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Easthampton Massachusetts’ Home-Grown Industries: Their Origins, Growth, Legacies, and Remains By: Marvin J. Ward, Ph.D. Easthampton Massachusetts’ Home-Grown Industries documents the history of all the industries, several of them interconnected, that were established in the Town of Easthampton at the start of the Industrial Revolution in Western Massachusetts, beginning, in c. 1824, with a piece-work enterprise operated from a home with an office and small warehouse, proceeding, in 1834, to an industrial manufacture, initially in an existing factory in another town, and moving into the first factory being built in the town in 1847-1848. Most were started by Samuel Williston, who had different partners, although many of those had their hands in more than one, and some of them took over one or another of them. All of them were situated on property that Williston owned, having inherited it from his father, Payson, the first minister to settle in it, who bought a large tract of “18 or 19 acres” of land in 1790. It tracks them through to his death in 1874, and that of his wife, Emily (née Graves, from nearby Williamsburg; her family’s property is also tracked), founder (in 1881) of the town library, in 1885. They manufactured the first products of their type in the US in the case of the first three, and in this region for the others, some having international exports and reputations. Williston was also involved in many civic endeavors: he funded numerous initiatives, including a school, a church, the Town Hall building, and a cemetery, to name the major projects; he was not a tycoon who spent lavishly on himself. The story unfolds, Sherlock Holmes-style, with documented facts, unraveling some mysteries, and destroying some tales that are myths and/or apocryphal, commonly believed among today’s residents, some of which took root in early 20th century sources that are also, Sherlock Holmes-style, undermined. In the 20th century, other industries, many larger, moved there, all moving or expanding from their former locations, some reassembling their buildings that were disassembled there and brought along, all of these on the West side of the Lower Mill Pond, North of the location of the first ones, and alongside the railroad that ran beside the Pond (today a Rail Trail); they are not treated here. None of either exist today, but many of their buildings have been or are being repurposed, except for one that is part of the factory of an industry not entirely unrelated to the one for which it was built.
This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. The meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profit and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profit and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.
History is about so much more than memorizing facts. It is, as more than half of the word suggests, about the story. And, told in the right way, it is the greatest one ever written: Good and evil, triumph and tragedy, despicable acts of barbarism and courageous acts of heroism.