Industry sign banking rhode island document now
[Music] it's no exaggeration to say that Rhode Island grew up around the Industrial Revolution it started here not five miles down the road Pawtucket and it rapidly transformed the economy from and agrarian small-scale manual labor based economy to a full-fledged mass producing industrial based economy and even though it's not exactly known for it Rhode Island is the place that a lot of these American firsts occurred that are now sort of taken for granted as just part of the American identity founded in 1630 is by Roger Williams after he got booted out of the Massachusetts colony for clashes with the local government about religious freedoms and the confiscation of native lands in conception rhode island was based on those tenets of religious freedom and personal liberties that we really just take for granted today and in 1652 a guy named John Smith not Pocahontas John Smith but the third president of the Rhode Island colony he enacted a law that would be the first water restrict slavery in the United States and it stated that nobody could remain in bondage whether forced or voluntary for a period exceeding ten years except in the event that they entered bondage before their 14th birthday in which case they would be emancipated upon their 24th birthday and what's most impressive to me about this legislation is that it included not just white people but also black people and then in 1679 it was extended further to include Native Americans now it's not that hard to argue that this isn't exactly the most widely upheld legislation in the history of mankind but this is 17th century New England this is a hundred years before the American Revolution and just north in Massachusetts we have people being burned alive for religious differences and loose accusations made by preteen children so the fact that the seeds of abolition are already being sown in Rhode Island is sort of really nothing short of fantastically progressive moving forward - around the time of the revolution Rhode Islanders burned the Gaspee which you can learn a bit more about my last video and that really kicked off the chain of events leading to the Boston Tea Party and to the American Revolution itself we were the first to declare independence from Britain May 4th 1776 so that's two full months before the rest of the colonies and upon drafting the Constitution were Island was the last to gratify holding out for more religious pretensions for the purposes of this video we've got to move forward about 13 years from the end of the American Revolution 1789 when a 21 year old man named Samuel Slater was making his way over from Brittany and at the time it was illegal to leave Britain with plans any kind of technical data for there are threat Milt because they didn't want that knowledge getting into the hands of the Americans despite only being 21 he had already had 11 years experience working in the mills he started working in the mills in Britain when he was just 10 years old so he had a lot of technical experience and he was particularly proficient with mathematics from an early age so he took to it like a mechanical engineer basically and headed to the United States with technical knowledge of Britain's Arkwright mill system and now it goes without saying that if he's not allowed to physically come over himself because of his uh mental knowledge he wasn't allowed to bring any blueprints so what he came over with was mental knowledge he he felt that he had enough expertise hands-on and technical experience with the inner workings and construction of the mills where he'd be able to come over here and replicate them in 1789 he came over wasn't really super impressed he had spent some time in the mills and didn't really like the layout thought that they were too far away from any major water source to be able to derive any significant power from our River and replicate anything like what output what production quality and quantity was seen over in Britain in their mills so he decided it would be easier to start from scratch and build up a new mill so he met with a guy named Moses Brown who with his business partner William Olney had been trying unsuccessfully for quite some time to build an ark Wright mill or something very like it so with Slater's guarantee that he would be able to be successful in constructing an arc right mill they decided to go ahead and they threw up some plans pick the spot hired some local builders artisans and in about 1789 1790 they began construction on what would become Slater mill later I had completed construction of the Slater mill and then rapidly transformed the surrounding areas in terms of economy and socially even geographically it transformed the quantity and rate of production such that the cost of both production and purchase were reduced to where more people had access to it had previously been seen whether in terms of goods just being cheaper or in terms of now people had access to employment so they could think of buying stuff in first place so it really transformed the quality of life for a lot of people but it wasn't just the mills the the mills were constructed along with the mills were constructed cottages who provide housing for the mill workers which is in turn invited different aspects of towns the margins the emergence stuff like blacksmiths and and tailors churches and schools also popped up in the area and it sort of became a concentrated village eponymously named Slater Phil it was sort of a concentrated area with the mill as a hub all of the aspects of a society radiating out from it with the mill generating the income that then percolated out into the local economy surrounding and a lot of people's quality of life were raised considerably because with the increase in production it created more need for jobs and more access to the goods at a lower cost and a more rapid rate so that was really quickly a positive feedback loop that expanded dramatically and it was replicated by other entrepreneurs along the major waterways in the area notably to would ask Pawtucket the Blackstone that even here behind me and tuckson rivers so that model was replicated all along the Blackstone all on the tugs at all in the wood ESMA took it and the areas quickly began transforming along the same pattern that Pawtucket saw with Slater mill and Slater village of those entrepreneurs who were responsible for the construction of the mills in the early years of the Industrial Revolution the sprigs are easily the most successful Williams brake was already a wealthy industrialist and he'll and small grist mill and Castle River in Cranston and seeing the success up at Slater mill he decided to convert his grist mill over to a water-powered cotton textile mill so he did this and began production in 1807 and it was so successful that the sprig name the Sprague brand was more or less responsible almost single-handedly for the propelling of Rhode Island from just a textile economy to a textile Empire they had a lot of mills all throughout the area and they were fantastically wealthy and the Sprague print works as the mill was called its Cranston print works today it's actually the only mill in continuous production from the Industrial Revolution at least in this area I don't know about beyond this area but 1807 is one of the earliest anyway and the spring print works went on to pioneer new techniques in textile dyeing bleaching and what's called calico printing so really successful and really propellant for the textile economy but as successful and wealthy as mill owners were things were a little bit different for the workers in the mill and the structural labor wasn't it wasn't really anything like what you and I would recognize today having benefited from literal centuries of the labor movement in the United States there was no eight-hour workday there was no 40-hour Work Week there was no overtime well no overtime laws there was no five-day workweek there's no two-day weekend no minimum wage there were no child labor laws either and actually young children and I mean preteen the early teen made up a disproportionate percentage of the labor force and that's not a uniquely American thing that's just kind of the way things went unfortunately and Sam slate of himself as I said he came over here at 21 with 11 years experience in the middle so he started working in the mills at age 10 it's a very common thing and then women began entering the workforce during his time and the mill owners eagerly hired them because they could pay them a lot less than they paid men and oftentimes women made less than half of their male counterparts in the mill so it was very much a paternalistic structure of labor with the mill owners and superintendents literally calling all the shots and they could increase the workday without offering any more compensation not even necessarily overtime they could increase the workweek they could scale back wages really what they said went and it was viewed as the good of the mill is the good of the worker and when the middle prospered so did the worker and honestly that was pretty much accepted across the board it almost sounds counterintuitive and it's not to say that there were no complaints or grievances or anything strikes and unionization at least small-scale unions are as old as the Industrial Revolution itself so it's not that there were no issues it's not that people weren't feeling mistreated from early on because they did and oftentimes they were but given the rapidity of industrialization and the rate at which people's lives improved and that women were now entering the workforce which is a catalytic moment in the women's rights movement not only in the United States but worldwide given all those things and despite the drawbacks and shortcomings it was very much a net positive effect positive impact on everybody involved and within the first half of the 19th century railroads had already begun being constructed to connect the mills and the villages and thus they facilitated mass transportation mass transit of raw materials and finished products and thereafter into New York and by the 1860s far beyond and so that's that started happening the rail work started linking things in the first half of the 19th century and that's that's pretty incredible when you think about it because Ryland as you know was founded in the 1630s the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the 1790s so that's 160 years of not enough stagnant but a static economy an agrarian economy it then you have Slater mill firing up for the first time in the 1790s and in less than 50 years in about 30% of the time that word Ireland had even existed prior you have almost a wholesale conversion to a full-fledged mass producing industrialized economy with a railroad interconnecting the major points to production and facilitating transit across state lines and so this really must have been exciting time to be alive [Music] you in 1851 a guy named Robert Knight founded the BBN our knight company which was a textile manufacturer based right here in the Pontiac Mills in Warwick Rhode Island and what Pontiac Mills and what BBN our night were originally known for was manufacturing textiles under the fruit of the Loom label and you might be one of those people that despite living in America you you have no idea that Rhode Island is even a thing but I guarantee you any of those people have heard of sort of look it's it's a big name in textiles even today I was founded right here and headquartered right here in the Pontiac Mills now ten years later with the onset of the civil war in 1861 night as well as several other textile firms throughout Rhode Island were responsible for the manufacture of the Union war uniforms now it wasn't only the uniforms night made a lot of the uniforms here at Pontiac mills other firms manufacture the tents and bags and packs and blankets and other textiles that were necessary for the Union effort but Braun had long since diversified from a strictly textile economy and the textiles were produced in the mills and then converted over and and made into garments into the uniforms using sewing machines that were manufactured at Brown and sharp which was another Rhode Island firm Providence Tool Company manufactured Sabres and and bayonets also in Rhode Island Builders foundry manufactured cannons for Union warships Providence steam engine made two engines for Union Board Suites Burnside rifle company made rifle parts and then companies like Condon and carpenter it's sort of the iron bars and rods and iron hoops and horseshoes and sort of another miscellaneous hardware that you might not think much about but it's nevertheless very critical to a 19th century war effort so so Brown was really a one-stop shop all of your arming the Union Army needs and given the rotating cast of generals at the helm of the Union Army none of whom seemed to be able to rival robert e lee something like a very concentrated resource center that the Union had in Rhode Island could manufacture everything more or less that army needed located right on a major railway it was indispensable to Union effort and as such Rhode Island kind of played and understated but critical role in the Union victory during the Civil War so in the years after the Civil War it was was a period called the Reconstruction era it was sort of a period of reunification and healing and the South was in need of an economy based on something that wasn't slave labor and as such the textile mill was spread more rapidly into the south than they had before the war and you might think of slavery and slave labor as something that was mostly beneficial to the south and the South the economy was completely predicated and depended upon it but the North was pretty much equally dependent upon him even though the slavery wasn't located here for nearly as long now the word Island specifically produced a unique product called Negro cloth has also called Kentucky jeans and what that was was and easy to produce inexpensive durable cotton twill fabric that was traded to the southern plantation owners in exchange for raw cotton and the plantation owners used the Negro cloth to clothe slaves and it accounted for up to 70% of Rhode Island's text duction at the height of producing this Negro cloth and immediately following the civil war that dropped off and it fell to about 15 percent of Rhode Island textile production and shortly thereafter it dropped off completely I mean there's no more slavery you don't need Negro cloth to clothe slave so it went from 70 percent down to zero very quickly and it goes without saying that if you no longer have slaves that need to be clothed the slavery doesn't exist then you also don't have the free labor that enslaved people buy so in the time period from 1860 to 1864 you have an increase of the price of cotton from 10 cents a pound to a dollar 89 so that's almost 19 times more expensive by the end of the Civil War so that's a big increase in overhead for the northern textile mills also around the time of the Civil War you have petroleum discovered in Pennsylvania which quickly started displacing the whaling industry in New Bedford which produced whale oil which prior to with petroleum discovery it was the primary lighting fuel source in the world and New Bedford was called the city that lit the world and it was one of the richest cities in the world at the time now going through the middle of the 19th century you really have whale populations being dramatically depleted and willing voyages took a lot longer and they weren't necessarily as profitable as a result and the whaling voyage might take about a month and that ships would come back with about 4,000 barrels worth of whale oil and in the whales that they had hunted and kill now in a month you get 4,000 barrels away all over Pennsylvania could Bruce produced 3,000 barrels of petroleum in a day so that quickly paced the whaling industry and as a result we Bedford which at the time included Fair Haven and Acushnet started mimicking their neighbors over in Fall River and moving toward the textile economy so it was a little bit more competition furthermore you can have the railroad industry which saw heavy heavy speculative investment the years leading up to the Civil War
but the development around the railroads didn't really keep pace as a result the profits that had been expected and promised to investors wasn't really seen so the railroad industry was kind of floundering and the railroad workers were at work going on strike widespread at the time and then lastly over in Europe and Germany specifically there was a D monetization of silver which was partly responsible for the destabilization of the European economy all of these events the displacement of whaling industry the the railroad industry faltering the rocketing increase in price in cotton and the lack of free labor with slave labor all of these things that others conspired to create what was called the panic of 1873 and at the time it was called the Great Depression but 68 years later with what we now call it a Great Depression we realized what a Great Depression was and now we just call it the panic of 1873 so during the panic of 1873 the Sprague's were really kind of spent they were sort of financially overextended and economically just exhausted and they began to go under and they started selling out and this is when Bibi and our night really stepped up and they did really well throughout the civil war they weren't quite as impacted as the springs were and they they started buying out the the mills that were previously owned by the sprigs and they spread like crazy they had mills all over the area all over New England they quickly outpaced the Sprague's in terms of presence in the textile industry and it was actually said that at one point Phoebe in our night rolled an unbroken an uninterrupted row of mills along the Pawtuxet spanning over four and a half miles and thinking like a 21st century person it might not really convey what that means four and a half miles that's three minutes in your car on the highway but that's not really how it was back then this was all on rail and I bike on a bike path pretty much every day called the walk from secondary path and back in the early 20th 19th century this was a railroad called the Providence Hartford Fishkill rail and it ran as I bite it from Providence down to Coventry so I literally bike along what used to be that railroad that saw that unbroken row of about four and a half miles of night company mills and a lot of it's still there a lot of the mills are still there a lot of the cottages that at that house the employees are still there a lot of the office buildings are still there a lot of the dams are still there and the sluice ways so it's a lot as you go further south then a lot of Rhode Island's you go across the intersections and you see sort of entering our tequila gendering date ability so you really start getting a feel for what this must have been like at the time when you're seeing mill after mill after mill and you know that the mill and the cottages and the immediate surrounding area was a village that was entirely dependent upon the night company for their income and their sustainability so you start to relate to it than your weight and when you're spending half an hour biking through this area that was run and owned almost entirely by the Knights you really kind of understand the expanse and the enormity of the knight corporation when this is just a small area than they operated all throughout the England so from the period of about 1880 to the turn of the 20th century Knight was the biggest name and they really pushed Rhode Island into unprecedented profits in the textile industry become the turn of the 20th century with the southern textile industry is really taking for it and gaining momentum and European economy having revitalized to a certain extent and providing some overseas competition you start seeing a steady slowing of the Rhode Island textile economy and after the turn of the 20th century who would never again return to the kind of profitability that it saw previously and particularly post-world War one in 1918 things slowed down so much that come when when the rest of the country was entering were the roaring 20s in the wake of their own industrialization prophets of the Industrial Revolution spreading elsewhere in the country Rhode Island was really kind of grinding to a halt and BBN our night sort of surprised the region and the industry when they announced that in 1920 they were selling out to a firm called consolidated textile [Music] so by the time consolidated textile had taken over possession of the now formally BB in our night company mills it was already doing so in the face of a receding economy and keeping pace with sort of the way things are done back then in 1921 in the face of that recession the consolidated textile company decided to cut wages and they they cut them by 22 percent which from a 21st century standpoint sounds insane but given that that's sort of the way things went back then it was like listen guys things are real tight right now orders have slowed down production has slowed down we can't bear the brunt of the lack of profits our own so let's sort of take it as a team and I wouldn't say that the workers were happy about it but given the circumstances it was it was acceptable now about a year later in January 1922 that all kind of changed when it was announced that not only would there be another 20% of pay cuts but that consolidated textile would be ending the company policy of providing housing for employees and they announced that they'd be starting to sell off the cottages so this is this is a recession for the better part of a year you're living with a 20% reduction in wages despite working 54 hour weeks and now it turns out that that 20% pay cut is is going up to a 40% pay cut and your boss is selling your house so that was really kind of last straw for a lot of people and on January 21st 1922 workers in River Point which is where I am right now at the Royal Mill which you can see sorta behind me further off to the left and the cotton shed was just sort of directly behind me and the valley Queen villages it's obscured behind the cotton shed though three mills walked off their machines and and they went on strike and they marched right over to the Pontiac mill with the intention of getting the mill workers there to strike with them and they were met by the police who although the police stopped them from getting into the yard of the mills it the message still got across sound like the mill workers didn't know what was going on a few hundred people show up at your workplace and are confronted by the police you don't have to talk to them directly to to find out what happened and even though they were turned away by the police the messages heard point got across and the workers at Pontiac Mills followed suit and joined the strike next they went on over to the Natick mill which at the time was one of the largest mill complexes in the world and now one of the strikers ended up being arrested during this and those riots continued until the worker was released and the Natick built in mid-june strike that part was successful but they were also turned away by police force the strike started to spread around the Patuxent River Valley and the workers put together what's called flying squadrons which were groups of mill workers striking mill workers that went from Milt's mill to sort of talk about why they were striking what they were straightening forth and try and encourage the workers at the different mills to join in the stroke and around the same time the mills put out a statement the mill owners put out a statement saying that this is just how things had been things slowed down and and wages are cut back or hours are extended this is how it's always been it was like that for 40 years under Beebe and our night it was like that for decades under the scrapes it's been like that since the onset of the Industrial Revolution why why is this suddenly different but to the workers it was different this was a major recession then we just have already been caught 40% and now you're getting rid of the houses so this is far beyond Oracle precedent as far as the work that work there's so much and the strikes really spread all the way across the the mills on the Patuxent River Valley and from from the southernmost border the border with Connecticut all the way up the river and also along with the Blackstone so that's that's a lot of territory to all be on strike and I've already mentioned the Royal mill the cotton shed and the Holly Queen Mills and I've mentioned the Natick and the Pontiac medal so that's five Mills on strike and that's pretty considerable but it was way more than that I mean you had the wood Nick mill and the Arctic mill the Centerville mill the prompt and milled Anthony Mills the Harris Mills lipid Mills Arkwright Mills Phoenix Mills and Clyde in ethanol on the black stone you had the born mill the social mill the hamlet mill the shanks mill - to do the Valley Falls mill and the bill that started Rolfe Slater mill was also involved in this and that's a lot but really that's only a handful I've mentioned a bunch of them there are some that I didn't mention some that I didn't visit some I don't even know existed that took part in this strike and this was from the for the Connecticut ballroom sound all the way up the Pawtuxet all the way up the Blackstone to the border with Massachusetts and then into Massachusetts all the way up to Lowell so pets that's all of Rhode Island in like three quarters of Massachusetts that was involved in this strike when I said earlier that the mills were really the hub of the the economy locally that still applies here I mean Rouen wasn't any longer a single product economy is it diversified from textiles but the mills were still really the bread and butter of the economy and when you have people that are already starved for money and they already lived out their savings and cut down to 60% of what they used to make there's no extra jobs you are in a recession even if there were extra jobs they're working 54 hours a week and you don't even have time for another job and then you pull the mils as out from that that that's paralyzing to the economy and it was really felt and it reverberate 'add not just long river valley along the along of the mill villages but it moved out from there and all the way across Rhode Island and most of the way up Massachusetts and already by February the mill owners were were pressing the governor who's a Republican governor named Emery San sushi he they were pressing on him to call in the National Guard because they didn't see any reasonable organic and little peaceful conclusion to this string and he didn't he didn't call in the National Guard he played the part of a typical politician and said that he didn't want to involve himself he wanted it to basically resolve itself peacefully and shortly thereafter he balked and threatened to uh to send in the National Guard and still didn't but by the end of February he wound up sending in the National Guard and 150 National Guard troops went to made the Natick mill to break the stripes there and they actually mounted a machine gun tarp and this is 20th century Rhode Island there's a machine gun turret on the top of a textile mill to prevent violence and and rioting and in doing that the the governor mostly succeeded in alienating the mill owners who wanted him to call at the national garden and he didn't so they were fed up with him and then when he finally did he a lien Aidid his base among the mill workers didn't any the strikes though by any stretch of the imagination so really he just succeeded in guaranteeing that he wouldn't be reelected but the strikes really went on and on and the violence continued and the clashes with police and now with National Guard troops continued the police have never dealt with anything like this and they were really under trained for the purposes and there was widespread reports of police brutality people are killed and ethnicity of the person killed often incited more solidarity among ethnic groups among the strikers and and among the ethnic groups related to the strikers who had been killed then by summer two Mills announced that they were going to started evicting the mill workers and their families but not for the reasons I said earlier when they announced that they were going to start selling off the mill housing they said that you know you have been to work in months you have no plans on coming back to work we need work to be done so you're living on our property free you're getting out of our property we're calling in outside labor to start getting things going again so this tactic didn't really work either and mill workers started setting up guards to prevent the mill from resuming operation and they would things like attack trucks or or delivery of moving and prevent the mills from really from starting up again at all and it wasn't until September of 1922 that the mill owners started becoming willing to negotiate and they did but not really out of the goodness of their own heart I mean they they knew that no quick resolution no easy resolution was going to come they weren't stupid but when it comes down to it the strike had already written out the brunt of the recession and production orders started coming back in again so they knew that at this point it's in their best interest someone needs to compromise they can afford to do it they're in a good position to do it and in moving forward to suggest the compromise to suggest negotiations they would be able to circulate air court so they did and they negotiated that work which would be reduced from 54 back down to 48 hours and the wage cuts would be reversed to where they were before January 1922 so basically they were first half of the wage cuts and even though this was sort of a selfish tactic on the part of the mill owners it was seen as a huge victory for the mill workers who had learned and demonstrated that they could come together on a massive scale and strike walk off their job and paralyze an economy across state lines they could march and strike and fight and literally died for a common cause and when it came down to it it was this is no longer a one-way street yes you're providing the employment but we are providing the labor nothing gets done without us and if you're not supporting one of us we've all talked to each other and if that's the case none of us are supporting you and that mentality that development really broke that maternal istic system that had been in place since the onset of the Industrial Revolution and it was no longer the mill owners calling the shots when it come came to labor and wages but beyond that the mill owner they acted as benevolent overlords like I said and in times of trouble in times of economic hardship they would yes they reduced wages but when it came down to it they would often be very charitable and help out their villages during recessions and during depression and going forward it was very much left up to the resources and ingenuity of the workers and the village residents how to work through that and that resourcefulness would very much be tested as we know about ten years later a little more than going into what would become the Great Depression [Music] [Music] right now I'm in Summit Rhode Island at what was once the second southernmost stop on the Providence Hartford Fishkill railroad before it crossed over into Connecticut and the railroad is long gone as is the textile industry that drove the economy that built it but given the the rural surrounding and what we've learned and the 1850s general store behind me you really kind of feel a connection with and you feel some appreciation for the people who lived through the Industrial Revolution and their way of life but in the wake of the 1922 textile strike that that way of life was already becoming a thing of the past and it was representative of sort of the way things were going nationwide as a whole it wasn't something that was unique to Rhode Island but Rhode Island was a very good snapshot of the way things were going and in particular one of the things that we would I think recognized most readily that came of saying that the textile strike is the modern incarnation the modern representation of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States and
back at the start of the Industrial Revolution the wealthy business owners who let's face it I mean this is a time of slavery we're talking about they weren't exactly ethnically diverse but they were there were wealthy business owners who sort of appealed to the government using their their wealth and their and their either political involvement or political connection to serve intervene and make things go a bit more smoothly to expand their industry and things like that railroad speculation that I mentioned were part of that and there's nothing wrong with that no government in the world wouldn't jump at that kind of opportunity but Republicans at the time were very much in favor of an expanding government presence that could really facilitate and support invest in if necessary the the expansion of the industries and for the purposes of this video the textile industry but as the 19th century waned on and in particular by the turn of the 20th century workers started saying you know we're not really getting as much out of this as we feel like we should and they started advocating more and more for their own rights and logically so the the Republicans said you know listen government we've been we've been at this for a long time now we're really good at it no-one's really complained about anything until relatively recently why don't you just back off and let us do what we're doing if it ain't broke don't fix it and we'll let you know if we need you and that's really an oversimplification but that's more or less the way it was going and was transitioning into that wealthy business owner conservative mindset that wanted a smaller government with less ways of interfering with the way that they were doing business and historical precedent seemed to suggest that that wasn't necessarily a bad thing and that's perfectly encapsulated and represented by the mill owners pressing governor's and sushi to call in the National Guard on their behalf and intervene to quell the riots at the Natick mill and it's also perfectly represented by the governor doing so and on the flip side you have the mill workers who are feeling increasingly frustrated with the sort of totalitarian authority that the mill owners had in their way of life and in the wake of something like Sen sushi calling in the National Guard to stop them for what they felt was asserting their rights and and fighting for their rights they felt very disenfranchised by and overlooked by the Republican Party it was at this point that they started looking toward the Democratic Party being like hey you guys do anything about this we really want to start advocating for our rights and these were lower class working class often very poor workers from immigrant families they were very ethnically diverse and as a result they kind of had to be progressive in order to just coexist with one another and that sort of started shaping the Democratic Party in being the party that represents the working-class ethnically diverse progressive individuals and would intervene on the behalf of workers so you have that right there the modern sort of wealthy conservative business owner who wants small government and the working class progressive blue collar person wants government to be able to step in and impose regulations on businesses that they feel are printing on different lines and in particular going through the Great Depression this really started to take shape with Franklin Roosevelt legislating which greatly strengthened the training and inaction of the social welfare programs that really took care of the lowest rung on the ladder of people who were unemployed a widespread thing obviously during the Great Depression but as far as we're concerned by this point in time the mills were already becoming part of a bygone era by the 1940s the railroad had gone bankrupt and fallen into disrepair in 1941 a fire broke out at the Natick mill which burned down a large part of the complex and actually spoke to the guy who owned the property nowadays and he didn't really know a lot of the specifics about the Industrial Revolution history of the site or anything like the riots or or the machine-gun but he did remember back almost sixty years ago when he was a kid his dad buying the property and some of the some of the Foundation's still stood they were all bulldozed and leveled and filled in for the auto salvage business that's there now but it's just really cool to have that sort of that connection to that past there even if he wasn't completely away aren't aware of it in 1992 a fire broke out in the western end of the Crompton mill complex and it pretty much completely devastated that side of the mills the east side is still in great shape and is actually protected for its historical value but the western end what's left of it there's been no archaeological surveys or no historical surveys whatsoever in order to assess what's left and what historical value that that still has and I kind of think that's a shame in 2005 the Phoenix mill caught fire and I remember this one personally because I I had a band that practiced in the area I remember one day heading to band practice and where the mill just was a couple days ago it was all blocked off it had police tape going around it and some of it was still either smoking or steaming and it was really just a burnt-out hulk really of what used to be this big imposing brick mill structure that was now just these crumbling walls and this remnants of this sad looking chimney that was uh shortly thereafter destroyed because of the structural integrity most of the mills however they're still standing a lot of them are still are still in operation whether I mean not necessarily continuously from the Industrial Revolution but a lot of industries moved in when the textile industry kind of went by the wayside and ruled out some of them have things like smaller scale businesses or or flea markets I know one up in Pawtucket is actually an outlet shop the Slater mill itself is actually now a really cool museum to the Industrial Revolution and it's it's kept pretty authentic and your ever in the Pawtucket area I definitely suggest checking that out and the majority of the mills I would say are going the way of living spaces becoming things like condos and apartment complexes and even hotels and a lot of them are currently occupied by these living spaces a lot of the vacant ones are currently in the process of being are of being repurposed for them and I in theory I think it's it's a good thing to take such a big part of the history of an area and repurpose it for for the modern economy and and and keep that iconic aspect of the area's history how I feel about that in regards to an economically depressed area all of a sudden having these really expensive loft apartments that the residents can't necessarily afford that's a topic for another video but it's still really cool to see something being done with these old mills and as for the railroad the rail bed itself was paved over starting in the late 1990s and in 1997 the first portion of it was opened up as a bike path that section was near the Washington section of the Providence Hartford Fishkill rail line and so the bike path is called the Washington secondary path and it currently spans from almost the Coventry border of Connecticut it's being expanded further but there's still some ways to go and goes all the way up to the Cranston border of Providence and it's a small segment of this overarching project called the East Coast Greenway which is a network that's being built that will stretch all the way from Maine all the way down to Florida and it's going to consist of rail trails like this one and different bike paths and different on-road segments and bike lanes that will all interconnect to have sort of an unbroken bicycling route that goes that spans the entire eastern seaboard of the United States the rhode island portion is 19 miles long and stretches from southern Coventry up to the Princeton border of Providence like I mentioned and on it you'll you'll see a lot of sort of relics of the path of this industrial history for example the store right behind me was built in the 1850s and it was a store that was right near the rail Depot and they'll also pass over the very same steel trestle bridges that the train passed over going in between the mill villages you'll come up to intersections that used to be railroad stops and crossings and you'll see stretches of the railing along the side of the path you'll see things like crossover control-c passenger and if you go far enough ill into River point you'll see the New Haven caboose which it's this cool restored railcar that's sort of a little tourist attraction off the side of the bike path and it used to be a caboose that was in service along this path when it is still a rail you'll see the telegraph poles dotting pretty much all along the length of the bike path if you really keep your eyes open you'll notice little bits of foundation especially going through Warwick they'll see little parts of foundation or not I have no idea what the building used to be but I do know that and variably they were part of either the railroad or the mill villages that surrounded it and of course you'll see the mills oftentimes you'll see them sort of coming up in the distance you'll see the smokestack popping up through the trees and it will disappear into the trees as you as you get closer and the trees obscure it and then as you pass through the trees as they clear away all of a sudden there's just sprawling mill complex and it's really cool to see and you really start feeling like you're traveling through a museum email it's not a museum that's not that far from accurate and it's not just a museum of the Industrial Revolution either as you pass through Anthony village you'll pass by the Nathaniel Greene homes then and what that is is an 18th century homestead that was built by a man named when it was just 27 years old and it expanded to become a farm and ironworks Forge that encompassed 800 acres in that area so it was a huge swath of the area and and it crossed over what would become the railroad and what is now the bike path and on to some of the grounds where the mill mound stands and it's important not just because of its snapshot of life in the 18th century Nathaniel Greene was a Revolutionary War hero he was a major general he was considered a tactical genius and he was good friends with and second-in-command to George Washington himself during the American Revolution looking at it as a museum it's not just a museum of industrialization it's literally a museum of the entire history of the United States as a country spanning from the end of the colonial era and through the American Revolution into the Industrial Revolution and through to secession and the Civil War and the emancipation and the turn of the 20th century and the rise of the automobile and the First World War and the woman suffrage movement and the passing of the 19th amendment that granted women the right to vote into the Great Depression and World War two and all the way through to today right now when it serves as not just recreation and tourism but also as mass transit for myself as well as countless other people who use the bike path to get to work and some of whom uses a bike path to get to work at the very same Mills that the railroad would build service so here we are almost 200 years after the fact and the Hartford Providence Fishkill line is still being used as a major transit artery so as you're traveling along it doesn't have to be here wherever you are and whatever it is you're up to just take a minute to stop and appreciate where you are and and learn something about the history in the past of that place because it doesn't have to be a sought-after travel destination everywhere I can pretty much guarantee you that everywhere has just as deep and rich and complex of a history as anywhere else and that has aspects that manifest themselves in the culture today in ways you would never expect and all you have to do all you have to do to find out about it is just go out there and look [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you
