1. Chapter 12
Industry and the North

2. MAP 12.1 Travel Times, 1800 and 1857 The transportation revolution dramatically reduced travel times, and vastly expanded everyone’s horizons. Improved roads, canals, and the introduction of steamboats and railroads made it easier for Americans to move, and made even those who did not move less isolated. Better transportation linked the developing West to the eastern seaboard and fostered a sense of national identity and pride.

3. MAP 12.2 Commercial Links: Rivers, Canals, Roads, 1830 and Rail Lines, 1850 By 1830, the United States was tied together by a network of roads, canals and rivers. This “transportation revolution” fostered a great burst of commercial activity and economic growth. Transportation improvements accelerated the commercialization of agriculture by getting farmers’ products to wider, nonlocal markets. Access to wider markets likewise encouraged new textile and other manufacturers to increase their scale of production. By 1850, another revolutionary mode of transportation, the railroad, had emerged as a vital link to the transportation infrastructure.

4. MAP 12.3 Lowell, Massachusetts, 1832 This town plan of Lowell, Massachusetts in 1832, illustrates the comprehensive relationship the owners envisaged between the factories and the workforce. The mills are located on the Merrimack River, while nearby are the boarding houses for the single young female workers, row houses for the male mechanics and their families, and houses for the overseers. Somewhat farther away is the mansion of the company agent.

5. FIGURE 12.1 Occupations of Women Wage Earners in Massachusetts, 1837 This chart shows how important outwork was for women workers. Textile work in factories occupied less than 20 percent of women, while outwork in palm-leaf hats, straw bonnets, and boots and shoes accounted for over half of the total workforce. Teaching was a new occupation for women in The small percentage of 3.6 would grow in the future.
SOURCE:Based on Thomas Dublin,Transforming Women ’s Work (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press,1991),Table 1.1,p.20.

8. In the 1840s, Edward Hicks painted his childhood home, rendering an idealized image of rural harmony that owes more to faith in republican agrarianism than to the artist’s accurate memory. The prosperous preindustrial farm depicted was similar to the Springers’ farm described in the text in its mixed yield—sheep, cattle, dairy products, and field crops—and its employment of an African American farm worker, shown plowing.
SOURCE:Residence of David Twinning, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.

9. Every small community had artisans such as blacksmiths and wheelwrights, who did such essential work as shoeing horses and mending wagons for local farmers. Artist John Neagle’s heroic image of the blacksmith Pat Lyon, presents him as the very model of honest industry.
SOURCE:John Neagle,Pat Lyon at the Forge. Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

10. One of the Erie Canal’s greatest engineering feats occured at Lockport, where the famous “combined” locks—two sets of five locks—rose side by side for 60 feet. One observer boasted, “Here the great Erie Canal has defied nature.” SOURCE:Lockport,New York.Lithograph

11. This Currier and Ives print of 1849, The Express Train, captures the popular awe at the speed and wonder of the new technology. This “express” probably traveled no more than 30 miles per hour. SOURCE:Currier and Ives,The Express Train ,1849.The Granger Collection,New York.

12. Cyrus McCormick is shown demonstrating his reaper to skeptical farmers
Cyrus McCormick is shown demonstrating his reaper to skeptical farmers. When they saw that the machine cut four times as much wheat a day as a hand-held scythe, farmers flocked to buy McCormick’s invention. Agricultural practices, little changed for centuries, were revolutionized by machines such as this. SOURCE:The Testing of the First Reaping Machine, lithograph,1831.Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.

13. This carved and painted figure, designed as a whirligig and trade sign, shows a woman at a spinning wheel. Until cotton textile mills industrialized this work, spinning was one of the most time-consuming tasks that women and young girls did at home.
SOURCE:Woman at Spinning Wheel,ca.1850 –70.Carved and painted wood and iron.Photographed by Ken Burris.Shelburne Museum, Shelburne,Vermont.

14. This 1850 engraving by the American Banknote company shows women tending looms at Lowell. The contrast between this industrial activity and the figure of a woman spinning at home illustrates one of the most important effects of industrialization: Now machines, not individuals, determined the pace of production.
SOURCE:Print Collection,Miriam and Ira D.Wallach Division of Art,Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library,Astor,Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

15. This early nineteenth-century watercolor shows Slater’s mill, the first cotton textile mill in the United States, which depended on the waterpower of Pawtucket Falls for its energy. New England was rich in swiftly flowing streams that could provide power to spinning machines and power looms. SOURCE:Rhode Island Historical Society.

16. In 1816, Connecticut gunsmith Simeon North did what Eli Whitney had only hoped to do. North produced the first gun with interchangeable parts. North’s invention, taken up and improved by the national armories at Springfield and Harpers Ferry, formed the basis of the American system of manufactures. SOURCE:(top)Photograph by James L.Amos;(bottom)John H.Hall ’s patent for a breech-loading rifle,1811.Both,National Geographic Society.

17. This illustration of seamstresses at work, from Sartain’s Union Magazine, January 1851, shows an early abuse created by the market revolution. Women workers were crowded into just a few occupations, thereby allowing owners to offer very low wages for very long hours of work. The women in this illustration appear to be gathered together in a central workshop, where they had each other for company. Many other women sewed alone at home, often for even lower wages. SOURCE:Illustration from Sartain’s Union Magazine, January 1851.Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

18. This timetable from the Lowell Mills illustrates the elaborate time schedules that the cotton textile mills expected their employees to meet. For workers, it was difficult to adjust to the regimentation imposed by clock time, in contrast to the approximate times common to preindustrial work.
SOURCE:Baker Library,Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University.

19. This middle class family group, painted in 1840, illustrates the new importance of children, and at the mother-child bond. SOURCE:Frederick Spencer,Family group, 1840.© Francis G..Mayer/CORBIS.

20. In a time before ready-made clothing was available, middle class women used Godey’s Ladies Book as a pattern book, taking elaborate fashion illustrations such as this one from 1856, to local seamstresses, or remaking older dresses to fit the current trends.
SOURCE:CORBIS © Bettmann//CORBIS

21. Emerson’s romantic glorification of nature included the notion of himself as a “transparent eyeball,” as he wrote in “Nature” in This caricature of Emerson is from “Illustrations of the New Philosophy” by Christopher Pearce Cranch.
SOURCE:Library of Congress.