Gauging Alchemy At Rhode Island’s Slater Mill
Innovation is still happening at Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Threads of human history shuttle in and out and around a complex of buildings that still stand on a point of land near the Blackstone River. Water that once transformed raw fibers into thread and yarn through a series of processes flows by. The children and women who spent their days here are now gone but exhibits testify to their lives. The Slater Mill was the “first successful cotton factory, and the first water powered spinning mill using the Arkwright system of carding and spinning in North America” according to the Library of Congress Historic American Engineering Record. Continue Reading