[Two years ago
this week, I moved to my new home in Waltham,
Massachusetts. Since then I’ve learned a lot more about the histories and
stories of this great town, and wanted to share a few of them this week,
leading up to a Guest Post from one of my favorite Walthamites!]
On three stages
of American history captured by phrases from Waltham’s past and present.
The earliest iterations
of the Industrial Revolution in
America are often associated with Lowell,
Massachusetts and its mills (and
mill girls)—but in the parlance of the era the name Lowell was linked to
Waltham through the concept of the Waltham-Lowell
System of production. The Lowell in that phrase wasn’t yet the city but
rather Newburyport businessman Francis
Cabot Lowell, who with a group of fellow investors opened the nation’s
first vertically integrated cotton production firm, the Boston Manufacturing Company,
on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham in 1814. Besides vertical integration
(controlling every step and aspect of the production process at one site), the
company also pioneered mass production and a number of other elements of the
labor process (including housing, feeding, and educating the factory’s entirely
female workers in company boarding houses) that would become the standard
throughout the industrial Northeast.
The Charles
River didn’t provide quite enough power to sustain that mass production, and
after Lowell’s death in 1817 his partners moved the factory to the banks of the
Merrimack River in East Chelmsford, a town that would become incorporated
as Lowell in 1826 and in the famous history of which the BMC’s mills would
play a vital role. But Waltham remained an industrial center throughout the 19th
century and well into the 20th, and no industry and company better
exemplified that identity than the Waltham Watch
Company. WWC opened its first factory in 1851, quickly thereafter became
the first company to produce watches on an assembly line, and literally served
as the industry’s gold standard for many decades, winning the
gold medal for its 1872 model at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia. Although Waltham Watch Company closed its doors in 1957, having
produced nearly 40 million watches and clocks in that century of work, its
legacy endures in the nickname of “The Watch City,” a representation of how
closely linked these industrial histories and their settings remain.
Those industrial
histories gave more than just nicknames to their cities, however—they also
contributed a striking demographic effect, bringing consistent streams of immigrant
arrivals to these communities and continually changing their ethnic makeup in
the process. Waltham is perhaps especially associated with Italian American arrivals
and communities, as illustrated by the 1992
dedication of a monument to Christopher Columbus as part of the city’s town
common. But every census (since ethnicity/nationality began to be recorded in
the late 19th century) has revealed new additions to the city’s
diversity and evolving community, from sizeable Eastern and Southern European influxes
at the turn of the twentieth century through the growing Hispanic populations
at the turn of the 21st (on the 2010 census,
nearly 14% of the city’s population self-identified as “Hispanic or Latino”).
Indeed, one of the city’s new nicknames is “Little
Kampala,” due to a surge in arrivals from Uganda that began in the era of
Idi Amin’s violent leadership and has continued to this day. If Watch City
captured a crucial element of Waltham’s past, Little Kampala nicely illustrates
its present—and the two phrases are as interconnected as past and present
always are.
Next history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Any histories and stories from your hometowns you’d share?
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