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HSS! For this image of the Maynard mills, I used the Lightroom Antique preset with some tweaks to the exposure to try to get the details to show better.
The first mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, was the Assabet Woolen Mill in 1847. In 1898 it was acquired by American Woolen Company, which continued to operated through World War I. In 1957 Digital Equipment Corporation was founded in rented office space in the mill complex. DEC purchased the entire complex in 1974, having become a leading manufacturer of minicomputers. By 1993, DEC failed and the buildings are now used as office space for multiple companies. The Assabet River flows in the foreground.
This is a PiDP-11, a functional replica of the 1970s PDP-11, a minicomputer of the 1970s. It is a really nice bliken light machine with a great design.
The replica can be obtained here (in case you are lucky)
obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful product lines. The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer.
Afternoon light bouncing off a 200-year-old woolens mill across the mill pond. At that time it was the headquarters for Digital Equipment Corporation, the largest manufacturer of minicomputers in the world.
From wikipedia:
After the mill shut down in 1950, local businessmen bought the property and began leasing it as office space. Digital Equipment Corporation moved into the complex in 1957....
The mill complex is also home to the oldest working hand wound clock in the country.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maynard,_Massachusetts
This photo was taken by me in 1968 with a 35mm viewfinder camera. I had a lot of time on my hands and a little motorcycle for mobility.
Micral is a series of microcomputers produced by the French company Réalisation d'Études Électroniques (R2E), beginning with the Micral N in early 1973.
According to the Computer History Museum, the Micral N was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a microprocessor (in this case, the Intel 8008).
R2E founder André Truong Trong Thi (EFREI degree, Paris), a French immigrant from Vietnam, asked Frenchman François Gernelle to develop the Micral N computer for the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), starting in June 1972. Alain Perrier of INRA was looking for a computer for process control in his crop evapotranspiration measurements. The software was developed by Benchetrit. Beckmann designed the I/O boards and controllers for peripheral magnetic storage. Lacombe was responsible for the memory system, I/O high speed channel, power supply and front panel. Gernelle invented the Micral N, which was much smaller than existing minicomputers. The January 1974 Users Manual called it "the first of a new generation of mini-computer whose principal feature is its very low cost," and said, "MICRAL's principal use is in process control. It does not aim to be an universal mini-computer."
The computer was to be delivered in December 1972, and Gernelle, Lacombe, Benchetrit and Beckmann had to work in a cellar in Châtenay-Malabry for 18 hours a day in order to deliver the computer in time.
Robert “Bob” Metcalfe ’69, an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus, has been awarded the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for his invention of Ethernet. Often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of computing,” the award comes with a $1 million prize provided by Google.
Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com Corp., the company that designed, developed, and manufactured computer networking equipment and software, was cited by the ACM for the “invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet,” one of the earliest and most extensively utilized networking technologies. 3Com, Metcalfe's Silicon Valley startup founded in 1979, helped to increase the commercial viability of Ethernet by selling network software, Ethernet transceivers, and Ethernet cards for minicomputers and workstations. 3Com introduced one of the first Ethernet interfaces for IBM PCs and their clones when IBM launched its personal computer.
A current research affiliate in computational engineering at MIT, Metcalfe is also an emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering after 11 years at The University of Texas at Austin. Metcalfe graduated from MIT in 1969 with bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and industrial management.
“Bob’s work has profoundly impacted computer science and the world, which cannot be overstated,” says Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). “With the invention of Ethernet, he enabled seamless communication and information sharing, paving the way for countless applications that have become integral to our daily lives. From the internet to online video streaming and beyond, Ethernet has formed the foundation of modern technology and transformed how we connect. It's hard to fathom life without the connectivity that Ethernet has made possible.”
Ethernet, commence
Metcalfe’s renowned 1973 memo on a “broadcast communication network” proposed linking the first personal computers, PARC's Altos, in a single building, which paved a way for the devices to talk to each other and share information in a local area network. The first Ethernet clocked in at 2.94 megabits per second, approximately 10,000 times faster than the terminal networks it replaced. The memo suggested that the network should be adaptable to new technologies such as optical fiber, twisted pair, Wi-Fi, and power networks and to swap out the original coaxial cable as the primary means of communication to “over an ether.” The contribution was later immortalized in their 1976 Communications of the ACM article, “Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks.”
But what came before Ethernet? Metcalfe likes to call it some version of luck. “My first task at Xerox was to put it on the ARPANET, which I had already done for Project MAC. I built the necessary hardware and software and Xerox got it connected. Later, the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC aimed to create the first modern personal computer and have one on every desk — imagine that,” he says. “So they asked me to design a network for this purpose. I was given a card with 60 chips for the network. That was the second-biggest stroke of luck in my life. The first one was being born to my parents.”
Metcalfe was not alone in pursuing efficient network communication; he connected as well with David Boggs, the co-inventor of Ethernet, who passed away last year. Metcalfe and Boggs set out to avoid using wires, an idea that was short-lived. “We went to a place that had packet radio network at the University of Hawaii and saw immediately that we couldn't have zero wires. The radios were just too big and expensive and slow. We'd have to have more than zero wires, so we decided to have one. And this one wire would be shared among the attached PCs.”
Making things standard
Metcalfe and Boggs cooked up a recipe of Jerrold taps, Manchester encoding, and ALOHA randomized retransmissions to bring Ethernet to life. The first would puncture the coaxial cable and attach to the semiconductor without cutting the cable. Manchester encoding allowed the clock to be in the packet. Finally, ALOHA randomized retransmissions allowed for turn-taking. The two then built and attached many stations to the Ethernet and wrote network protocols to use it.
“We had to make Ethernet standard. I served as the so-called 'marriage broker' connecting Digital Equipment Corporation, then the second-largest computer company in the world, and Intel Corporation, a brand new semiconductor company, and Xerox Corporation, a large systems vendor,” says Metcalfe. “We created the DIX Ethernet standard and submitted it to the IEEE. A couple of painful years later, it got standardized. Then a big fight ensued between the Ethernet companies and IBM and General Motors, a three-way battle. General Motors lost quickly, and IBM hung on for 20 years. All of them wanted their technology to be the standard everybody used to connect computers. Ethernet won.”
Today, Ethernet is the main conduit of wired network communications worldwide, handling data rates from 10 megabits per second to 400 gigabits per second (Gbps), with 800 Gbps and 1.6 terabits per second technologies emerging. As a result, Ethernet has also become an enormous market, with revenue from Ethernet switches alone exceeding $30 billion in 2021, according to the International Data Corp.
Life at MIT
MIT has long been a second home to Metcalfe, where he could not stay away for long.
From 1970 to 1972, he worked on putting MIT on the ARPANET in J.C.R. Licklider's dynamic modeling systems group. “This was all on the ninth floor of Tech Square — where everything interesting in the world was happening” says Metcalfe. “I returned to MIT in 1979, after I left Xerox, and became a consultant to Michael Dertouzos. I was peddling Ethernet, and Mike's people were peddling something called a 'token ring.' He and I were on opposite sides of a big argument. He was pro-token ring, and I was pro-Ethernet. Dertouzos wanted me to join that fight, which I did through most of 1979, during which I founded the 3Com Corporation while at LCS.”
Metcalfe has been a member of the MIT Corporation since 1992. In 1997-98 he served as president of the MIT Alumni Association. He served as MIT Visiting Innovation Fellow with the Innovation Initiative and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science during the 2015-16 academic year, during which he mentored students on all things entrepreneurship. In 2022, Metcalfe joined CSAIL as a research affiliate to pursue research in computational engineering.
“Ethernet is the foundational technology of the internet, which supports more than 5 billion users and enables much of modern life,” says Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow and senior vice president of Google Research and AI, in the official ACM announcement. “Today, with an estimated 7 billion ports around the globe, Ethernet is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. However, it's easy to forget that our interconnected world would not be the same without Bob Metcalfe's invention and his enduring vision that every computer must be networked.”
Past Turing Award recipients who have taught at MIT include Sir Tim Berners-Lee (2017), Michael Stonebraker (2014), Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali (2013), Barbara Liskov (2008), Ronald Rivest (2002), Butler Lampson (1992), Fernando Corbato (1990), John McCarthy (1971) and Marvin Minsky (1969).
Metcalfe will be formally presented with the A.M. Turing Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet, held this year on June 10 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
boston, massachusetts
1960s
teradyne automatic test system j259e
paired with digital pdp-8/i 12-bit minicomputer
and teletype machine
teradyne was founded in 1960 by alex d'arbeloff and nick dewolf. more information available here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradyne
part of an archival project, featuring the photographs of nick dewolf
© the Nick DeWolf Foundation
Image-use requests are welcome via flickrmail or nickdewolfphotoarchive [at] gmail [dot] com
OTA (from front to back):
Kendrick Dew Heater Controller (under dew shield)
Minix minicomputer (on top)
RIGRunner 12vdc Power Distribution Panel (on side)
TeleVue NP101is (4" f/5.4 refractor)
Moonlite CFL2.5 Electronic Focuser
TeleVue Large Field Corrector (LCL-1069)
ZWO M68 Off-axis Guider
ZWO 2" x 7-position Electronic Filter Wheel
ZWO ASI6200MM-Pro Full Frame Camera
Losmandy G-11 German Equatorial Mount with Gemini II GoTo
gadget is destiny
There is nothing unusual in this photo: the girl is fascinated by something in her smartphone and the young man is also looking at his smartphone. Two young people, carried away by something in their minicomputers, do not notice each other. And this is a powerful trend of today's society - virtual communication prevails over real. Perhaps these two young people should have seen each other. But they look at the screens of gadgets ...
For the APRANET in 1969, the BBN Interface Message Processor (IMP) did the packet routing.
(It's another cool artifact of history in the back room, awaiting installation in the new Computer History Museum exhibition hall.)
The Honeywell 516 minicomputer inside had only 6,000 words of software (in 12K of core memory) and monitored network status and statistics. Cost: $82,200
The first transmission between UCLA and SRI took place on October 29, 1969.
Larry Roberts, architect of the Internet, diagrammed some of that rich history at our CEO Summit.
OTA (from front to back):
Kendrick Dew Heater Controller (under dew shield)
Moonlite focuser controller
Minix minicomputer (on top)
TeleVue NP101is (4" f/5.4 refractor)
Moonlite CFL 2.5 Focuser
TeleVue Large Field Corrector (LCL-1069)
ZWO M68 Off-axis Guider
ZWO 2" x 7-position Electronic Filter Wheel
ZWO ASI6200MM-Pro Full Frame Camera
Losmandy G-11 German Equatorial Mount with Gemini II GoTo
This Digital PDP-8/f minicomputer is currently busy dumping its core memory for archiving and further analysis.
The machine was recently acquired by the Hack42 Museum (Computermuseum Arnhem).
boston, massachusetts
1960s
teradyne automatic test system j259e
paired with digital pdp-8/l 12-bit minicomputer
and teletype machine
teradyne was founded in 1960 by alex d'arbeloff and nick dewolf. more information available here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradyne
part of an archival project, featuring the photographs of nick dewolf
© the Nick DeWolf Foundation
Image-use requests are welcome via flickrmail or nickdewolfphotoarchive [at] gmail [dot] com
In de 80-er jaren werkte ik bij CEVAN, het CEntrum Voor Automatisering noord Nederland.
Wij deden daar de "geautomatiseerde gegevensverwerking" in een tijd waar de ponskaart en de kaartenbak de regel was.
Heel modern eigenlijk.
Ik kwam daar via een uitzendbureau terecht, en ik vond het allemaal zeer indrukwekkend.
Het Mainframe was een IBM 3090 System 370. Zo'n beetje heel noord Nederland was aangesloten via terminals...
Ricoh KR10 Super + SMC Pentax 28mm F2,8
Filmdata: Agfacolor CT18 scanned on Canon MP980
Deze fotoserie upload ik vanwege historische redenen. Van Cevan is maar weinig meer bekend, en de tijd van de oude computers is "online" ook zeer "ondervertegenwoordigd"
A whole bunch of fully operational vintage computer systems, together in a real "mainframe center" taken in the eighties! IBM system 370XA 3090, with a row of tape units, and HP minicomputers. In the background the IBM storage cabinets. These photos used to be classified material...
This is a similar setup to what I had on my desk when I worked at Cadence around 1992/93.
I actually had a SPARCStation 10 and a HP 9000 sitting side by side.
I loved the SPARCStation and hated the HP 9000.
Compared to SunOS (based on BSD Unix) running on the Sun the HP running HP-UX (System V based) was horrible.
I hardly ever used it. Apart from anything else it took ages to boot up.
I had used HP minicomputers before and liked them but I never used a HP box after the 9000.
I remember running Gopher, WAIS, Viola etc on the SS10.
I also downloaded and compiled one of the early copies of the Mosaic browser on this machine in 1993.
Another thing I did on the SS10 was to follow along with the World Chess Championship in 1993. I scraped move information and fed it into a copy of XBoard (on X Windows).
This is the brand new Raspberry Pi 3 - as a cross eye 3D picture.
The Raspberry Pi is a mini computer for less than $40, which was invented to give kids a chance to learn about programming and electronics for cheap. In the 1980s, we had the VIC-20 and the C64 for learning about programming and computers at a low level and I think, at that time, I have practiced the basics, that I use in my job as an engineer every day. www.raspberrypi.org/
The Raspberry Pi 3 is the new flagship of the family. It has 64 bit quad-core processor running @ 1200MHz. It has on board Wifi and Bluetooth and 1GB RAM. The operating system(s) is installed on a micro SD card. That can be Raspbian, which is a Linux derivate.
The Raspberry Pis have a huge impact on the maker scene, one can build things like a media center, maybe robots, 3D printers, etc. etc. pp. with it. I have bought the first one about 4 years ago.
Directions for cross eye 3D: Look cross-eyed at the picture until you see three pictures, in the middle the two pictures are overlapping, here you can see it three dimensional.
replacing my old tablet companion with this new tablet, the samsung galaxy tab A with s pen. pretty neat specs with a faster processor and heftier internal memory. tablet, nowadays, could also perform some functions as laptops, such as operating microsoft office and transferring files while making a phone call and taking texts, which is cool! should last me for another number of years
So what is CHDK? Many of Canon’s digital cameras run on a processor called DIGIC II (now it is replaced by the new and improved version DIGIC III). This processor is like a minicomputer that controls those cameras. However, in 2007 (I think) a gentleman named Andre Gratchev created a hacking file called CHDK for that processor. The users can simply download the files that were created for their cameras, put them on the memory card, turn on the camera and access its features. This program, CHDK, allows the users more control over the camera than is allowed by the Canon DIGIC II processor.
You access this program using the camera’s buttons but it has its own menu. It allows users to shoot in RAW, override the shutter, ISO, and Av values, displays battery life, memory left, calendar, clock, live histogram, and many more options including an impossible to solve game called Sokoban! (Haha! And that’s only the first level! If you solved the first level, would you please let me know how!)
Those files are pretty small to download, but the problem is that finding the right version for your camera, the right link, and getting the features you want is anything but fun! Because there are so many parties that are making those hacking files, with so many versions it is truly a hassle just to get the file you want and need, and get it to work! And even if you succeeded in making the file work on you camera, then you truly have to be a genius (or someone who has a lot of time on his hand, like me!) to figure out how to set up the options to get the results you want! Until now I’ve used CHDK mainly to view my battery life and memory left!
So today I decided to play around with this cool program that everybody seems to love and use except me! Anyway, after a couple of hours and 116 snaps I finally managed to get the settings of CHDK right to be able to capture the shot you see here :) I hope you like it :)
So here are my settings if you are interested in photographing drops of water :D
Camera: Canon PowerShot S3IS
CHDK’s settings:
Shutter speed--> 1/80,000 second (don’t ask, I don’t know if that’s really true or not, but that’s what CHDK displayed! It certainly doesn’t look like 1/80,000 because I’ve seen droplets shots taken with less than 5% of this shutter speed and they looked just as good if not better! Beside, is 1/80,000 of a second shutter speed really possible?!)
Av--> 16.00
ISO--> 50
Camera’s settings:
Mode--> Manual
Focus--> Macro (approximately 25 cm away)
Flash--> 2/3 stop
Light--> room light, plus 3 table lamps without their shades and very close to the water dish, plus the flash! (That’s where the sparkles on the two droplets came from!)
I hope you enjoyed this photograph, and be able to enjoy CHDK on your camera too :)
(Toronto, ON; spring 2008.)
Computer Output Microfiche or "COM" is a process for copying and printing data onto microfilm from electronic media found on personal, mini, or mainframe computers.
COM consists of: 1) A high-speed recorder that transfers digital data onto microfilm using laser technology; and 2) A processor that develops the microfilm once exposed to a light source. A COM recorder can operate “on-line” or “off-line,” meaning that it can be connected to a single computer, a local or wide-area network, a minicomputer, or a mainframe computer. In addition, the recorder can operate independently as a stand-alone device that reads digital data from formatted magnetic media, such as tape. A COM recorder generally operates with: 1) A duplicator that generates copies of microfiche; and 2) A sorter that separates duplicate microfiche cards into bins for easy, end-point distribution. Each functional unit is connected to the next, providing a linear path from creation to end-point distribution of the microfiche. -- Courtesy IARA
... for these clippings
www.flickr.com/photos/wolfgang-kynast/16994815096/
www.flickr.com/photos/wolfgang-kynast/16844006730/
is:
a minicomputer Raspberry Pi Mod. B
Our Digital PDP-8/f minicomputer.
The machine was recently acquired by the Hack42 Museum (Computermuseum Arnhem).
Hey, Santa. Nice kit.
Close up version of the cover image from the Special Altair® MITS-MAS Christmas Catalog.
These pages, featuring minicomputer kits and peripherals from the MITS Altair product line, were originally clipped from the December 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine.
National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, England
_DSC0773 Anx2 1200h Q90 0.5k-2k
Front of a VAX 11/780, with the doors shut, and booting OpenVMS 7.2, using the Xyplex 1600 and VT220 as its console.
The telephone. Once considered a luxury, now is just another part of our every day life. From the hand cranked party-line to the minicomputer we carry in our pocket.
Betty Lou is your typical teenager, keeping up with all the latest gossip; who's going steady with whom, what friend has a crush on what boy (and visa versa) and who got grounded for activities over the weekend.
Part of the computer room in the University of Warwick Computer Unit in 1981. A VAX 11/750 minicomputer can be seen just left of centre; the room also contains a Burroughs B6700 mainframe computer.
One of the latest additions to the Hack42 Museum (Computermuseum Arnhem): a DEC PDP-8/f minicomputer.
The machine was graciously donated by our friends at Wageningen University.
The machine has a few stickers mainly directed at operators and service engineers, persons who to notify in case of problems and procedures to be carried out, as well as troubleshooting hints.
Compare this shot to one with a more shallow depth of field.
The days of the proprietary mini-computer. Data General, Prime, Digital, Harris.
This was one of Sunderland Polytechnic's Harris H100 multi-user computer systems, circa 1980, which provided a service for 30 or so students at a time using display screen terminals. Fortran and BASIC were available as programming languages. This machine was in the Priestman Building with maths and computing.
The two boxes on the right are exchangeable disk drives, each with a capacity of 40MB - so in today's terms you would have room for a small handful of photos from Flickr. 1-2 raw files from a full frame DSLR. There is a reel to reel tape deck for loading software upgrades and taking backups. An operating system upgrade typically took all morning and a backup perhaps an hour.
I can't recall the exact model number of this mighty beast, or the CPU clock speed, but I think it had 512K of RAM.
More power in a mobile phone than this lot.
I once lost the supervisor password and had to load a program in binary machine code using the toggle switches on the front panel of the processor, to access the disk and manually patch in a new password. REAL PROGRAMMING!
If you wanted anything doing you pretty much had to write it yourself. In those pre-internet times, copy a file from one computer to another type? Write file transfer send and receive programs on both computers and plug them together.
My fourth training Z80 board, completed with vent power supply, Z80 ceramic purple Mostek-Zilog CPU, ROM 8K (Bios plus main programs), RAM 8 + 8K (SRAM or NVRAM) , SIO RS-232 USART 8251, PIO 8255, 25 pin IBM PC Standard Parallel Port bidirectional nibble mode interface, additional memory mapped 8bit parallel I/O, E2/Eprom programmer via HW bit-to-bit or SW with ZIF sockets, programmable tone generator (555 as orgue), Hex keyboard (74C923), Hex LED Display, ASCIII 16 segment LED Display (DL2416), 3 Clocks types ( 2.5MHz; 4 Hz; instruction stepping), dip switches for interrupt Zero Mode, Windows Visual Basic Software for serial & parallel data transmission between the Z80 and an IBM Personal Computer. Quite all components are vintage original 1980's
Litronix DL2416T: a four digit display module wilh16 bar segments plus a decimal and a built-in CMOS integrated circuit.
The integrated circuit contains memory, latched ASCII character
generator, multiplexing circuitry and drivers. Data entry is
asynchronous and can be random.
circa 1966
nick with teradyne test system j259
part of an archival project, featuring the photographs of nick dewolf
© the Nick DeWolf Foundation
Image-use requests are welcome via flickrmail or nickdewolfphotoarchive [at] gmail [dot] com
The mills are an important feature of Maynard's development. The earliest saw and grist mills were built in the early 18th century. Two of the earliest mills were the Puffer Mill and the Asa Smith's Mill, which were located on Taylor Brook and Mill Street, respectively. These were the first mills to use the Assabet River for power; therefore, they were very slow and sluggish. The grist and saw mill were then followed by paper mills, which were built starting in 1820.
The Mill is easily Maynard's most prominent feature. The complex takes up 11 acres in the middleof what we call downtown. The Mill complex began in 1847 as set of wooden buildings used to manufacture carpets and carpet yarn. Amory Maynard helped construct this mill. His partner, William H. Knight, helped him build a dam across the Assabet and dug a canal channeling a portion of the river into what is called Mill Pond. The Mill changed hands a few times but it would eventually become the largest woolen factory in the world till the 1930s.
The 1950's ushered in a change from textiles to businesses like computer manufacturing. With the start of the final decade of the century the Mill is on the cusp of being transformed again.
It is said that "as the Mill goes, so goes Maynard". While the town isn't as dependent on the Mill as it was in 19th century it continues to play an important role in shaping the character of the town.
We hope you enjoy this historical perspective of the Mill. It has been pieced together from a variety of sources and continues to be enriched as we discover new materials to include, increase the number of hyperlinks and add pictures, diagrams, and sound..
The Mill from 1847 to 1977
The site of the mill was once part of the town of Sudbury, while the opposite bank of the Assabet River belonged to Stow. The present town, formed in 1871, was named for the man most responsible for its development, Amory Maynard.
Born in 1804, Maynard was running his own sawmill business at the age of sixteen. In the 1840's, he went into partnership with a carpet manufacturer for whom he'd done contracting. They dammed up the Assabet and diverted water into a millpond to provide power for a new mill, which opened in 1847, producing carpet yarn and carpets. Only one of the original mill buildings survives: it was moved across Main Street and now is an apartment house.
Amory Maynard's carpet firm failed in the business panic of 1857. But the Civil War allowed the Assabet Manufacturing Company, organized in 1862 with Maynard as the managing "agent", to prosper by producing woolens, flannels and blankets for the army. This work was carried on in new brick mill buildings.
Expansion of the mill over many years is evidenced by the variations in the architecture of the structures still standing.
The oldest portion of Building 3 dates from 1859, making it the oldest part of the mill in existence today, but several additions were made afterwards. Buildings constructed in the late 1800's frequently featured brick arches over the windows, and at times new additions were made to match neighboring structures.
The best-known feature is the clock donated in memory of Amory Maynard by his son Lorenzo in 1892. Its four faces, each nine feet in diameter, are mechanically controlled by a small timer inside the tower. Neither the timer nor the bell mechanism has ever been electrified; custodians still climb 120 steps to wind the clock every week- 90 turns for the timer and 330 turns for the striker.
Amory Maynard died in 1890, but his son and grandson still held high positions in the mill's management. The family's local popularity plummeted, however, when the Assabet Manufacturing Company failed late in 1898. Workers lost nearly half of their savings which they had deposited with the company, since there were no banks in town. Their disillusionment nearly resulted in changing the town's name from Maynard to Assabet.
Prosperity returned in 1899 when the American Woolen Company, an industrial giant, bought the Assabet Mills and began to expand them, adding most of the structures now standing. The biggest new unit was Building 5, 610 feet long which contained more looms than any other woolen mill in the world. Building 1, completed in 1918, is the newest; the mill pond had been drained to permit construction of its foundation. These buildings have little decoration, but their massiveness is emphasized by the buttress-like brick columns between their windows.
The turn of the century saw a changeover from gas to electric lights at the mill. Until the 1930's the mill generated not only its own power but also electricity for Maynard and several other towns. For years the mill used 40-cycle current. Into the late 1960's power produced by a water wheel was used for outdoor lighting, including the Christmas tree near Main Street. The complex system of shafts and belts once used to distribute power from a central source was rendered obsolete by more efficient small electric motors, just as inexpensive minicomputers have often replaced terminals tied to one large processor.
As the mill grew, so did the town. Even in 1871, the nearly 2,000 people who became Maynard's first citizens outnumbered the people left in either Sudbury or Stow. Maynard's first population almost doubled in the decade between 1895 and 1905, when reached nearly 7,000 people. Most of the workers lived in houses owned by the company, many of which have been refurbished and are used today. The trains that served th town and the mill, however, are long gone - the depot site is now occupied by a gas station.
Most of the original mill workers had been local Yankees and Irish immigrants. But by the early 1900's, the Assabet Mills were employing large numbers of newcomers from Finland, Poland, Russia and Italy. The latest arrivals were often escorted to their relatives or friends by obliging post office workers. The immigrants made Maynard a bustling, multi-ethnic community while Stow, Sudbury and Acton remained small, rural villages. Farmers and their families rode the trolley to Maynard to shop and to visit urban attractions then unknown in their own towns, including barrooms and movie houses.
Wages were low and the hours were long. Early payrolls show wages of four cents an hour for a sixty hour week. Ralph Sheridan of the Maynard Historical Society confirmed that in 1889 his eldest brother was making 5 1/2 cents an hour in the mill's rag shop at the age of fourteen, while their father was earning 16 1/2 cents per hour in the boiler room. (As of 1891 one-eighth of the workers were less than 16 years old, and one-quarter were women.)
Sheridan's own first job at the mill, in the summer of 1915, paid $6.35 for a work week limited to 48 hours by child labor laws. The indestructible "bullseye" safe still remains in the old Office Building.
Sheridan remembers the bell that was perched on top of Building 3:
"...the whistle on the engine room gave one blast at quarter of the hour, and then at about five minutes of the hour the gave one blast again. And everyone was supposed to be inside the gate when that second whistle blew. And then at one minute of the hour this bell rang just once, a quick ring- and we referred to it as "The Tick" because of that..... everybody was supposed to start work at that time, at that moment."
A worker was sent home if he'd forgotten to wear his employee's button, marked "A.W.Co.,Assabet".
The millhands really had to work, too. Sheridan recalls one winter evening when there was such a rush to get out an order of cloth for Henry Ford that the men were ordered to invoice it from the warehouse, now Building 21, instead of from the usual shipping room:
"There was no heat in the building, never had been. And it was so cold that I remember that I had to cut the forefinger and the thumb from the glove that I was wearing in order to handle the pencil to do the invoicing....the yard superintendant at the time brought in some kerosene lanterns and put 'em under our chairs to keep our feet warm."
Building 21, built out over the pond, remained unheated until DIGITAL took it over.
As in most Northern mill towns, labor relations were often troubled. In 1911 the company used Poles to break the strike of Finnish workers. When no longer able to play off one nationality against another, management for years took advantage of rivalries between different unions. The Great Depression hit the company hard, however. In 1934 it sold all the houses it owned, mostly to the employees who lived in them; and New Deal labor laws encouraged the workers to form a single industrial union, which joined the C.I.O.
World War II brought a final few years of good times to the woolens industry. The mill in Maynard operated around the clock with over two thousand employees producing such items as blankets and cloth for overcoats for the armed forces. But when peace returned, the long-term trends resumed their downward drift, and in 1950 the American Woolen Company shut down its Assabet Mills entirely. Like many New England mills, Maynard's had succumbed to a combination of Southern and foreign competition, relatively high costs and low productivity, and the growing use of synthetic fibers.
'Til then a one-industry town, Maynard was in trouble. In 1953, however, ten Worcester businessmen bought the mill and began leasing space to tenants, some of which were established firms, while others were just getting started. One of the new companies which found the low cost of Maynard Industries' space appealing was Digital Equipment Corporation, which started operations in 8,680 square feet in the mill in 1957.
A Mill Chronology
1846 Amory Maynard and William Knight form Assabet Mills.
1847 Maynard and Knight install a water wheel and build a new factory on the banks of the Assabet River.
1848 The Assabet Mills business is valued at $150,000.
The Lowell and Framingham Railroad carries passengers over branch road.
1855 The Mill now has three buildings on the site. Massachusetts is producing one-third of the textiles in the United States.
1857 Assabet Mills collapses after a business panic. The Mill complex is sold at an auction.
1862 The Mills are reorganized as Assabet Manufacturing Company. This involve replacing wooden buildings with brick, and the installation of new machinery. To fulfill contracts to the government during the Civil War production is switched from carpets to woolen cloth, blankets, and flannel.
The first tenement for employees are also constructed.
1869 Millhands peition President Ulysses S. Grant for a shorter work week ... 55 hours.
1871 The Town of Maynard incorporates. The population stands at 2,000
1888 A reservoir is installed for $70,000 to supply a growing population.
1890 The Assabet Manufacturing Company is valued at $1,500,000.
1892 Lorenzo Maynard donates clock in his father's name.
The Mill Complex contains seven buildings.
1898 Assabet Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy. Many people in town lose much of their savings as banks have not yet been established.
1899 American Woolen Company purchases the Mill complex for $400,000. This company would eventually control 20% of the woolen textile market in the U.S. Wool was shipped all over the country to keep up with demand.
1901 160 additional tenements are constructed with their own sewage system. The streets are named after U.S. presidents.
The first electric trolley in Maynard begins service.
Building Number 5, the Mill complex's largest, is built in nine months. Electric power is introduced with the addition of dynamos on site.
1906 The Mill complex now has 13 buildings.
1910 The Mill complex grows to 25 buildings. Floor space is at 421,711 square feet. The property takes up 75 acres.
1918 With the addition of three new buildings the American Wollen Company and the Mill are in their heyday. The fortunes of the industry begin to decline over the next 30 years.
1947 After a brief spell of prosperity during World War II, the Mill phases out production as demand for woolen goods declines.
1950 Mill closes. 1,200 employees lose their jobs.
1953 Maynard Industries, Inc. purchases the Mill for $200,000. Space is rented to business and industrial tenants.
1957 Three engineers set up shop on the second floor of Building 12. With $70,000 and 8,600 square feet of rented space Digital Equipment Corporation is formed.
1960 Over thirty firms are located within the Mill complex.
1974 Digital Equipment Corporation purchases the entire Mill complex for $2.2 million. The Mill has over 1 million square feet in 19 buildings residing on 11 acres.
1992 The 100th anniversary of the Mill Clock is celebrated.
1993 Digital Equipment Corporation announces that it plans to leave the Mill complex. A search for a new tenant is started.
1995 Franklin Life Care purchases the Mill. Digital continues to rent space in Building 5.
1998 Mill purchased by Clock Tower Place.
Sources
* "Digital's Mill 1847-1977", a brochure published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
* "A Walk Through the Mill...", published by Digital Equipment Corporation for the Mill Clock Centennial.
The mills are an important feature of Maynard's development. The earliest saw and grist mills were built in the early 18th century. Two of the earliest mills were the Puffer Mill and the Asa Smith's Mill, which were located on Taylor Brook and Mill Street, respectively. These were the first mills to use the Assabet River for power; therefore, they were very slow and sluggish. The grist and saw mill were then followed by paper mills, which were built starting in 1820.
The Mill is easily Maynard's most prominent feature. The complex takes up 11 acres in the middleof what we call downtown. The Mill complex began in 1847 as set of wooden buildings used to manufacture carpets and carpet yarn. Amory Maynard helped construct this mill. His partner, William H. Knight, helped him build a dam across the Assabet and dug a canal channeling a portion of the river into what is called Mill Pond. The Mill changed hands a few times but it would eventually become the largest woolen factory in the world till the 1930s.
The 1950's ushered in a change from textiles to businesses like computer manufacturing. With the start of the final decade of the century the Mill is on the cusp of being transformed again.
It is said that "as the Mill goes, so goes Maynard". While the town isn't as dependent on the Mill as it was in 19th century it continues to play an important role in shaping the character of the town.
We hope you enjoy this historical perspective of the Mill. It has been pieced together from a variety of sources and continues to be enriched as we discover new materials to include, increase the number of hyperlinks and add pictures, diagrams, and sound..
The Mill from 1847 to 1977
The site of the mill was once part of the town of Sudbury, while the opposite bank of the Assabet River belonged to Stow. The present town, formed in 1871, was named for the man most responsible for its development, Amory Maynard.
Born in 1804, Maynard was running his own sawmill business at the age of sixteen. In the 1840's, he went into partnership with a carpet manufacturer for whom he'd done contracting. They dammed up the Assabet and diverted water into a millpond to provide power for a new mill, which opened in 1847, producing carpet yarn and carpets. Only one of the original mill buildings survives: it was moved across Main Street and now is an apartment house.
Amory Maynard's carpet firm failed in the business panic of 1857. But the Civil War allowed the Assabet Manufacturing Company, organized in 1862 with Maynard as the managing "agent", to prosper by producing woolens, flannels and blankets for the army. This work was carried on in new brick mill buildings.
Expansion of the mill over many years is evidenced by the variations in the architecture of the structures still standing.
The oldest portion of Building 3 dates from 1859, making it the oldest part of the mill in existence today, but several additions were made afterwards. Buildings constructed in the late 1800's frequently featured brick arches over the windows, and at times new additions were made to match neighboring structures.
The best-known feature is the clock donated in memory of Amory Maynard by his son Lorenzo in 1892. Its four faces, each nine feet in diameter, are mechanically controlled by a small timer inside the tower. Neither the timer nor the bell mechanism has ever been electrified; custodians still climb 120 steps to wind the clock every week- 90 turns for the timer and 330 turns for the striker.
Amory Maynard died in 1890, but his son and grandson still held high positions in the mill's management. The family's local popularity plummeted, however, when the Assabet Manufacturing Company failed late in 1898. Workers lost nearly half of their savings which they had deposited with the company, since there were no banks in town. Their disillusionment nearly resulted in changing the town's name from Maynard to Assabet.
Prosperity returned in 1899 when the American Woolen Company, an industrial giant, bought the Assabet Mills and began to expand them, adding most of the structures now standing. The biggest new unit was Building 5, 610 feet long which contained more looms than any other woolen mill in the world. Building 1, completed in 1918, is the newest; the mill pond had been drained to permit construction of its foundation. These buildings have little decoration, but their massiveness is emphasized by the buttress-like brick columns between their windows.
The turn of the century saw a changeover from gas to electric lights at the mill. Until the 1930's the mill generated not only its own power but also electricity for Maynard and several other towns. For years the mill used 40-cycle current. Into the late 1960's power produced by a water wheel was used for outdoor lighting, including the Christmas tree near Main Street. The complex system of shafts and belts once used to distribute power from a central source was rendered obsolete by more efficient small electric motors, just as inexpensive minicomputers have often replaced terminals tied to one large processor.
As the mill grew, so did the town. Even in 1871, the nearly 2,000 people who became Maynard's first citizens outnumbered the people left in either Sudbury or Stow. Maynard's first population almost doubled in the decade between 1895 and 1905, when reached nearly 7,000 people. Most of the workers lived in houses owned by the company, many of which have been refurbished and are used today. The trains that served th town and the mill, however, are long gone - the depot site is now occupied by a gas station.
Most of the original mill workers had been local Yankees and Irish immigrants. But by the early 1900's, the Assabet Mills were employing large numbers of newcomers from Finland, Poland, Russia and Italy. The latest arrivals were often escorted to their relatives or friends by obliging post office workers. The immigrants made Maynard a bustling, multi-ethnic community while Stow, Sudbury and Acton remained small, rural villages. Farmers and their families rode the trolley to Maynard to shop and to visit urban attractions then unknown in their own towns, including barrooms and movie houses.
Wages were low and the hours were long. Early payrolls show wages of four cents an hour for a sixty hour week. Ralph Sheridan of the Maynard Historical Society confirmed that in 1889 his eldest brother was making 5 1/2 cents an hour in the mill's rag shop at the age of fourteen, while their father was earning 16 1/2 cents per hour in the boiler room. (As of 1891 one-eighth of the workers were less than 16 years old, and one-quarter were women.)
Sheridan's own first job at the mill, in the summer of 1915, paid $6.35 for a work week limited to 48 hours by child labor laws. The indestructible "bullseye" safe still remains in the old Office Building.
Sheridan remembers the bell that was perched on top of Building 3:
"...the whistle on the engine room gave one blast at quarter of the hour, and then at about five minutes of the hour the gave one blast again. And everyone was supposed to be inside the gate when that second whistle blew. And then at one minute of the hour this bell rang just once, a quick ring- and we referred to it as "The Tick" because of that..... everybody was supposed to start work at that time, at that moment."
A worker was sent home if he'd forgotten to wear his employee's button, marked "A.W.Co.,Assabet".
The millhands really had to work, too. Sheridan recalls one winter evening when there was such a rush to get out an order of cloth for Henry Ford that the men were ordered to invoice it from the warehouse, now Building 21, instead of from the usual shipping room:
"There was no heat in the building, never had been. And it was so cold that I remember that I had to cut the forefinger and the thumb from the glove that I was wearing in order to handle the pencil to do the invoicing....the yard superintendant at the time brought in some kerosene lanterns and put 'em under our chairs to keep our feet warm."
Building 21, built out over the pond, remained unheated until DIGITAL took it over.
As in most Northern mill towns, labor relations were often troubled. In 1911 the company used Poles to break the strike of Finnish workers. When no longer able to play off one nationality against another, management for years took advantage of rivalries between different unions. The Great Depression hit the company hard, however. In 1934 it sold all the houses it owned, mostly to the employees who lived in them; and New Deal labor laws encouraged the workers to form a single industrial union, which joined the C.I.O.
World War II brought a final few years of good times to the woolens industry. The mill in Maynard operated around the clock with over two thousand employees producing such items as blankets and cloth for overcoats for the armed forces. But when peace returned, the long-term trends resumed their downward drift, and in 1950 the American Woolen Company shut down its Assabet Mills entirely. Like many New England mills, Maynard's had succumbed to a combination of Southern and foreign competition, relatively high costs and low productivity, and the growing use of synthetic fibers.
'Til then a one-industry town, Maynard was in trouble. In 1953, however, ten Worcester businessmen bought the mill and began leasing space to tenants, some of which were established firms, while others were just getting started. One of the new companies which found the low cost of Maynard Industries' space appealing was Digital Equipment Corporation, which started operations in 8,680 square feet in the mill in 1957.
A Mill Chronology
1846 Amory Maynard and William Knight form Assabet Mills.
1847 Maynard and Knight install a water wheel and build a new factory on the banks of the Assabet River.
1848 The Assabet Mills business is valued at $150,000.
The Lowell and Framingham Railroad carries passengers over branch road.
1855 The Mill now has three buildings on the site. Massachusetts is producing one-third of the textiles in the United States.
1857 Assabet Mills collapses after a business panic. The Mill complex is sold at an auction.
1862 The Mills are reorganized as Assabet Manufacturing Company. This involve replacing wooden buildings with brick, and the installation of new machinery. To fulfill contracts to the government during the Civil War production is switched from carpets to woolen cloth, blankets, and flannel.
The first tenement for employees are also constructed.
1869 Millhands peition President Ulysses S. Grant for a shorter work week ... 55 hours.
1871 The Town of Maynard incorporates. The population stands at 2,000
1888 A reservoir is installed for $70,000 to supply a growing population.
1890 The Assabet Manufacturing Company is valued at $1,500,000.
1892 Lorenzo Maynard donates clock in his father's name.
The Mill Complex contains seven buildings.
1898 Assabet Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy. Many people in town lose much of their savings as banks have not yet been established.
1899 American Woolen Company purchases the Mill complex for $400,000. This company would eventually control 20% of the woolen textile market in the U.S. Wool was shipped all over the country to keep up with demand.
1901 160 additional tenements are constructed with their own sewage system. The streets are named after U.S. presidents.
The first electric trolley in Maynard begins service.
Building Number 5, the Mill complex's largest, is built in nine months. Electric power is introduced with the addition of dynamos on site.
1906 The Mill complex now has 13 buildings.
1910 The Mill complex grows to 25 buildings. Floor space is at 421,711 square feet. The property takes up 75 acres.
1918 With the addition of three new buildings the American Wollen Company and the Mill are in their heyday. The fortunes of the industry begin to decline over the next 30 years.
1947 After a brief spell of prosperity during World War II, the Mill phases out production as demand for woolen goods declines.
1950 Mill closes. 1,200 employees lose their jobs.
1953 Maynard Industries, Inc. purchases the Mill for $200,000. Space is rented to business and industrial tenants.
1957 Three engineers set up shop on the second floor of Building 12. With $70,000 and 8,600 square feet of rented space Digital Equipment Corporation is formed.
1960 Over thirty firms are located within the Mill complex.
1974 Digital Equipment Corporation purchases the entire Mill complex for $2.2 million. The Mill has over 1 million square feet in 19 buildings residing on 11 acres.
1992 The 100th anniversary of the Mill Clock is celebrated.
1993 Digital Equipment Corporation announces that it plans to leave the Mill complex. A search for a new tenant is started.
1995 Franklin Life Care purchases the Mill. Digital continues to rent space in Building 5.
1998 Mill purchased by Clock Tower Place.
Sources
* "Digital's Mill 1847-1977", a brochure published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
* "A Walk Through the Mill...", published by Digital Equipment Corporation for the Mill Clock Centennial.
I. Targeting Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Proliferation Activities
One set of today’s actions targets Iran’s nuclear and missile proliferation activities by designating entities and individuals that are part of the international procurement and nuclear proliferation operations of Iran’s Ministry of Defense for Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL); Aerospace Industries Organization (AIO); Iran’s national maritime carrier, Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL); and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – all of which have been previously designated under Executive Order (E.O.) 13382, “Blocking Property of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators and Their Supporters.” Treasury today is also updating the identifying information for 57 vessels affiliated with IRISL that had been renamed or reflagged since they were originally designated by Treasury, and identifying seven vessels affiliated with IRISL that have not been identified previously. U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with individuals or entities designated pursuant to E.O 13382, and any assets the designees may have under U.S. jurisdiction are blocked.
Designations Related to MODAFL and AIO
Iran’s Ministry of Defense for Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL) oversees Iran’s ballistic missile program. It is designated by the United States pursuant to E.O. 13382 in 2007, and has brokered a number of transactions involving materials and technologies with ballistic missile applications. Aerospace Industries Organization (AIO), a subsidiary of MODAFL, oversees all of Iran’s missile industries and was listed in the Annex to E.O. 13382. Today’s MODAFL- and AIO-related designations under E.O. 13382 include:
Electronic Components Industries Co. (ECI) and Information Systems Iran (ISIRAN)
Electronic Components Industries Co. (ECI) and Information Systems Iran (ISIRAN) are being designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 because they are owned or controlled by Iran Electronics Industries (IEI), which was designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 in 2008 for being owned or controlled by MODAFL. IEI offers a diversified range of military products including electro-optics and lasers, communication equipment, telecommunication security equipment, electronic warfare equipment, new and refurbished radar tubes, and missile launchers. IEI manufactures military tactical communication systems and also electronic field telephones and switchboards.
ECI conducts work on military and civilian projects, to include semi-conductors, multilayer single and double sided printed circuit boards, hybrid circuits, quartz crystals and oscillators, high purity oxygen and nitrogen gases, micromodules and electronic ceramics.
ISIRAN is one of the largest and most experienced information technology companies in Iran with expertise in building mainframes, minicomputers and PC hardware, software and maintenance as well as total solution turn-key projects.
Advanced Information and Communication Technology Center
Advanced Information and Communication Technology Center (AICTC) is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 because it has provided technological or other support for, or services in support of ISIRAN. According to information available from computers abandoned by Hamid Reza Rabiee in the United States, AICTC executes work projects on behalf of ISIRAN. AICTC has five research groups in the fields of Enterprise Software Solutions, Multimedia Systems, Mobile Value-Added Services, Wireless and P2P Networks and Bioinformatics. It also does work on GIS/GPS based tracking systems and more.
Hamid Reza Rabiee
Hamid Reza Rabiee, a software engineer, is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 for acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of AICTC. According to information available from computers abandoned by Rabiee in the United States, he has coordinated directly with ISIRAN to establish and execute contracts benefitting ISIRAN. Rabiee is the chief architect and founder of AICTC, and is the current director of the organization.
Digital Media Lab (DML) and Value-Added Services Laboratory (VASL)
Digital Media Lab (DML) and Value-Added Services Laboratory (VASL) were designated for being owned or controlled by, or acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of Hamid Reza Rabiee and AICTC. According to publicly available information, Rabiee is the founder and director of DML and VASL.
Ministry of Defense Logistics Export (MODLEX)
MODLEX is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 because it is owned or controlled by, or acts or purports to act, for or on behalf of, MODAFL. As MODAFL’s primary exporting entity since 2009, MODLEX was involved in the trade of exportable military products to countries including Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burma, Bangladesh and Nigeria, all in contravention of UNSCR 1747 (2007). UNSCR 1747 prohibits Iran from selling any arms or related material. MODLEX represents Iran at arms trade fairs worldwide advertising Iranian military products for sale. MODLEX also conducts limited procurement activities on behalf of MODAFL elements such as Iran’s Defense Industries Organization (DIO), AIO, and Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group (SBIG). Both DIO and SBIG are sanctioned under UNSCR 1737 for their links to Iran’s missile program through MODAFL and AIO, respectively.
The Annex to UNSCR 1929 (2010) lists MODLEX as an entity involved in Iran’s nuclear or ballistic missile activities and identified MODLEX as being owned or controlled by MODAFL.
Daniel Frosch and International General Resourcing FZE
Daniel Frosch is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 for providing or attempting to provide material support for AIO.
Daniel Frosch for several years has shown a steady pattern of providing support to Iran’s missile program, including Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group (SHIG) and SBIG, by supplying it with sensitive material. He started dealing with Iran’s missile industry while in his home country of Austria, under his now defunct company Daniel Frosch Exports. He moved to the United Arab Emirates(UAE) in 2006, where he continued supporting Iran’s weapons programs. Frosch has supplied Iran’s missile industry with a wide range of goods, including electronics, testing equipment, and raw materials such as graphite with potential applications in Iran’s ballistic missile program. Frosch is the owner of International General Resourcing FZE, located in the UAE.
SHIG was identified in the Annex to E.O. 13382 and is tied to Iran’s ballistic missile research, development, and production activities. SHIG was also listed in the Annex to UNSCR 1737.
Malek Ashtar University
Malek Ashtar University is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 for being owned or controlled by MODAFL. Malek Ashtar University was established in 1986 by Iran’s Ministry of Higher Education and the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, and it is one of the major research institutes and educational centers contained under the MODAFL umbrella.
Malek Ashtar University was identified in the Annex to UNSCR 1929 because it is a subordinate of the Defense Technology and Science Research Center (DTSRC) within MODAFL. The European Union designated Malek Ashtar University on June 24, 2008, because Malek Ashtar University is linked to MODAFL. The University also created a missile training program in 2003 in close collaboration with AIO.
Actions Related to Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line (IRISL)
IRISL, Iran’s national maritime carrier, was designated by Treasury pursuant to E.O. 13382 in September 2008 for its provision of logistical services to MODAFL.
Good Luck Shipping
Good Luck Shipping (GLS), which is located in the UAE, is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 because it acts or purports to act for or on behalf of IRISL. GLS was established to replace Great Ocean Shipping Services, which was designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 in June 2011.
Great Ocean Shipping Services (Great Ocean), along with Oasis Freight Agency LLC (Oasis) and Pearl Ship Management LLC (Pearl), are being removed from the SDN List because they were liquidated and struck from the Dubai, UAE commercial register. Great Ocean was designated in June 2011 for acting for or on behalf of IRISL affiliate Oasis and/or IRISL. Oasis was designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 in September 2008 for being owned or controlled by, or acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, IRISL. Pearl was also designated in June 2011 for acting for or on behalf of Oasis and/or IRISL.
Identification of Renamed, Reflagged Vessels and Additional IRISL Vessels
Today, Treasury updated its List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN List) entries for 57 vessels affiliated with IRISL that, since their original identification, have been renamed and/or reflagged by IRISL and its affiliates. OFAC is also identifying 7 additional vessels as blocked property in which IRISL has an interest. Including today’s additions, Treasury has identified 155 ships as blocked property in which IRISL or designated IRISL affiliates have an interest.
Designation of IRGC Officer
The IRGC was designated pursuant to E.O. 13382 in 2007 for having engaged, or attempting to engage, in proliferation-related activities. The IRGC continues to be a primary focus of U.S. and international sanctions against Iran because of the central role it plays in Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs and its involvement in serious human rights abuses.
Ali Fadavi
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy Commander Ali Fadavi is being designated under E.O. 13382 for acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the IRGC. Fadavi was appointed by the Supreme Leader Khamenei as the new IRGC Navy Commander on May 3, 2010. On September 21, 2010, the Defense Ministry of Iran announced that it had delivered the third generation of the domestically designed and manufactured Fateh-110 high-precision ballistic missiles to the IRGC. Fadavi was present at the ceremony where the missiles were delivered. In November 2010 under Fadavi’s leadership, the IRGCNavy organized and trained around 60,000 Basij students who received instruction in techniques aimed to confront enemies of Iran. Fadavi claimed that around 100,000 students had become members of the Shahid Fahmideh Rahrovan camp of Basij forces in Bandar Abbas after the launch of the education project.
The European Union designated Fadavi on July 26, 2010, pursuant to European Union Council authorities, for his role as an IRGC Navy Commander.
Designation of Nuclear Procurement Entities
Pentane Chemistry Industries
Pentane Chemistry Industries (PCI) is being designated for engaging or attempting to engage in activities that have materially contributed to, or posed a risk of contributing to, the development of Iran’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs.
PCI is an Iranian entity involved in building distillation columns for the production of heavy water for use in Iran’s IR-40 heavy water reactor, under construction in Arak, Iran. Since late 2009 PCI has been in charge of the distillation column project at this reactor. PCI has also attempted to procure phosphor bronze mesh as recently as July 2011. Phosphor bronze mesh can be used in distillation columns for final enrichment of heavy water. PCI began manufacturing phosphor bronze mesh screens for the distillation columns in March 2012. Chemically-treated phosphor bronze, when knitted into mesh screens, will be used as packing in the IR-40 distillation columns.
Hossein Tanideh
Hossein Tanideh was a procurement agent for Iran’s nuclear program through late 2011. He was the Vice President of Iran’s Pentane Chemistry Industries Board of Directors as well as Managing Director of the Sherkate Sakhtemani Rahtes Sahami Company (also known as the Rahtes Company). Tanideh in 2010 and 2011 attempted to procure items for probable use in distillation columns for Iran’s 40-megawatt heavy water research reactor.
Center for Innovation and Technology Cooperation
The Center for Innovation and Technology Cooperation (CITC) is in a position to support a range of Iran’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and military procurement objectives. It has been assessed that CITC facilitates procurement and technology transfer from the science community to the military services.
II. Preventing the Circumvention of International Sanctions
To prevent the circumvention of international sanctions on Iran, including sanctions on oil trade with Iran, Treasury is publicly exposing numerous entities that are part of the Government of Iran. Treasury is identifying these Government of Iran entities pursuant to E.O. 13599, which blocks all property and interests in property within U.S. jurisdiction of the Government of Iran and of Iranian financial institutions, and prohibits U.S. persons or those within U.S. jurisdiction from having dealings with them. These identifications are being issued to assist U.S. persons in complying with E.O. 13599, but are not required for E.O. 13599 to apply. Every entity that meets the definition of Government of Iran or an Iranian financial institution under E.O. 13599 is blocked, regardless of whether it has been identified and added to the SDN List. Today’s actions include:
Exposing front companies involved in Iran’s oil trade
Aiming to undercut Iran’s attempts to obscure Iran’s petroleum trade in the face of increasing international sanctions, Treasury is identifying Petro Suisse Intertrade Company SA (Petro Suisse), an entity incorporated in Switzerland; Hong Kong Intertrade Company, a Hong Kong-based entity; Noor Energy (Malaysia) Ltd, an entity incorporated in Malaysia; and Petro Energy Intertrade Company, an entity operating out of Dubai, as blocked pursuant to E.O. 13599 because they are owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, the Government of Iran. Each of these entities are front companies for the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), Naftiran Intertrade Company Ltd. (NICO), or Naftiran Intertrade Co. (NICO) Sarl (NICO Sarl).
Prior to the issuance of E.O. 13599, Iran’s NIOC, NICO, and NICO Sarl, a Swiss subsidiary of NICO, were identified in 2008, by OFAC as entities that are owned or controlled by the Government of Iran within the meaning of the Iranian Transactions Regulations. U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with NIOC, NICO, and NICO Sarl, without authorization from OFAC.
Identification of additional Iranian financial institutions
The 20 Iranian financial institutions identified in today’s action constitute new additions to the SDN List that were blocked pursuant to E.O. 13599 on February 5, 2012. Three of the entities identified today have previously been designated by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under other authorities, and their entries on the SDN List have been updated to reflect their status as Iranian financial institutions.
These identifications, which include the publication of the names and aliases of the Iranian financial institutions, are intended to aid the public in meeting its obligations under E.O. 13599.
To receive a list of these 20 Iranian financial institutions please contact Treasury Public Affairs
Identification of NITC Vessels
Treasury is identifying 58 National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) vessels, as well as NITC and 27 of its affiliated entities, as blocked or “frozen” pursuant to E.O. 13599. The NITC entities have been identified as Government of Iran entities, and the NITC vessels have been identified as property of the Government of Iran. These identifications will aid companies and individuals in complying with sanctions against the Government of Iran and undermine Iran’s attempts to use NITC front companies or renamed vessels to evade sanctions.
****
Fact Sheet
Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
July 12, 2012
The mills are an important feature of Maynard's development. The earliest saw and grist mills were built in the early 18th century. Two of the earliest mills were the Puffer Mill and the Asa Smith's Mill, which were located on Taylor Brook and Mill Street, respectively. These were the first mills to use the Assabet River for power; therefore, they were very slow and sluggish. The grist and saw mill were then followed by paper mills, which were built starting in 1820.
The Mill is easily Maynard's most prominent feature. The complex takes up 11 acres in the middleof what we call downtown. The Mill complex began in 1847 as set of wooden buildings used to manufacture carpets and carpet yarn. Amory Maynard helped construct this mill. His partner, William H. Knight, helped him build a dam across the Assabet and dug a canal channeling a portion of the river into what is called Mill Pond. The Mill changed hands a few times but it would eventually become the largest woolen factory in the world till the 1930s.
The 1950's ushered in a change from textiles to businesses like computer manufacturing. With the start of the final decade of the century the Mill is on the cusp of being transformed again.
It is said that "as the Mill goes, so goes Maynard". While the town isn't as dependent on the Mill as it was in 19th century it continues to play an important role in shaping the character of the town.
We hope you enjoy this historical perspective of the Mill. It has been pieced together from a variety of sources and continues to be enriched as we discover new materials to include, increase the number of hyperlinks and add pictures, diagrams, and sound..
The Mill from 1847 to 1977
The site of the mill was once part of the town of Sudbury, while the opposite bank of the Assabet River belonged to Stow. The present town, formed in 1871, was named for the man most responsible for its development, Amory Maynard.
Born in 1804, Maynard was running his own sawmill business at the age of sixteen. In the 1840's, he went into partnership with a carpet manufacturer for whom he'd done contracting. They dammed up the Assabet and diverted water into a millpond to provide power for a new mill, which opened in 1847, producing carpet yarn and carpets. Only one of the original mill buildings survives: it was moved across Main Street and now is an apartment house.
Amory Maynard's carpet firm failed in the business panic of 1857. But the Civil War allowed the Assabet Manufacturing Company, organized in 1862 with Maynard as the managing "agent", to prosper by producing woolens, flannels and blankets for the army. This work was carried on in new brick mill buildings.
Expansion of the mill over many years is evidenced by the variations in the architecture of the structures still standing.
The oldest portion of Building 3 dates from 1859, making it the oldest part of the mill in existence today, but several additions were made afterwards. Buildings constructed in the late 1800's frequently featured brick arches over the windows, and at times new additions were made to match neighboring structures.
The best-known feature is the clock donated in memory of Amory Maynard by his son Lorenzo in 1892. Its four faces, each nine feet in diameter, are mechanically controlled by a small timer inside the tower. Neither the timer nor the bell mechanism has ever been electrified; custodians still climb 120 steps to wind the clock every week- 90 turns for the timer and 330 turns for the striker.
Amory Maynard died in 1890, but his son and grandson still held high positions in the mill's management. The family's local popularity plummeted, however, when the Assabet Manufacturing Company failed late in 1898. Workers lost nearly half of their savings which they had deposited with the company, since there were no banks in town. Their disillusionment nearly resulted in changing the town's name from Maynard to Assabet.
Prosperity returned in 1899 when the American Woolen Company, an industrial giant, bought the Assabet Mills and began to expand them, adding most of the structures now standing. The biggest new unit was Building 5, 610 feet long which contained more looms than any other woolen mill in the world. Building 1, completed in 1918, is the newest; the mill pond had been drained to permit construction of its foundation. These buildings have little decoration, but their massiveness is emphasized by the buttress-like brick columns between their windows.
The turn of the century saw a changeover from gas to electric lights at the mill. Until the 1930's the mill generated not only its own power but also electricity for Maynard and several other towns. For years the mill used 40-cycle current. Into the late 1960's power produced by a water wheel was used for outdoor lighting, including the Christmas tree near Main Street. The complex system of shafts and belts once used to distribute power from a central source was rendered obsolete by more efficient small electric motors, just as inexpensive minicomputers have often replaced terminals tied to one large processor.
As the mill grew, so did the town. Even in 1871, the nearly 2,000 people who became Maynard's first citizens outnumbered the people left in either Sudbury or Stow. Maynard's first population almost doubled in the decade between 1895 and 1905, when reached nearly 7,000 people. Most of the workers lived in houses owned by the company, many of which have been refurbished and are used today. The trains that served th town and the mill, however, are long gone - the depot site is now occupied by a gas station.
Most of the original mill workers had been local Yankees and Irish immigrants. But by the early 1900's, the Assabet Mills were employing large numbers of newcomers from Finland, Poland, Russia and Italy. The latest arrivals were often escorted to their relatives or friends by obliging post office workers. The immigrants made Maynard a bustling, multi-ethnic community while Stow, Sudbury and Acton remained small, rural villages. Farmers and their families rode the trolley to Maynard to shop and to visit urban attractions then unknown in their own towns, including barrooms and movie houses.
Wages were low and the hours were long. Early payrolls show wages of four cents an hour for a sixty hour week. Ralph Sheridan of the Maynard Historical Society confirmed that in 1889 his eldest brother was making 5 1/2 cents an hour in the mill's rag shop at the age of fourteen, while their father was earning 16 1/2 cents per hour in the boiler room. (As of 1891 one-eighth of the workers were less than 16 years old, and one-quarter were women.)
Sheridan's own first job at the mill, in the summer of 1915, paid $6.35 for a work week limited to 48 hours by child labor laws. The indestructible "bullseye" safe still remains in the old Office Building.
Sheridan remembers the bell that was perched on top of Building 3:
"...the whistle on the engine room gave one blast at quarter of the hour, and then at about five minutes of the hour the gave one blast again. And everyone was supposed to be inside the gate when that second whistle blew. And then at one minute of the hour this bell rang just once, a quick ring- and we referred to it as "The Tick" because of that..... everybody was supposed to start work at that time, at that moment."
A worker was sent home if he'd forgotten to wear his employee's button, marked "A.W.Co.,Assabet".
The millhands really had to work, too. Sheridan recalls one winter evening when there was such a rush to get out an order of cloth for Henry Ford that the men were ordered to invoice it from the warehouse, now Building 21, instead of from the usual shipping room:
"There was no heat in the building, never had been. And it was so cold that I remember that I had to cut the forefinger and the thumb from the glove that I was wearing in order to handle the pencil to do the invoicing....the yard superintendant at the time brought in some kerosene lanterns and put 'em under our chairs to keep our feet warm."
Building 21, built out over the pond, remained unheated until DIGITAL took it over.
As in most Northern mill towns, labor relations were often troubled. In 1911 the company used Poles to break the strike of Finnish workers. When no longer able to play off one nationality against another, management for years took advantage of rivalries between different unions. The Great Depression hit the company hard, however. In 1934 it sold all the houses it owned, mostly to the employees who lived in them; and New Deal labor laws encouraged the workers to form a single industrial union, which joined the C.I.O.
World War II brought a final few years of good times to the woolens industry. The mill in Maynard operated around the clock with over two thousand employees producing such items as blankets and cloth for overcoats for the armed forces. But when peace returned, the long-term trends resumed their downward drift, and in 1950 the American Woolen Company shut down its Assabet Mills entirely. Like many New England mills, Maynard's had succumbed to a combination of Southern and foreign competition, relatively high costs and low productivity, and the growing use of synthetic fibers.
'Til then a one-industry town, Maynard was in trouble. In 1953, however, ten Worcester businessmen bought the mill and began leasing space to tenants, some of which were established firms, while others were just getting started. One of the new companies which found the low cost of Maynard Industries' space appealing was Digital Equipment Corporation, which started operations in 8,680 square feet in the mill in 1957.
A Mill Chronology
1846 Amory Maynard and William Knight form Assabet Mills.
1847 Maynard and Knight install a water wheel and build a new factory on the banks of the Assabet River.
1848 The Assabet Mills business is valued at $150,000.
The Lowell and Framingham Railroad carries passengers over branch road.
1855 The Mill now has three buildings on the site. Massachusetts is producing one-third of the textiles in the United States.
1857 Assabet Mills collapses after a business panic. The Mill complex is sold at an auction.
1862 The Mills are reorganized as Assabet Manufacturing Company. This involve replacing wooden buildings with brick, and the installation of new machinery. To fulfill contracts to the government during the Civil War production is switched from carpets to woolen cloth, blankets, and flannel.
The first tenement for employees are also constructed.
1869 Millhands peition President Ulysses S. Grant for a shorter work week ... 55 hours.
1871 The Town of Maynard incorporates. The population stands at 2,000
1888 A reservoir is installed for $70,000 to supply a growing population.
1890 The Assabet Manufacturing Company is valued at $1,500,000.
1892 Lorenzo Maynard donates clock in his father's name.
The Mill Complex contains seven buildings.
1898 Assabet Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy. Many people in town lose much of their savings as banks have not yet been established.
1899 American Woolen Company purchases the Mill complex for $400,000. This company would eventually control 20% of the woolen textile market in the U.S. Wool was shipped all over the country to keep up with demand.
1901 160 additional tenements are constructed with their own sewage system. The streets are named after U.S. presidents.
The first electric trolley in Maynard begins service.
Building Number 5, the Mill complex's largest, is built in nine months. Electric power is introduced with the addition of dynamos on site.
1906 The Mill complex now has 13 buildings.
1910 The Mill complex grows to 25 buildings. Floor space is at 421,711 square feet. The property takes up 75 acres.
1918 With the addition of three new buildings the American Wollen Company and the Mill are in their heyday. The fortunes of the industry begin to decline over the next 30 years.
1947 After a brief spell of prosperity during World War II, the Mill phases out production as demand for woolen goods declines.
1950 Mill closes. 1,200 employees lose their jobs.
1953 Maynard Industries, Inc. purchases the Mill for $200,000. Space is rented to business and industrial tenants.
1957 Three engineers set up shop on the second floor of Building 12. With $70,000 and 8,600 square feet of rented space Digital Equipment Corporation is formed.
1960 Over thirty firms are located within the Mill complex.
1974 Digital Equipment Corporation purchases the entire Mill complex for $2.2 million. The Mill has over 1 million square feet in 19 buildings residing on 11 acres.
1992 The 100th anniversary of the Mill Clock is celebrated.
1993 Digital Equipment Corporation announces that it plans to leave the Mill complex. A search for a new tenant is started.
1995 Franklin Life Care purchases the Mill. Digital continues to rent space in Building 5.
1998 Mill purchased by Clock Tower Place.
Sources
* "Digital's Mill 1847-1977", a brochure published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
* "A Walk Through the Mill...", published by Digital Equipment Corporation for the Mill Clock Centennial.
The mills are an important feature of Maynard's development. The earliest saw and grist mills were built in the early 18th century. Two of the earliest mills were the Puffer Mill and the Asa Smith's Mill, which were located on Taylor Brook and Mill Street, respectively. These were the first mills to use the Assabet River for power; therefore, they were very slow and sluggish. The grist and saw mill were then followed by paper mills, which were built starting in 1820.
The Mill is easily Maynard's most prominent feature. The complex takes up 11 acres in the middleof what we call downtown. The Mill complex began in 1847 as set of wooden buildings used to manufacture carpets and carpet yarn. Amory Maynard helped construct this mill. His partner, William H. Knight, helped him build a dam across the Assabet and dug a canal channeling a portion of the river into what is called Mill Pond. The Mill changed hands a few times but it would eventually become the largest woolen factory in the world till the 1930s.
The 1950's ushered in a change from textiles to businesses like computer manufacturing. With the start of the final decade of the century the Mill is on the cusp of being transformed again.
It is said that "as the Mill goes, so goes Maynard". While the town isn't as dependent on the Mill as it was in 19th century it continues to play an important role in shaping the character of the town.
We hope you enjoy this historical perspective of the Mill. It has been pieced together from a variety of sources and continues to be enriched as we discover new materials to include, increase the number of hyperlinks and add pictures, diagrams, and sound..
The Mill from 1847 to 1977
The site of the mill was once part of the town of Sudbury, while the opposite bank of the Assabet River belonged to Stow. The present town, formed in 1871, was named for the man most responsible for its development, Amory Maynard.
Born in 1804, Maynard was running his own sawmill business at the age of sixteen. In the 1840's, he went into partnership with a carpet manufacturer for whom he'd done contracting. They dammed up the Assabet and diverted water into a millpond to provide power for a new mill, which opened in 1847, producing carpet yarn and carpets. Only one of the original mill buildings survives: it was moved across Main Street and now is an apartment house.
Amory Maynard's carpet firm failed in the business panic of 1857. But the Civil War allowed the Assabet Manufacturing Company, organized in 1862 with Maynard as the managing "agent", to prosper by producing woolens, flannels and blankets for the army. This work was carried on in new brick mill buildings.
Expansion of the mill over many years is evidenced by the variations in the architecture of the structures still standing.
The oldest portion of Building 3 dates from 1859, making it the oldest part of the mill in existence today, but several additions were made afterwards. Buildings constructed in the late 1800's frequently featured brick arches over the windows, and at times new additions were made to match neighboring structures.
The best-known feature is the clock donated in memory of Amory Maynard by his son Lorenzo in 1892. Its four faces, each nine feet in diameter, are mechanically controlled by a small timer inside the tower. Neither the timer nor the bell mechanism has ever been electrified; custodians still climb 120 steps to wind the clock every week- 90 turns for the timer and 330 turns for the striker.
Amory Maynard died in 1890, but his son and grandson still held high positions in the mill's management. The family's local popularity plummeted, however, when the Assabet Manufacturing Company failed late in 1898. Workers lost nearly half of their savings which they had deposited with the company, since there were no banks in town. Their disillusionment nearly resulted in changing the town's name from Maynard to Assabet.
Prosperity returned in 1899 when the American Woolen Company, an industrial giant, bought the Assabet Mills and began to expand them, adding most of the structures now standing. The biggest new unit was Building 5, 610 feet long which contained more looms than any other woolen mill in the world. Building 1, completed in 1918, is the newest; the mill pond had been drained to permit construction of its foundation. These buildings have little decoration, but their massiveness is emphasized by the buttress-like brick columns between their windows.
The turn of the century saw a changeover from gas to electric lights at the mill. Until the 1930's the mill generated not only its own power but also electricity for Maynard and several other towns. For years the mill used 40-cycle current. Into the late 1960's power produced by a water wheel was used for outdoor lighting, including the Christmas tree near Main Street. The complex system of shafts and belts once used to distribute power from a central source was rendered obsolete by more efficient small electric motors, just as inexpensive minicomputers have often replaced terminals tied to one large processor.
As the mill grew, so did the town. Even in 1871, the nearly 2,000 people who became Maynard's first citizens outnumbered the people left in either Sudbury or Stow. Maynard's first population almost doubled in the decade between 1895 and 1905, when reached nearly 7,000 people. Most of the workers lived in houses owned by the company, many of which have been refurbished and are used today. The trains that served th town and the mill, however, are long gone - the depot site is now occupied by a gas station.
Most of the original mill workers had been local Yankees and Irish immigrants. But by the early 1900's, the Assabet Mills were employing large numbers of newcomers from Finland, Poland, Russia and Italy. The latest arrivals were often escorted to their relatives or friends by obliging post office workers. The immigrants made Maynard a bustling, multi-ethnic community while Stow, Sudbury and Acton remained small, rural villages. Farmers and their families rode the trolley to Maynard to shop and to visit urban attractions then unknown in their own towns, including barrooms and movie houses.
Wages were low and the hours were long. Early payrolls show wages of four cents an hour for a sixty hour week. Ralph Sheridan of the Maynard Historical Society confirmed that in 1889 his eldest brother was making 5 1/2 cents an hour in the mill's rag shop at the age of fourteen, while their father was earning 16 1/2 cents per hour in the boiler room. (As of 1891 one-eighth of the workers were less than 16 years old, and one-quarter were women.)
Sheridan's own first job at the mill, in the summer of 1915, paid $6.35 for a work week limited to 48 hours by child labor laws. The indestructible "bullseye" safe still remains in the old Office Building.
Sheridan remembers the bell that was perched on top of Building 3:
"...the whistle on the engine room gave one blast at quarter of the hour, and then at about five minutes of the hour the gave one blast again. And everyone was supposed to be inside the gate when that second whistle blew. And then at one minute of the hour this bell rang just once, a quick ring- and we referred to it as "The Tick" because of that..... everybody was supposed to start work at that time, at that moment."
A worker was sent home if he'd forgotten to wear his employee's button, marked "A.W.Co.,Assabet".
The millhands really had to work, too. Sheridan recalls one winter evening when there was such a rush to get out an order of cloth for Henry Ford that the men were ordered to invoice it from the warehouse, now Building 21, instead of from the usual shipping room:
"There was no heat in the building, never had been. And it was so cold that I remember that I had to cut the forefinger and the thumb from the glove that I was wearing in order to handle the pencil to do the invoicing....the yard superintendant at the time brought in some kerosene lanterns and put 'em under our chairs to keep our feet warm."
Building 21, built out over the pond, remained unheated until DIGITAL took it over.
As in most Northern mill towns, labor relations were often troubled. In 1911 the company used Poles to break the strike of Finnish workers. When no longer able to play off one nationality against another, management for years took advantage of rivalries between different unions. The Great Depression hit the company hard, however. In 1934 it sold all the houses it owned, mostly to the employees who lived in them; and New Deal labor laws encouraged the workers to form a single industrial union, which joined the C.I.O.
World War II brought a final few years of good times to the woolens industry. The mill in Maynard operated around the clock with over two thousand employees producing such items as blankets and cloth for overcoats for the armed forces. But when peace returned, the long-term trends resumed their downward drift, and in 1950 the American Woolen Company shut down its Assabet Mills entirely. Like many New England mills, Maynard's had succumbed to a combination of Southern and foreign competition, relatively high costs and low productivity, and the growing use of synthetic fibers.
'Til then a one-industry town, Maynard was in trouble. In 1953, however, ten Worcester businessmen bought the mill and began leasing space to tenants, some of which were established firms, while others were just getting started. One of the new companies which found the low cost of Maynard Industries' space appealing was Digital Equipment Corporation, which started operations in 8,680 square feet in the mill in 1957.
A Mill Chronology
1846 Amory Maynard and William Knight form Assabet Mills.
1847 Maynard and Knight install a water wheel and build a new factory on the banks of the Assabet River.
1848 The Assabet Mills business is valued at $150,000.
The Lowell and Framingham Railroad carries passengers over branch road.
1855 The Mill now has three buildings on the site. Massachusetts is producing one-third of the textiles in the United States.
1857 Assabet Mills collapses after a business panic. The Mill complex is sold at an auction.
1862 The Mills are reorganized as Assabet Manufacturing Company. This involve replacing wooden buildings with brick, and the installation of new machinery. To fulfill contracts to the government during the Civil War production is switched from carpets to woolen cloth, blankets, and flannel.
The first tenement for employees are also constructed.
1869 Millhands peition President Ulysses S. Grant for a shorter work week ... 55 hours.
1871 The Town of Maynard incorporates. The population stands at 2,000
1888 A reservoir is installed for $70,000 to supply a growing population.
1890 The Assabet Manufacturing Company is valued at $1,500,000.
1892 Lorenzo Maynard donates clock in his father's name.
The Mill Complex contains seven buildings.
1898 Assabet Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy. Many people in town lose much of their savings as banks have not yet been established.
1899 American Woolen Company purchases the Mill complex for $400,000. This company would eventually control 20% of the woolen textile market in the U.S. Wool was shipped all over the country to keep up with demand.
1901 160 additional tenements are constructed with their own sewage system. The streets are named after U.S. presidents.
The first electric trolley in Maynard begins service.
Building Number 5, the Mill complex's largest, is built in nine months. Electric power is introduced with the addition of dynamos on site.
1906 The Mill complex now has 13 buildings.
1910 The Mill complex grows to 25 buildings. Floor space is at 421,711 square feet. The property takes up 75 acres.
1918 With the addition of three new buildings the American Wollen Company and the Mill are in their heyday. The fortunes of the industry begin to decline over the next 30 years.
1947 After a brief spell of prosperity during World War II, the Mill phases out production as demand for woolen goods declines.
1950 Mill closes. 1,200 employees lose their jobs.
1953 Maynard Industries, Inc. purchases the Mill for $200,000. Space is rented to business and industrial tenants.
1957 Three engineers set up shop on the second floor of Building 12. With $70,000 and 8,600 square feet of rented space Digital Equipment Corporation is formed.
1960 Over thirty firms are located within the Mill complex.
1974 Digital Equipment Corporation purchases the entire Mill complex for $2.2 million. The Mill has over 1 million square feet in 19 buildings residing on 11 acres.
1992 The 100th anniversary of the Mill Clock is celebrated.
1993 Digital Equipment Corporation announces that it plans to leave the Mill complex. A search for a new tenant is started.
1995 Franklin Life Care purchases the Mill. Digital continues to rent space in Building 5.
1998 Mill purchased by Clock Tower Place.
Sources
* "Digital's Mill 1847-1977", a brochure published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
* "A Walk Through the Mill...", published by Digital Equipment Corporation for the Mill Clock Centennial.
The mills are an important feature of Maynard's development. The earliest saw and grist mills were built in the early 18th century. Two of the earliest mills were the Puffer Mill and the Asa Smith's Mill, which were located on Taylor Brook and Mill Street, respectively. These were the first mills to use the Assabet River for power; therefore, they were very slow and sluggish. The grist and saw mill were then followed by paper mills, which were built starting in 1820.
The Mill is easily Maynard's most prominent feature. The complex takes up 11 acres in the middleof what we call downtown. The Mill complex began in 1847 as set of wooden buildings used to manufacture carpets and carpet yarn. Amory Maynard helped construct this mill. His partner, William H. Knight, helped him build a dam across the Assabet and dug a canal channeling a portion of the river into what is called Mill Pond. The Mill changed hands a few times but it would eventually become the largest woolen factory in the world till the 1930s.
The 1950's ushered in a change from textiles to businesses like computer manufacturing. With the start of the final decade of the century the Mill is on the cusp of being transformed again.
It is said that "as the Mill goes, so goes Maynard". While the town isn't as dependent on the Mill as it was in 19th century it continues to play an important role in shaping the character of the town.
We hope you enjoy this historical perspective of the Mill. It has been pieced together from a variety of sources and continues to be enriched as we discover new materials to include, increase the number of hyperlinks and add pictures, diagrams, and sound..
The Mill from 1847 to 1977
The site of the mill was once part of the town of Sudbury, while the opposite bank of the Assabet River belonged to Stow. The present town, formed in 1871, was named for the man most responsible for its development, Amory Maynard.
Born in 1804, Maynard was running his own sawmill business at the age of sixteen. In the 1840's, he went into partnership with a carpet manufacturer for whom he'd done contracting. They dammed up the Assabet and diverted water into a millpond to provide power for a new mill, which opened in 1847, producing carpet yarn and carpets. Only one of the original mill buildings survives: it was moved across Main Street and now is an apartment house.
Amory Maynard's carpet firm failed in the business panic of 1857. But the Civil War allowed the Assabet Manufacturing Company, organized in 1862 with Maynard as the managing "agent", to prosper by producing woolens, flannels and blankets for the army. This work was carried on in new brick mill buildings.
Expansion of the mill over many years is evidenced by the variations in the architecture of the structures still standing.
The oldest portion of Building 3 dates from 1859, making it the oldest part of the mill in existence today, but several additions were made afterwards. Buildings constructed in the late 1800's frequently featured brick arches over the windows, and at times new additions were made to match neighboring structures.
The best-known feature is the clock donated in memory of Amory Maynard by his son Lorenzo in 1892. Its four faces, each nine feet in diameter, are mechanically controlled by a small timer inside the tower. Neither the timer nor the bell mechanism has ever been electrified; custodians still climb 120 steps to wind the clock every week- 90 turns for the timer and 330 turns for the striker.
Amory Maynard died in 1890, but his son and grandson still held high positions in the mill's management. The family's local popularity plummeted, however, when the Assabet Manufacturing Company failed late in 1898. Workers lost nearly half of their savings which they had deposited with the company, since there were no banks in town. Their disillusionment nearly resulted in changing the town's name from Maynard to Assabet.
Prosperity returned in 1899 when the American Woolen Company, an industrial giant, bought the Assabet Mills and began to expand them, adding most of the structures now standing. The biggest new unit was Building 5, 610 feet long which contained more looms than any other woolen mill in the world. Building 1, completed in 1918, is the newest; the mill pond had been drained to permit construction of its foundation. These buildings have little decoration, but their massiveness is emphasized by the buttress-like brick columns between their windows.
The turn of the century saw a changeover from gas to electric lights at the mill. Until the 1930's the mill generated not only its own power but also electricity for Maynard and several other towns. For years the mill used 40-cycle current. Into the late 1960's power produced by a water wheel was used for outdoor lighting, including the Christmas tree near Main Street. The complex system of shafts and belts once used to distribute power from a central source was rendered obsolete by more efficient small electric motors, just as inexpensive minicomputers have often replaced terminals tied to one large processor.
As the mill grew, so did the town. Even in 1871, the nearly 2,000 people who became Maynard's first citizens outnumbered the people left in either Sudbury or Stow. Maynard's first population almost doubled in the decade between 1895 and 1905, when reached nearly 7,000 people. Most of the workers lived in houses owned by the company, many of which have been refurbished and are used today. The trains that served th town and the mill, however, are long gone - the depot site is now occupied by a gas station.
Most of the original mill workers had been local Yankees and Irish immigrants. But by the early 1900's, the Assabet Mills were employing large numbers of newcomers from Finland, Poland, Russia and Italy. The latest arrivals were often escorted to their relatives or friends by obliging post office workers. The immigrants made Maynard a bustling, multi-ethnic community while Stow, Sudbury and Acton remained small, rural villages. Farmers and their families rode the trolley to Maynard to shop and to visit urban attractions then unknown in their own towns, including barrooms and movie houses.
Wages were low and the hours were long. Early payrolls show wages of four cents an hour for a sixty hour week. Ralph Sheridan of the Maynard Historical Society confirmed that in 1889 his eldest brother was making 5 1/2 cents an hour in the mill's rag shop at the age of fourteen, while their father was earning 16 1/2 cents per hour in the boiler room. (As of 1891 one-eighth of the workers were less than 16 years old, and one-quarter were women.)
Sheridan's own first job at the mill, in the summer of 1915, paid $6.35 for a work week limited to 48 hours by child labor laws. The indestructible "bullseye" safe still remains in the old Office Building.
Sheridan remembers the bell that was perched on top of Building 3:
"...the whistle on the engine room gave one blast at quarter of the hour, and then at about five minutes of the hour the gave one blast again. And everyone was supposed to be inside the gate when that second whistle blew. And then at one minute of the hour this bell rang just once, a quick ring- and we referred to it as "The Tick" because of that..... everybody was supposed to start work at that time, at that moment."
A worker was sent home if he'd forgotten to wear his employee's button, marked "A.W.Co.,Assabet".
The millhands really had to work, too. Sheridan recalls one winter evening when there was such a rush to get out an order of cloth for Henry Ford that the men were ordered to invoice it from the warehouse, now Building 21, instead of from the usual shipping room:
"There was no heat in the building, never had been. And it was so cold that I remember that I had to cut the forefinger and the thumb from the glove that I was wearing in order to handle the pencil to do the invoicing....the yard superintendant at the time brought in some kerosene lanterns and put 'em under our chairs to keep our feet warm."
Building 21, built out over the pond, remained unheated until DIGITAL took it over.
As in most Northern mill towns, labor relations were often troubled. In 1911 the company used Poles to break the strike of Finnish workers. When no longer able to play off one nationality against another, management for years took advantage of rivalries between different unions. The Great Depression hit the company hard, however. In 1934 it sold all the houses it owned, mostly to the employees who lived in them; and New Deal labor laws encouraged the workers to form a single industrial union, which joined the C.I.O.
World War II brought a final few years of good times to the woolens industry. The mill in Maynard operated around the clock with over two thousand employees producing such items as blankets and cloth for overcoats for the armed forces. But when peace returned, the long-term trends resumed their downward drift, and in 1950 the American Woolen Company shut down its Assabet Mills entirely. Like many New England mills, Maynard's had succumbed to a combination of Southern and foreign competition, relatively high costs and low productivity, and the growing use of synthetic fibers.
'Til then a one-industry town, Maynard was in trouble. In 1953, however, ten Worcester businessmen bought the mill and began leasing space to tenants, some of which were established firms, while others were just getting started. One of the new companies which found the low cost of Maynard Industries' space appealing was Digital Equipment Corporation, which started operations in 8,680 square feet in the mill in 1957.
A Mill Chronology
1846 Amory Maynard and William Knight form Assabet Mills.
1847 Maynard and Knight install a water wheel and build a new factory on the banks of the Assabet River.
1848 The Assabet Mills business is valued at $150,000.
The Lowell and Framingham Railroad carries passengers over branch road.
1855 The Mill now has three buildings on the site. Massachusetts is producing one-third of the textiles in the United States.
1857 Assabet Mills collapses after a business panic. The Mill complex is sold at an auction.
1862 The Mills are reorganized as Assabet Manufacturing Company. This involve replacing wooden buildings with brick, and the installation of new machinery. To fulfill contracts to the government during the Civil War production is switched from carpets to woolen cloth, blankets, and flannel.
The first tenement for employees are also constructed.
1869 Millhands peition President Ulysses S. Grant for a shorter work week ... 55 hours.
1871 The Town of Maynard incorporates. The population stands at 2,000
1888 A reservoir is installed for $70,000 to supply a growing population.
1890 The Assabet Manufacturing Company is valued at $1,500,000.
1892 Lorenzo Maynard donates clock in his father's name.
The Mill Complex contains seven buildings.
1898 Assabet Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy. Many people in town lose much of their savings as banks have not yet been established.
1899 American Woolen Company purchases the Mill complex for $400,000. This company would eventually control 20% of the woolen textile market in the U.S. Wool was shipped all over the country to keep up with demand.
1901 160 additional tenements are constructed with their own sewage system. The streets are named after U.S. presidents.
The first electric trolley in Maynard begins service.
Building Number 5, the Mill complex's largest, is built in nine months. Electric power is introduced with the addition of dynamos on site.
1906 The Mill complex now has 13 buildings.
1910 The Mill complex grows to 25 buildings. Floor space is at 421,711 square feet. The property takes up 75 acres.
1918 With the addition of three new buildings the American Wollen Company and the Mill are in their heyday. The fortunes of the industry begin to decline over the next 30 years.
1947 After a brief spell of prosperity during World War II, the Mill phases out production as demand for woolen goods declines.
1950 Mill closes. 1,200 employees lose their jobs.
1953 Maynard Industries, Inc. purchases the Mill for $200,000. Space is rented to business and industrial tenants.
1957 Three engineers set up shop on the second floor of Building 12. With $70,000 and 8,600 square feet of rented space Digital Equipment Corporation is formed.
1960 Over thirty firms are located within the Mill complex.
1974 Digital Equipment Corporation purchases the entire Mill complex for $2.2 million. The Mill has over 1 million square feet in 19 buildings residing on 11 acres.
1992 The 100th anniversary of the Mill Clock is celebrated.
1993 Digital Equipment Corporation announces that it plans to leave the Mill complex. A search for a new tenant is started.
1995 Franklin Life Care purchases the Mill. Digital continues to rent space in Building 5.
1998 Mill purchased by Clock Tower Place.
Sources
* "Digital's Mill 1847-1977", a brochure published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
* "A Walk Through the Mill...", published by Digital Equipment Corporation for the Mill Clock Centennial.
The mills are an important feature of Maynard's development. The earliest saw and grist mills were built in the early 18th century. Two of the earliest mills were the Puffer Mill and the Asa Smith's Mill, which were located on Taylor Brook and Mill Street, respectively. These were the first mills to use the Assabet River for power; therefore, they were very slow and sluggish. The grist and saw mill were then followed by paper mills, which were built starting in 1820.
The Mill is easily Maynard's most prominent feature. The complex takes up 11 acres in the middleof what we call downtown. The Mill complex began in 1847 as set of wooden buildings used to manufacture carpets and carpet yarn. Amory Maynard helped construct this mill. His partner, William H. Knight, helped him build a dam across the Assabet and dug a canal channeling a portion of the river into what is called Mill Pond. The Mill changed hands a few times but it would eventually become the largest woolen factory in the world till the 1930s.
The 1950's ushered in a change from textiles to businesses like computer manufacturing. With the start of the final decade of the century the Mill is on the cusp of being transformed again.
It is said that "as the Mill goes, so goes Maynard". While the town isn't as dependent on the Mill as it was in 19th century it continues to play an important role in shaping the character of the town.
We hope you enjoy this historical perspective of the Mill. It has been pieced together from a variety of sources and continues to be enriched as we discover new materials to include, increase the number of hyperlinks and add pictures, diagrams, and sound..
The Mill from 1847 to 1977
The site of the mill was once part of the town of Sudbury, while the opposite bank of the Assabet River belonged to Stow. The present town, formed in 1871, was named for the man most responsible for its development, Amory Maynard.
Born in 1804, Maynard was running his own sawmill business at the age of sixteen. In the 1840's, he went into partnership with a carpet manufacturer for whom he'd done contracting. They dammed up the Assabet and diverted water into a millpond to provide power for a new mill, which opened in 1847, producing carpet yarn and carpets. Only one of the original mill buildings survives: it was moved across Main Street and now is an apartment house.
Amory Maynard's carpet firm failed in the business panic of 1857. But the Civil War allowed the Assabet Manufacturing Company, organized in 1862 with Maynard as the managing "agent", to prosper by producing woolens, flannels and blankets for the army. This work was carried on in new brick mill buildings.
Expansion of the mill over many years is evidenced by the variations in the architecture of the structures still standing.
The oldest portion of Building 3 dates from 1859, making it the oldest part of the mill in existence today, but several additions were made afterwards. Buildings constructed in the late 1800's frequently featured brick arches over the windows, and at times new additions were made to match neighboring structures.
The best-known feature is the clock donated in memory of Amory Maynard by his son Lorenzo in 1892. Its four faces, each nine feet in diameter, are mechanically controlled by a small timer inside the tower. Neither the timer nor the bell mechanism has ever been electrified; custodians still climb 120 steps to wind the clock every week- 90 turns for the timer and 330 turns for the striker.
Amory Maynard died in 1890, but his son and grandson still held high positions in the mill's management. The family's local popularity plummeted, however, when the Assabet Manufacturing Company failed late in 1898. Workers lost nearly half of their savings which they had deposited with the company, since there were no banks in town. Their disillusionment nearly resulted in changing the town's name from Maynard to Assabet.
Prosperity returned in 1899 when the American Woolen Company, an industrial giant, bought the Assabet Mills and began to expand them, adding most of the structures now standing. The biggest new unit was Building 5, 610 feet long which contained more looms than any other woolen mill in the world. Building 1, completed in 1918, is the newest; the mill pond had been drained to permit construction of its foundation. These buildings have little decoration, but their massiveness is emphasized by the buttress-like brick columns between their windows.
The turn of the century saw a changeover from gas to electric lights at the mill. Until the 1930's the mill generated not only its own power but also electricity for Maynard and several other towns. For years the mill used 40-cycle current. Into the late 1960's power produced by a water wheel was used for outdoor lighting, including the Christmas tree near Main Street. The complex system of shafts and belts once used to distribute power from a central source was rendered obsolete by more efficient small electric motors, just as inexpensive minicomputers have often replaced terminals tied to one large processor.
As the mill grew, so did the town. Even in 1871, the nearly 2,000 people who became Maynard's first citizens outnumbered the people left in either Sudbury or Stow. Maynard's first population almost doubled in the decade between 1895 and 1905, when reached nearly 7,000 people. Most of the workers lived in houses owned by the company, many of which have been refurbished and are used today. The trains that served th town and the mill, however, are long gone - the depot site is now occupied by a gas station.
Most of the original mill workers had been local Yankees and Irish immigrants. But by the early 1900's, the Assabet Mills were employing large numbers of newcomers from Finland, Poland, Russia and Italy. The latest arrivals were often escorted to their relatives or friends by obliging post office workers. The immigrants made Maynard a bustling, multi-ethnic community while Stow, Sudbury and Acton remained small, rural villages. Farmers and their families rode the trolley to Maynard to shop and to visit urban attractions then unknown in their own towns, including barrooms and movie houses.
Wages were low and the hours were long. Early payrolls show wages of four cents an hour for a sixty hour week. Ralph Sheridan of the Maynard Historical Society confirmed that in 1889 his eldest brother was making 5 1/2 cents an hour in the mill's rag shop at the age of fourteen, while their father was earning 16 1/2 cents per hour in the boiler room. (As of 1891 one-eighth of the workers were less than 16 years old, and one-quarter were women.)
Sheridan's own first job at the mill, in the summer of 1915, paid $6.35 for a work week limited to 48 hours by child labor laws. The indestructible "bullseye" safe still remains in the old Office Building.
Sheridan remembers the bell that was perched on top of Building 3:
"...the whistle on the engine room gave one blast at quarter of the hour, and then at about five minutes of the hour the gave one blast again. And everyone was supposed to be inside the gate when that second whistle blew. And then at one minute of the hour this bell rang just once, a quick ring- and we referred to it as "The Tick" because of that..... everybody was supposed to start work at that time, at that moment."
A worker was sent home if he'd forgotten to wear his employee's button, marked "A.W.Co.,Assabet".
The millhands really had to work, too. Sheridan recalls one winter evening when there was such a rush to get out an order of cloth for Henry Ford that the men were ordered to invoice it from the warehouse, now Building 21, instead of from the usual shipping room:
"There was no heat in the building, never had been. And it was so cold that I remember that I had to cut the forefinger and the thumb from the glove that I was wearing in order to handle the pencil to do the invoicing....the yard superintendant at the time brought in some kerosene lanterns and put 'em under our chairs to keep our feet warm."
Building 21, built out over the pond, remained unheated until DIGITAL took it over.
As in most Northern mill towns, labor relations were often troubled. In 1911 the company used Poles to break the strike of Finnish workers. When no longer able to play off one nationality against another, management for years took advantage of rivalries between different unions. The Great Depression hit the company hard, however. In 1934 it sold all the houses it owned, mostly to the employees who lived in them; and New Deal labor laws encouraged the workers to form a single industrial union, which joined the C.I.O.
World War II brought a final few years of good times to the woolens industry. The mill in Maynard operated around the clock with over two thousand employees producing such items as blankets and cloth for overcoats for the armed forces. But when peace returned, the long-term trends resumed their downward drift, and in 1950 the American Woolen Company shut down its Assabet Mills entirely. Like many New England mills, Maynard's had succumbed to a combination of Southern and foreign competition, relatively high costs and low productivity, and the growing use of synthetic fibers.
'Til then a one-industry town, Maynard was in trouble. In 1953, however, ten Worcester businessmen bought the mill and began leasing space to tenants, some of which were established firms, while others were just getting started. One of the new companies which found the low cost of Maynard Industries' space appealing was Digital Equipment Corporation, which started operations in 8,680 square feet in the mill in 1957.
A Mill Chronology
1846 Amory Maynard and William Knight form Assabet Mills.
1847 Maynard and Knight install a water wheel and build a new factory on the banks of the Assabet River.
1848 The Assabet Mills business is valued at $150,000.
The Lowell and Framingham Railroad carries passengers over branch road.
1855 The Mill now has three buildings on the site. Massachusetts is producing one-third of the textiles in the United States.
1857 Assabet Mills collapses after a business panic. The Mill complex is sold at an auction.
1862 The Mills are reorganized as Assabet Manufacturing Company. This involve replacing wooden buildings with brick, and the installation of new machinery. To fulfill contracts to the government during the Civil War production is switched from carpets to woolen cloth, blankets, and flannel.
The first tenement for employees are also constructed.
1869 Millhands peition President Ulysses S. Grant for a shorter work week ... 55 hours.
1871 The Town of Maynard incorporates. The population stands at 2,000
1888 A reservoir is installed for $70,000 to supply a growing population.
1890 The Assabet Manufacturing Company is valued at $1,500,000.
1892 Lorenzo Maynard donates clock in his father's name.
The Mill Complex contains seven buildings.
1898 Assabet Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy. Many people in town lose much of their savings as banks have not yet been established.
1899 American Woolen Company purchases the Mill complex for $400,000. This company would eventually control 20% of the woolen textile market in the U.S. Wool was shipped all over the country to keep up with demand.
1901 160 additional tenements are constructed with their own sewage system. The streets are named after U.S. presidents.
The first electric trolley in Maynard begins service.
Building Number 5, the Mill complex's largest, is built in nine months. Electric power is introduced with the addition of dynamos on site.
1906 The Mill complex now has 13 buildings.
1910 The Mill complex grows to 25 buildings. Floor space is at 421,711 square feet. The property takes up 75 acres.
1918 With the addition of three new buildings the American Wollen Company and the Mill are in their heyday. The fortunes of the industry begin to decline over the next 30 years.
1947 After a brief spell of prosperity during World War II, the Mill phases out production as demand for woolen goods declines.
1950 Mill closes. 1,200 employees lose their jobs.
1953 Maynard Industries, Inc. purchases the Mill for $200,000. Space is rented to business and industrial tenants.
1957 Three engineers set up shop on the second floor of Building 12. With $70,000 and 8,600 square feet of rented space Digital Equipment Corporation is formed.
1960 Over thirty firms are located within the Mill complex.
1974 Digital Equipment Corporation purchases the entire Mill complex for $2.2 million. The Mill has over 1 million square feet in 19 buildings residing on 11 acres.
1992 The 100th anniversary of the Mill Clock is celebrated.
1993 Digital Equipment Corporation announces that it plans to leave the Mill complex. A search for a new tenant is started.
1995 Franklin Life Care purchases the Mill. Digital continues to rent space in Building 5.
1998 Mill purchased by Clock Tower Place.
Sources
* "Digital's Mill 1847-1977", a brochure published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
* "A Walk Through the Mill...", published by Digital Equipment Corporation for the Mill Clock Centennial.
The mills are an important feature of Maynard's development. The earliest saw and grist mills were built in the early 18th century. Two of the earliest mills were the Puffer Mill and the Asa Smith's Mill, which were located on Taylor Brook and Mill Street, respectively. These were the first mills to use the Assabet River for power; therefore, they were very slow and sluggish. The grist and saw mill were then followed by paper mills, which were built starting in 1820.
The Mill is easily Maynard's most prominent feature. The complex takes up 11 acres in the middleof what we call downtown. The Mill complex began in 1847 as set of wooden buildings used to manufacture carpets and carpet yarn. Amory Maynard helped construct this mill. His partner, William H. Knight, helped him build a dam across the Assabet and dug a canal channeling a portion of the river into what is called Mill Pond. The Mill changed hands a few times but it would eventually become the largest woolen factory in the world till the 1930s.
The 1950's ushered in a change from textiles to businesses like computer manufacturing. With the start of the final decade of the century the Mill is on the cusp of being transformed again.
It is said that "as the Mill goes, so goes Maynard". While the town isn't as dependent on the Mill as it was in 19th century it continues to play an important role in shaping the character of the town.
We hope you enjoy this historical perspective of the Mill. It has been pieced together from a variety of sources and continues to be enriched as we discover new materials to include, increase the number of hyperlinks and add pictures, diagrams, and sound..
The Mill from 1847 to 1977
The site of the mill was once part of the town of Sudbury, while the opposite bank of the Assabet River belonged to Stow. The present town, formed in 1871, was named for the man most responsible for its development, Amory Maynard.
Born in 1804, Maynard was running his own sawmill business at the age of sixteen. In the 1840's, he went into partnership with a carpet manufacturer for whom he'd done contracting. They dammed up the Assabet and diverted water into a millpond to provide power for a new mill, which opened in 1847, producing carpet yarn and carpets. Only one of the original mill buildings survives: it was moved across Main Street and now is an apartment house.
Amory Maynard's carpet firm failed in the business panic of 1857. But the Civil War allowed the Assabet Manufacturing Company, organized in 1862 with Maynard as the managing "agent", to prosper by producing woolens, flannels and blankets for the army. This work was carried on in new brick mill buildings.
Expansion of the mill over many years is evidenced by the variations in the architecture of the structures still standing.
The oldest portion of Building 3 dates from 1859, making it the oldest part of the mill in existence today, but several additions were made afterwards. Buildings constructed in the late 1800's frequently featured brick arches over the windows, and at times new additions were made to match neighboring structures.
The best-known feature is the clock donated in memory of Amory Maynard by his son Lorenzo in 1892. Its four faces, each nine feet in diameter, are mechanically controlled by a small timer inside the tower. Neither the timer nor the bell mechanism has ever been electrified; custodians still climb 120 steps to wind the clock every week- 90 turns for the timer and 330 turns for the striker.
Amory Maynard died in 1890, but his son and grandson still held high positions in the mill's management. The family's local popularity plummeted, however, when the Assabet Manufacturing Company failed late in 1898. Workers lost nearly half of their savings which they had deposited with the company, since there were no banks in town. Their disillusionment nearly resulted in changing the town's name from Maynard to Assabet.
Prosperity returned in 1899 when the American Woolen Company, an industrial giant, bought the Assabet Mills and began to expand them, adding most of the structures now standing. The biggest new unit was Building 5, 610 feet long which contained more looms than any other woolen mill in the world. Building 1, completed in 1918, is the newest; the mill pond had been drained to permit construction of its foundation. These buildings have little decoration, but their massiveness is emphasized by the buttress-like brick columns between their windows.
The turn of the century saw a changeover from gas to electric lights at the mill. Until the 1930's the mill generated not only its own power but also electricity for Maynard and several other towns. For years the mill used 40-cycle current. Into the late 1960's power produced by a water wheel was used for outdoor lighting, including the Christmas tree near Main Street. The complex system of shafts and belts once used to distribute power from a central source was rendered obsolete by more efficient small electric motors, just as inexpensive minicomputers have often replaced terminals tied to one large processor.
As the mill grew, so did the town. Even in 1871, the nearly 2,000 people who became Maynard's first citizens outnumbered the people left in either Sudbury or Stow. Maynard's first population almost doubled in the decade between 1895 and 1905, when reached nearly 7,000 people. Most of the workers lived in houses owned by the company, many of which have been refurbished and are used today. The trains that served th town and the mill, however, are long gone - the depot site is now occupied by a gas station.
Most of the original mill workers had been local Yankees and Irish immigrants. But by the early 1900's, the Assabet Mills were employing large numbers of newcomers from Finland, Poland, Russia and Italy. The latest arrivals were often escorted to their relatives or friends by obliging post office workers. The immigrants made Maynard a bustling, multi-ethnic community while Stow, Sudbury and Acton remained small, rural villages. Farmers and their families rode the trolley to Maynard to shop and to visit urban attractions then unknown in their own towns, including barrooms and movie houses.
Wages were low and the hours were long. Early payrolls show wages of four cents an hour for a sixty hour week. Ralph Sheridan of the Maynard Historical Society confirmed that in 1889 his eldest brother was making 5 1/2 cents an hour in the mill's rag shop at the age of fourteen, while their father was earning 16 1/2 cents per hour in the boiler room. (As of 1891 one-eighth of the workers were less than 16 years old, and one-quarter were women.)
Sheridan's own first job at the mill, in the summer of 1915, paid $6.35 for a work week limited to 48 hours by child labor laws. The indestructible "bullseye" safe still remains in the old Office Building.
Sheridan remembers the bell that was perched on top of Building 3:
"...the whistle on the engine room gave one blast at quarter of the hour, and then at about five minutes of the hour the gave one blast again. And everyone was supposed to be inside the gate when that second whistle blew. And then at one minute of the hour this bell rang just once, a quick ring- and we referred to it as "The Tick" because of that..... everybody was supposed to start work at that time, at that moment."
A worker was sent home if he'd forgotten to wear his employee's button, marked "A.W.Co.,Assabet".
The millhands really had to work, too. Sheridan recalls one winter evening when there was such a rush to get out an order of cloth for Henry Ford that the men were ordered to invoice it from the warehouse, now Building 21, instead of from the usual shipping room:
"There was no heat in the building, never had been. And it was so cold that I remember that I had to cut the forefinger and the thumb from the glove that I was wearing in order to handle the pencil to do the invoicing....the yard superintendant at the time brought in some kerosene lanterns and put 'em under our chairs to keep our feet warm."
Building 21, built out over the pond, remained unheated until DIGITAL took it over.
As in most Northern mill towns, labor relations were often troubled. In 1911 the company used Poles to break the strike of Finnish workers. When no longer able to play off one nationality against another, management for years took advantage of rivalries between different unions. The Great Depression hit the company hard, however. In 1934 it sold all the houses it owned, mostly to the employees who lived in them; and New Deal labor laws encouraged the workers to form a single industrial union, which joined the C.I.O.
World War II brought a final few years of good times to the woolens industry. The mill in Maynard operated around the clock with over two thousand employees producing such items as blankets and cloth for overcoats for the armed forces. But when peace returned, the long-term trends resumed their downward drift, and in 1950 the American Woolen Company shut down its Assabet Mills entirely. Like many New England mills, Maynard's had succumbed to a combination of Southern and foreign competition, relatively high costs and low productivity, and the growing use of synthetic fibers.
'Til then a one-industry town, Maynard was in trouble. In 1953, however, ten Worcester businessmen bought the mill and began leasing space to tenants, some of which were established firms, while others were just getting started. One of the new companies which found the low cost of Maynard Industries' space appealing was Digital Equipment Corporation, which started operations in 8,680 square feet in the mill in 1957.
A Mill Chronology
1846 Amory Maynard and William Knight form Assabet Mills.
1847 Maynard and Knight install a water wheel and build a new factory on the banks of the Assabet River.
1848 The Assabet Mills business is valued at $150,000.
The Lowell and Framingham Railroad carries passengers over branch road.
1855 The Mill now has three buildings on the site. Massachusetts is producing one-third of the textiles in the United States.
1857 Assabet Mills collapses after a business panic. The Mill complex is sold at an auction.
1862 The Mills are reorganized as Assabet Manufacturing Company. This involve replacing wooden buildings with brick, and the installation of new machinery. To fulfill contracts to the government during the Civil War production is switched from carpets to woolen cloth, blankets, and flannel.
The first tenement for employees are also constructed.
1869 Millhands peition President Ulysses S. Grant for a shorter work week ... 55 hours.
1871 The Town of Maynard incorporates. The population stands at 2,000
1888 A reservoir is installed for $70,000 to supply a growing population.
1890 The Assabet Manufacturing Company is valued at $1,500,000.
1892 Lorenzo Maynard donates clock in his father's name.
The Mill Complex contains seven buildings.
1898 Assabet Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy. Many people in town lose much of their savings as banks have not yet been established.
1899 American Woolen Company purchases the Mill complex for $400,000. This company would eventually control 20% of the woolen textile market in the U.S. Wool was shipped all over the country to keep up with demand.
1901 160 additional tenements are constructed with their own sewage system. The streets are named after U.S. presidents.
The first electric trolley in Maynard begins service.
Building Number 5, the Mill complex's largest, is built in nine months. Electric power is introduced with the addition of dynamos on site.
1906 The Mill complex now has 13 buildings.
1910 The Mill complex grows to 25 buildings. Floor space is at 421,711 square feet. The property takes up 75 acres.
1918 With the addition of three new buildings the American Wollen Company and the Mill are in their heyday. The fortunes of the industry begin to decline over the next 30 years.
1947 After a brief spell of prosperity during World War II, the Mill phases out production as demand for woolen goods declines.
1950 Mill closes. 1,200 employees lose their jobs.
1953 Maynard Industries, Inc. purchases the Mill for $200,000. Space is rented to business and industrial tenants.
1957 Three engineers set up shop on the second floor of Building 12. With $70,000 and 8,600 square feet of rented space Digital Equipment Corporation is formed.
1960 Over thirty firms are located within the Mill complex.
1974 Digital Equipment Corporation purchases the entire Mill complex for $2.2 million. The Mill has over 1 million square feet in 19 buildings residing on 11 acres.
1992 The 100th anniversary of the Mill Clock is celebrated.
1993 Digital Equipment Corporation announces that it plans to leave the Mill complex. A search for a new tenant is started.
1995 Franklin Life Care purchases the Mill. Digital continues to rent space in Building 5.
1998 Mill purchased by Clock Tower Place.
Sources
* "Digital's Mill 1847-1977", a brochure published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
* "A Walk Through the Mill...", published by Digital Equipment Corporation for the Mill Clock Centennial.
The mills are an important feature of Maynard's development. The earliest saw and grist mills were built in the early 18th century. Two of the earliest mills were the Puffer Mill and the Asa Smith's Mill, which were located on Taylor Brook and Mill Street, respectively. These were the first mills to use the Assabet River for power; therefore, they were very slow and sluggish. The grist and saw mill were then followed by paper mills, which were built starting in 1820.
The Mill is easily Maynard's most prominent feature. The complex takes up 11 acres in the middleof what we call downtown. The Mill complex began in 1847 as set of wooden buildings used to manufacture carpets and carpet yarn. Amory Maynard helped construct this mill. His partner, William H. Knight, helped him build a dam across the Assabet and dug a canal channeling a portion of the river into what is called Mill Pond. The Mill changed hands a few times but it would eventually become the largest woolen factory in the world till the 1930s.
The 1950's ushered in a change from textiles to businesses like computer manufacturing. With the start of the final decade of the century the Mill is on the cusp of being transformed again.
It is said that "as the Mill goes, so goes Maynard". While the town isn't as dependent on the Mill as it was in 19th century it continues to play an important role in shaping the character of the town.
We hope you enjoy this historical perspective of the Mill. It has been pieced together from a variety of sources and continues to be enriched as we discover new materials to include, increase the number of hyperlinks and add pictures, diagrams, and sound..
The Mill from 1847 to 1977
The site of the mill was once part of the town of Sudbury, while the opposite bank of the Assabet River belonged to Stow. The present town, formed in 1871, was named for the man most responsible for its development, Amory Maynard.
Born in 1804, Maynard was running his own sawmill business at the age of sixteen. In the 1840's, he went into partnership with a carpet manufacturer for whom he'd done contracting. They dammed up the Assabet and diverted water into a millpond to provide power for a new mill, which opened in 1847, producing carpet yarn and carpets. Only one of the original mill buildings survives: it was moved across Main Street and now is an apartment house.
Amory Maynard's carpet firm failed in the business panic of 1857. But the Civil War allowed the Assabet Manufacturing Company, organized in 1862 with Maynard as the managing "agent", to prosper by producing woolens, flannels and blankets for the army. This work was carried on in new brick mill buildings.
Expansion of the mill over many years is evidenced by the variations in the architecture of the structures still standing.
The oldest portion of Building 3 dates from 1859, making it the oldest part of the mill in existence today, but several additions were made afterwards. Buildings constructed in the late 1800's frequently featured brick arches over the windows, and at times new additions were made to match neighboring structures.
The best-known feature is the clock donated in memory of Amory Maynard by his son Lorenzo in 1892. Its four faces, each nine feet in diameter, are mechanically controlled by a small timer inside the tower. Neither the timer nor the bell mechanism has ever been electrified; custodians still climb 120 steps to wind the clock every week- 90 turns for the timer and 330 turns for the striker.
Amory Maynard died in 1890, but his son and grandson still held high positions in the mill's management. The family's local popularity plummeted, however, when the Assabet Manufacturing Company failed late in 1898. Workers lost nearly half of their savings which they had deposited with the company, since there were no banks in town. Their disillusionment nearly resulted in changing the town's name from Maynard to Assabet.
Prosperity returned in 1899 when the American Woolen Company, an industrial giant, bought the Assabet Mills and began to expand them, adding most of the structures now standing. The biggest new unit was Building 5, 610 feet long which contained more looms than any other woolen mill in the world. Building 1, completed in 1918, is the newest; the mill pond had been drained to permit construction of its foundation. These buildings have little decoration, but their massiveness is emphasized by the buttress-like brick columns between their windows.
The turn of the century saw a changeover from gas to electric lights at the mill. Until the 1930's the mill generated not only its own power but also electricity for Maynard and several other towns. For years the mill used 40-cycle current. Into the late 1960's power produced by a water wheel was used for outdoor lighting, including the Christmas tree near Main Street. The complex system of shafts and belts once used to distribute power from a central source was rendered obsolete by more efficient small electric motors, just as inexpensive minicomputers have often replaced terminals tied to one large processor.
As the mill grew, so did the town. Even in 1871, the nearly 2,000 people who became Maynard's first citizens outnumbered the people left in either Sudbury or Stow. Maynard's first population almost doubled in the decade between 1895 and 1905, when reached nearly 7,000 people. Most of the workers lived in houses owned by the company, many of which have been refurbished and are used today. The trains that served th town and the mill, however, are long gone - the depot site is now occupied by a gas station.
Most of the original mill workers had been local Yankees and Irish immigrants. But by the early 1900's, the Assabet Mills were employing large numbers of newcomers from Finland, Poland, Russia and Italy. The latest arrivals were often escorted to their relatives or friends by obliging post office workers. The immigrants made Maynard a bustling, multi-ethnic community while Stow, Sudbury and Acton remained small, rural villages. Farmers and their families rode the trolley to Maynard to shop and to visit urban attractions then unknown in their own towns, including barrooms and movie houses.
Wages were low and the hours were long. Early payrolls show wages of four cents an hour for a sixty hour week. Ralph Sheridan of the Maynard Historical Society confirmed that in 1889 his eldest brother was making 5 1/2 cents an hour in the mill's rag shop at the age of fourteen, while their father was earning 16 1/2 cents per hour in the boiler room. (As of 1891 one-eighth of the workers were less than 16 years old, and one-quarter were women.)
Sheridan's own first job at the mill, in the summer of 1915, paid $6.35 for a work week limited to 48 hours by child labor laws. The indestructible "bullseye" safe still remains in the old Office Building.
Sheridan remembers the bell that was perched on top of Building 3:
"...the whistle on the engine room gave one blast at quarter of the hour, and then at about five minutes of the hour the gave one blast again. And everyone was supposed to be inside the gate when that second whistle blew. And then at one minute of the hour this bell rang just once, a quick ring- and we referred to it as "The Tick" because of that..... everybody was supposed to start work at that time, at that moment."
A worker was sent home if he'd forgotten to wear his employee's button, marked "A.W.Co.,Assabet".
The millhands really had to work, too. Sheridan recalls one winter evening when there was such a rush to get out an order of cloth for Henry Ford that the men were ordered to invoice it from the warehouse, now Building 21, instead of from the usual shipping room:
"There was no heat in the building, never had been. And it was so cold that I remember that I had to cut the forefinger and the thumb from the glove that I was wearing in order to handle the pencil to do the invoicing....the yard superintendant at the time brought in some kerosene lanterns and put 'em under our chairs to keep our feet warm."
Building 21, built out over the pond, remained unheated until DIGITAL took it over.
As in most Northern mill towns, labor relations were often troubled. In 1911 the company used Poles to break the strike of Finnish workers. When no longer able to play off one nationality against another, management for years took advantage of rivalries between different unions. The Great Depression hit the company hard, however. In 1934 it sold all the houses it owned, mostly to the employees who lived in them; and New Deal labor laws encouraged the workers to form a single industrial union, which joined the C.I.O.
World War II brought a final few years of good times to the woolens industry. The mill in Maynard operated around the clock with over two thousand employees producing such items as blankets and cloth for overcoats for the armed forces. But when peace returned, the long-term trends resumed their downward drift, and in 1950 the American Woolen Company shut down its Assabet Mills entirely. Like many New England mills, Maynard's had succumbed to a combination of Southern and foreign competition, relatively high costs and low productivity, and the growing use of synthetic fibers.
'Til then a one-industry town, Maynard was in trouble. In 1953, however, ten Worcester businessmen bought the mill and began leasing space to tenants, some of which were established firms, while others were just getting started. One of the new companies which found the low cost of Maynard Industries' space appealing was Digital Equipment Corporation, which started operations in 8,680 square feet in the mill in 1957.
A Mill Chronology
1846 Amory Maynard and William Knight form Assabet Mills.
1847 Maynard and Knight install a water wheel and build a new factory on the banks of the Assabet River.
1848 The Assabet Mills business is valued at $150,000.
The Lowell and Framingham Railroad carries passengers over branch road.
1855 The Mill now has three buildings on the site. Massachusetts is producing one-third of the textiles in the United States.
1857 Assabet Mills collapses after a business panic. The Mill complex is sold at an auction.
1862 The Mills are reorganized as Assabet Manufacturing Company. This involve replacing wooden buildings with brick, and the installation of new machinery. To fulfill contracts to the government during the Civil War production is switched from carpets to woolen cloth, blankets, and flannel.
The first tenement for employees are also constructed.
1869 Millhands peition President Ulysses S. Grant for a shorter work week ... 55 hours.
1871 The Town of Maynard incorporates. The population stands at 2,000
1888 A reservoir is installed for $70,000 to supply a growing population.
1890 The Assabet Manufacturing Company is valued at $1,500,000.
1892 Lorenzo Maynard donates clock in his father's name.
The Mill Complex contains seven buildings.
1898 Assabet Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy. Many people in town lose much of their savings as banks have not yet been established.
1899 American Woolen Company purchases the Mill complex for $400,000. This company would eventually control 20% of the woolen textile market in the U.S. Wool was shipped all over the country to keep up with demand.
1901 160 additional tenements are constructed with their own sewage system. The streets are named after U.S. presidents.
The first electric trolley in Maynard begins service.
Building Number 5, the Mill complex's largest, is built in nine months. Electric power is introduced with the addition of dynamos on site.
1906 The Mill complex now has 13 buildings.
1910 The Mill complex grows to 25 buildings. Floor space is at 421,711 square feet. The property takes up 75 acres.
1918 With the addition of three new buildings the American Wollen Company and the Mill are in their heyday. The fortunes of the industry begin to decline over the next 30 years.
1947 After a brief spell of prosperity during World War II, the Mill phases out production as demand for woolen goods declines.
1950 Mill closes. 1,200 employees lose their jobs.
1953 Maynard Industries, Inc. purchases the Mill for $200,000. Space is rented to business and industrial tenants.
1957 Three engineers set up shop on the second floor of Building 12. With $70,000 and 8,600 square feet of rented space Digital Equipment Corporation is formed.
1960 Over thirty firms are located within the Mill complex.
1974 Digital Equipment Corporation purchases the entire Mill complex for $2.2 million. The Mill has over 1 million square feet in 19 buildings residing on 11 acres.
1992 The 100th anniversary of the Mill Clock is celebrated.
1993 Digital Equipment Corporation announces that it plans to leave the Mill complex. A search for a new tenant is started.
1995 Franklin Life Care purchases the Mill. Digital continues to rent space in Building 5.
1998 Mill purchased by Clock Tower Place.
Sources
* "Digital's Mill 1847-1977", a brochure published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
* "A Walk Through the Mill...", published by Digital Equipment Corporation for the Mill Clock Centennial.