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Manufacturing in Puritan rural towns in New England 1630–60: ‘A Miller Never Goes to Heaven’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2021

John R. Mullin  and
Zenia Kotval
John R. Mullin
Affiliation:
Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, United States
Zenia Kotval*
Affiliation:
Urban and Regional Planning Program, Michigan State University, United States
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article is an analysis of the influence of blacksmiths, and saw and grain millers on the development of Puritan communities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1660. During this period these artisans played a significant role in defining the physical form of the rural Puritan town and its economic development, without intent and in a social and cultural climate where they were often disliked and distrusted. This article focuses on the impacts of these manufacturers on the formation and physical character of Puritan communities in New England.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , October 2021 , pp. 187 - 196
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Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1 Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony: A Gallery of our Intellectual Ancestors (Boston, 1930), pp. 65–71.

2 David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1987), p. 44.

3 John Winthrop, ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, Winthrop Papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), vol. 2, pp. 282–7.

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5 Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptualism (New Haven, CT, 2020), pp. 49–59.

6 Winthrop, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, see the plate following p. 276. Also see William Haller, The Puritan Frontier: Town Planting in New England Colonial Development, 1630–1660 (New York, 1957), p. 55.

7 John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, CT, 1990), p. 9.

8 Charles F. Adams, ‘The Genesis of the Massachusetts Town and the Development of Town-Meeting Government’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Series 2 (January 1892), p. 58.

9 Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1628–1686 (Boston: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1853), vol. 2, p. 172.

10 John Frederick Martin, People in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurs and the Founding of New England Towns (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), p. 24

11 Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts Bay, vol. 1, p. 76. Also see Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore, 1997), p. 45.

12 Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts Bay, vol. 1, p. 159.

13 Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town (Chapel Hill, NC, 1965), p. 93.

14 Winthrop, ‘Essay on the Ordering of Towns’, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, pp. 181–2.

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16 John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal: The History of New England from 1630–1649 (New York, 1825–1826), vol. 2, p. 263.

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18 Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts Bay, vol. 1, p. 272; vol. 2, p. 263.

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21 Richard Wilkie and Jack Tager, eds, Historic Atlas of Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 17.

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25 Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal, vol. 1, p. 103; Edward Pierce Hamilton, ‘The New England mill village’, Old Time New England, LXII:2 (October–December 1951), 29–38 (p. 30).

26 Edwin Tunis, Colonial Craftsmen and the Beginning of American Industry (Baltimore, 1965), p. 19.

27 Innes, Labor in a New Land, pp. 229–36. Note the ‘Blacksmithing’ category of expenditures is consolidated in William Pynchon’s Record of Accounts with Early Settlers and Indians, 1645–1650 and John Pynchon’s Account Books 1652–1702.

28 Record of Salem, 1634–1650, Essex Institute Historic Collection, 6th February 1635 (Salem, 1868), p. 9. Also see Nathaniel Ward, The Book of General Laws and Liberties Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Cambridge, MA, 1929), para. 30.

29 Lawrence S. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 24.

30 Alfred S. Hudson, History of Sudbury, Massachusetts (Sudbury, 1889), p. 97; Benjamin P. Mighill and George B. Blodgette, Early Records of Rowley, Massachusetts, 1639–1860 (Rowley, 1894), p. 92.

31 John Stilgoe, Common Landscapes of America, 1580–1845 (New Haven, CT, 1982), p. 312.

32 John Currier, The Record and History of Newbury, 1635–1902 (Boston, 1902), p. 38.

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34 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), pp. 42–3.

35 Charles F. Carroll, The Timber Economy of New England (Providence, RI, 1974), p. 60.

36 Yi Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (New York, 1979), p. 6.

37 Benno M. Forman, ‘Mill sawing in seventeenth-century Massachusetts’, Old Time New England, LX: 4 (spring 1970), 110–30 (p. 117).

38 Joseph Merrill, History of Amesbury Massachusetts (Haverhill, MA, 1880), p. 10.

39 Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), p. 262.

40 Record of Salem, p. 10.

41 Mighill and Blodgette, Early Records of the Town of Rowley, p. 92.

42 Lotte Motz, The Wise One of the Mountain: Form, Function, and Significance of the Subterranean Smith: A Study in Folklore (Kümmerle Verlag, 1983), pp. 1–4.

43 Theodore R. Hazen, ‘Sayings From the Mill’, <http://www.angelfire.com/journal/millrestoration/sayings/html> [17th April 2017].

44 Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America (New York, 1966), p. 35.

45 Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts Bay, p. 223.

46 Townsend Scudder, Concord: America’s Town (Boston, 1947), p. 5.

47 Ancient Records of the Town of Ipswich, 1634–1650 (Ipswich, 1899), p. 4.

48 Roger Thompson, Divided We Stand: Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630–1680 (Amherst, 2001), pp. 84, 225.

49 Charles M. Ellis, The History of Roxbury Town (Boston, 1847), p. 138.

50 Hudson, The History of Sudbury, Massachusetts, p. 97.

51 Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1964), p. 21.

52 Innes, Labor in a New Land, p. 83.

53 Bailyn, The New England Merchants, p. 43.

54 Hamilton, ‘The New England mill village’, pp. 34–5.

55 Martha Zimiles and Murray Zimiles, Early American Mills (New York, 1972), p. 7.

56 Richard L. Bushman, From the Puritans to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, MA, 1967), pp. 41–2.

57 Douglas R. McMannis, Colonial New England: A Historical Geography (London, 1975), p. 93.

58 Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts Bay, vol. 2, p. 105; vol. 3, p. 396.

59 Christopher Gerard, Pam Graves, Andrew Millard, Richard Annis and Anwen Caffell, Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar, 1650 (Oxford, 2018), p. 205; Massachusetts Historical Society, Scotch Prisoners Deported to New England by Cromwell, 1651–1652 (Boston, 1900), pp. 1–19. Also see Henry Burt, ed., The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636–1736 (Springfield, 1898–9), vol. 1, pp. 216–17, 252–3.

60 Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from its Founding to the Revolution (Philadelphia, 2009), p. 145. Also see Mighill and Blodgett, Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts, pp. 272–3.

61 Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607–1860 (London, 1929), p. 180.

62 Hazen, ‘Sayings From the Mill’.

63 Zimiles and Zimiles, Early American Mills, p. 110.

64 Edward J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America (New York, 1988), p. 48.

65 Stilgoe, Common Landscapes, p. 308; McMannis, Colonial New England, p. 60.

66 Ellis, The History of Roxbury Town, p. 138. Also see Blanche Evans Hazard, The Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry before 1875 (Cambridge, MA, 1920), p. 16 and Richard W. Judd, Second Nature: An Environmental History of New England (Amherst, MA, 2014), pp. 72–3.

67 Richard M. Candee, ‘Merchant and millwright: the water powered sawmills of the Piscataqua’, Old Time New England, 15: 4 (spring 1970), 131–49 (p. 316).

68 Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970), pp. 97–9.

69 Stilgoe, Common Landscapes, p. 308; McMannis, Colonial New England, p. 316.