite fluctuations in individual industries. That pattern

of stability was not necessarily available to inland communities where

opportunities were not as widespread. As a result the coastal experience of towns

abutting industrialization was quite different from that of the more commonly

studied inland communties.

By profiting from their coastal geography over numerous generations,

residents in Somerset and Swansea were able to amass capital that they then

invested in the development of the textile mill industry in neighboring Fall River.

This local involvement in industrialization by farmers and small independent

merchants suggests that the economic power behind New England's nineteenth-

century textile mills was much more complex than the history of the Boston

Associates and other big-city financiers suggests.

At the same time, they remained physically separated from Fall River by the

Taunton River and the Assonet faultline. By occupying a separate watershed that

fed into a large tidal bay, they were buffered from the environmental and social

impacts of the textile industry in ways that inland towns were not. Their fisheries

were less affected, their water supply remained cleaner, and residents were able to

73

remain in occupations that did not exist in strictly rural inland communities.

Examining the experience of Somerset and Swansea in this environmental context

suggests the complex role that geography and ecology play in economic

development beyond merely access to natural resources. The same features that

buffered Somerset and Swansea from the impacts of industrialization and

urbanization enabled them to retain recreational and residential value in the next

century. The towns that Edgar Mayhew Bacon saw as having been left behind

had not only played a leading role in shaping the industrial development around

them, but had translated their bucolic character to economic benefit throughout

the entire process.

74

Maps

Figure 1: General region of Narragansett Basin. Created from Google Earth

image.

75

Figure 2: Taunton River Watershed. U.S. Geological Survey

76

Figure 3: Partial map of the original Shawomet Purchase. As reproduced in William A. Hart, History of the Town of Somerset, Massachusetts (Town of Somerset, 1940).

77

Figure 4a: Taunton River, showing Fall River and the village of Swansea (Somerset). Joseph des Barres, “A Chart of the Harbour of Rhode Island and Narragansett Bay,” The Atlantic Neptune (London, 1776).

78

Figure 4b: Mount Hope Bay, showing the rivers leading into the bay, and the area of the Shawomet Purchase. Joseph des Barres, “A Chart of the Harbour of Rhode Island and Narragansett Bay,” The Atlantic Neptune (London, 1776).

79

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