Land is a crucial component of industrialization. It was the need for resources that brought colonists from Europe. Once they set foot on land, the colonists commodified it, renaming it after the places they had come from. Natural resources such as water and timber within easy reach of major ports and commercial zones, as well as land used for agriculture or animal grazing, determined the locations that played roles in textile manufacturing in the United States. The Merrimack River, like other waterways that could be harnessed to power the mills, became the lifeblood of industrial New England. Using a series of dams and locks, the Essex Company controlled the Merrimack’s current from New Hampshire to Massachusetts. This water current powered turbines for nearly all of the mills along the river, giving rise to cities like Lowell and Lawrence that would come to dominate the horizon.

And what of the people who had first named the landscape? By the time of the Industrial Revolution, nations like the Abenaki, Pennacook, Pequot, Mohegan, Narragansett, and Wampanoag had been displaced, enslaved, or killed by colonizers’ diseases. In 1616, a little over 400 years before our current pandemic, an epidemic caused by Europeans killed an estimated 75% of the indigenous people living in New England coastal areas. This is the forgotten context of the first Thanksgiving in 1620.

The landscape of the South was similarly affected. Whitney's cotton gin and the resulting industrialization of cotton textile manufacturing required increasing amounts of land. Cotton pushed the expulsion of indigenous peoples as the U.S. expanded westward. Here, nations such as the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole would also be decimated by war and disease, and ultimately death-marched to lands even farther west on the “Trail of Tears.” What often goes undiscussed is that this move was directly related to the need for more land on which to grow cotton.

In turn, this crop and the growth of industrial textile manufacturing supported the use of slave labor in the South for generations. The first 20 enslaved Africans set foot on British American soil in 1619. An estimated 10 million people were enslaved over the next 246 years. By the end of the Civil War, there were an approximately 3.5 million enslaved people in the U.S. Beginning in the 19th century, the financial strength of the U.S. was directly tied to the textile and garment industries and the use of slave labor on indigenous land.

Christopher Levett. A Voyage into New England, Begun in 1623, and Ended in 1624, [1800s].

Account of a visit to New England by an Englishman, consisting mainly of resources that can be extracted from the land or areas that can be used to create “plantations” – agriculture for profit. In a description of the current day York River, he mentions that land has been cleared and planted by indigenous people “who are all dead,” and thus is ideal for incoming settlers.

Collection/Call #: Archives 4600 Bd. Ms. 102

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