A Sketch of the Early Days of the Woolen Industry in North Andover, Massachusetts

A Sketch of the Early Days of the Woolen Industr

This sketch by Nathaniel Stevens (grandson of Captain Nathaniel Stevens) traces the origins and rise of the woolen manufacturing industry in North Andover, Massachusetts, from the town's 1787 resolution to curb dependence on foreign goods and encourage domestic wool and flax production through to the establishment and growth of the great mill dynasties along Cochichewick Brook. The narrative opens by noting that before the Revolution, England had actively discouraged American manufacturing, leaving the town with little industry beyond saw and grist mills and Samuel Phillips's short-lived powder mill (which exploded in 1778 and was later converted, unsuccessfully, into a paper mill before Abraham Marland turned it into a woolen mill). The true beginning of the local woolen trade is credited to the Scholfield brothers—Arthur, John, and James—English mechanics and inventors who arrived in 1793 with spinning jennies and carding machines. James Scholfield settled in North Andover in 1802, purchasing the lower fall at Sutton's Mills and establishing what is identified as the first woolen mill in the town, later passing through owners including Abraham Marland, Isaac Osgood, Samuel Ayer, and finally the Sutton family, whose descendants (William and General Eben Sutton) still figured prominently in the town's industrial life at the time of writing. The account then surveys the successive falls on Cochichewick Brook: the vanished Saunders factory; the Hodges Mill (later Osgood Mills), founded by Captain George Hodges and Edward Pranker for the manufacture of white flannels, later organized as a stock company under General Eben Sutton and John Elliot before passing in 1900 to M. T. Stevens and Sons Company; and the site of Isaac Osgood's saw and grist mill, which became the town's largest industry under Charles Barnes, George H. Gilbert, Parker Richardson, and successors. The heart of the sketch is devoted to Nathaniel Stevens ("Captain Nat"), born in 1786, son of Revolutionary War veteran Jonathan Stevens. After a modest local education, years bound out as a laborer, work in a livery stable, and a stint at sea sailing from Salem to Leghorn, Stevens returned to North Andover in 1812 and briefly kept a grocery store. Amid wartime demand for woolens, he acquired an interest in the old Bradstreet grist-mill site on Cochichewick Brook (jointly with Dr. Joseph Kittredge and Josiah Monroe, forming the "Factory Company" under Superintendent James Scholfield) and began manufacturing woolen goods in October 1813, eventually becoming sole owner. The essay details the hardships of the early tariff environment, the War of 1812, and the difficult decade that followed, including his 1815 marriage to Harriet Hale and his adoption, on Abraham Marland's advice, of flannel as his specialty—making him, per Bagnall's history, the pioneer American flannel manufacturer, a product line the mill retained exclusively until 1876. Anecdotes illustrate Stevens's tenacity and character: his defiant reply to Abbott Lawrence's warning that imported goods would undercut him ("As long as I can get water to turn my wheel, I shall continue to run my mill"); a lawsuit over a burned rental house that shaped his later business caution; his support for Andrew Jackson and free raw materials in tariff debates; his brief tenure as an Andover Bank director and sole term in the Massachusetts Legislature (1835); and his connection to the founding of Lawrence, Massachusetts, as a charter member of the Essex Company. A lengthy digression reproduces the travel memoir of his daughter, Julia Maria Stevens (Mrs. Hunting), recounting her arduous three-week journey by rail, ferry, canal boat, inclined plane, and steamboat from Andover to Nashville, Tennessee, in October 1838—offering a vivid period portrait of travel, Quaker hospitality in New Hampshire, and slavery-era Tennessee. The sketch further documents the mill's business practices: early single-entry bookkeeping combined store and factory accounts (with sample ledger entries for sugar, gin, coffee, flannel, and wool), wool sourced overland from as far as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and financial strain during the panics of 1837 and 1857, both of which the enterprise survived. Stevens expanded operations with a Haverhill mill in 1855, testified in an 1849 lawsuit that output had grown from fifty to four or five hundred pounds of wool processed daily, and ensured his children's education at Franklin Academy and beyond before ceding active management to his sons Moses Tyler, George, and Horace Nathaniel. The piece closes with Stevens's death on March 5, 1865, his wife Harriet's death in 1881, and a tribute to his character as a man of "indomitable will, incessant industry, shrewd business sagacity and square dealing," situating him and his family's business—the direct ancestor of the M. T. Stevens and Sons Company—as central to four generations of North Andover's industrial and civic life.

By Nathaniel Stevens · First published 1925 · Genre: History, Industrial History, Biography · 7,136 words

First lines

the following vote recorded under date of the year 1787: "We hereby resolve to refrain from, as far as in our power, to prevent the excessive use and consumption of articles of foreign manufacture, and we will exert our best endeavors for the promotion of industry and our own manufactures. And in particular, that we will exert ourselves to increase our wool and flax as far as is practicable, that we will as far as may be, avoid killing our sheep, or killing them for slaughter after shearing time, till the wool be serviceable for clothing. And that we will exert ourselves to promote and encourage the manufactures of wool and flax and other raw materials into such articles as shall be useful in the community."

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industrial history · textile manufacturing · wool processing · factory development · New England history · Massachusetts history · local history · economic history · labor history · nineteenth century · American industry · manufacturing communities

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