Читать книгу The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life - Allison Chisolm - Страница 12

Given the economic conditions, a move back to New England certainly made sense for the Morgans. Sometime during the summer of 1839, perhaps in time for Hiram’s sister Malvina’s July wedding, Hiram, Lucina and the three boys moved back east to live in West Boylston, Massachusetts. A growing town of 1,330 residents, West Boylston was 42 miles west of Boston and eight miles north of Worcester.

They moved in with Hiram’s mother, Polly Forbush Morgan, who had relocated to West Boylston from Brimfield after the death of her husband, Calvin, in 1832. The new arrivals crowded into the Morgan home, doubling the household size as Hiram’s unmarried younger siblings, Abigail, Francis, Harriet and Cordelia still lived with Polly. Facing the trials and uncertainties that moving to a new community always create, the Morgans found solace in their Christian faith. Hiram and Lucina officially joined the First Congregational Church of West Boylston on September 1, 1839. Reverend Brown Emerson welcomed them into the congregation.

West Boylston was an attractive place to live, as Hiram would have had several employers to choose from. He could have worked in a boot factory or one of seven cotton mills, all powered by the confluence of the Nashua, Quinapoxet and Stillwater rivers. Drawn to a novel mechanical invention, Hiram might have worked in the factory that made the warp stop motion machine—which brought looms to a halt if a thread broke—a major innovation for the textile industry and one invented by local resident Thomas Keyes.

Other opportunities existed in the nearby community known as Factory Village, which was a section of south Lancaster, a sprawling town that included 12 separate villages. Aptly named, Factory Village by the late 1830s had factories making combs, satinets (finely-woven, satin-like cloth), worsted wool and forks.

One new employer, West Boylston resident and fellow church member with the Morgans, Erastus B. Bigelow started up a coach lace operation in Factory Village in 1838 with his brother Horatio. A serial inventor since childhood, Erastus had invented a hand loom and a machine for making piping cord before he was 14. Erastus’ coach lace invention mechanically produced the narrow borders used to decorate stagecoach cushions and straps, rather than through the traditional handcrafted method. Automation resulted in production costs per yard plummeting from 22 cents to 3 cents, which fueled the company’s 20 percent annual growth for its first seven years.

Bigelow named the new business the Clinton Company, after his favorite New York City hotel, which in turn had been named for New York’s governor Clinton. Operations began in an old cotton mill and soon needed several new buildings, including a machine shop headed by Joseph B. Parker. Parker had married Hiram’s younger sister, Mary Ann, in 1833. Hiram may have joined his brother-in-law to work at the company as early as 1841.

To accommodate his expanding enterprise, Bigelow built housing for the workers. By November 1844, Hiram had moved his family from West Boylston into what had come to be known as Clintonville, to be closer to work. Records for April 1845 show that young Charles, then a gangly 14, had joined his father among the lace manufacturing department’s nine employees. Hiram moved over to join the machine shop employees later that year. The shop made all the machinery needed for the Clinton Company’s coach lace operations.

That machine shop played an important role in Clintonville’s economic development. One resident, Daniel B. Ingalls, noted in a local history that he decided to settle in town as a young mechanic in 1847 after a conversation with Parker (known as “Deacon Parker” for his role in the local church). Parker at that point was supervising more than 200 men in the Clinton Company’s machine shop.

Engraving of Erastus Bigelow, c. 1860

After young Ingalls described his own machinist skills, Parker explained that “pretty good machinists” earned $1.25 (roughly $36 in today’s dollars) for a day that began before breakfast and ended at 7 p.m., an hour earlier than Ingalls’ experience had been in Connecticut and Maine. Ingalls promptly decided to settle in Clintonville.

Parker “impressed me as a frank, open-hearted, self-possessed, honest man,” Ingalls wrote. “There was no sham about him ... He had a way of expressing himself with a look that manifested his contempt for insincerity in others ... While true to his employers, he was helpful to those in his employ, and in general was public-spirited in the best sense of the word.”

Both uncle and employer, J.B. Parker also took on the role of Charles Morgan’s first mentor as a skilled mechanic. That machine shop headed by Parker became a seedbed for further invention by several of those working there, not just Charles. As local historian Andrew E. Ford commented:

It is here in this machine shop that we find, more than anywhere else, the promise of the Clinton that was to be, for some of the men who were working here afterwards became most substantial citizens. Moreover, the later improvements made in the machinery of the mills is due in no small degree to these men who, under the charge of J.B. Parker, prepared many of the original looms.