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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.
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.
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 have just acquired this old portable 486, with 8Mb of RAM. It has Windows 3.11 installed. I will use it in my PARTYland pinball machine. The computer will run a modified version of Pinball Fantasies in real DOS.
Data will be exchanged between the computer and the pinball machine through the parallel port. Some of the binary patches that do it have already been successfully tested using dosbox (DOS emulator).
If you are interested, you can read the wiki at code.google.com/p/how-to-build-a-pinball/
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.
For anyone out there who served at NAVMASSO, please remind me which Navy ship would send us OBO Navy messages which Capt Rush expected a reply immediately. Thanks.
There is certainly not a shortage of plaques, mission statements and acronyms in the military. This is a NAVMASSO (Navy Management System Support Office) plaque commemorating my shore duty (May 1985 to Jan 1988) in Norfolk, VA. I was provided two plaques, this one and an alternate less glamorous looking plaque affixed with the typical brass plate of name and dates of service. To my detailer's chagrin, I was offered this assignment by contacting commands directly.
NAMASSO deployed mini-computers (terminal servers) running COBOL applications to automate administrative tasks and eliminate paperwork. NAVMASSO was led by Capt William Herbert Rush (aka Wild Bill) who began his Navy career as a sailor in WW II. He hired just about every Master Chief in the Navy to achieve his mission. His nickname "Wild Bill" was not understated and he led his command with pious Navy zeal. His limited choice of officers were assigned lead or no responsibility and he assigned them fairly. His objective was "to tame the paper tiger". His staff, civilian and military, would be reminded daily and on weekends of putting the fleet first. He was succeeded by Capt Neil A Quinn Jr in 1987 who led the SNAP fleet support effort (Code 50) and humorously kept a Star Trek model above one of his file cabinets.
NAVMASSO deployed SNAP (Shipboard Non-tactical Automated Data Processing Program) I and II computers. The SNAP idea begin as a glimmer of Naval Post Graduate work in 1981. SNAP became the key acronym to automate the fleet. Unlike their tactical counterparts such as NTDS (Navy Tactical Data System), SNAP computers wouldn't achieve any glamorous notoriety. Nor would they completely eliminate paperwork. Captain Rush's hallmark was to treat every ship's request with the utmost respect and priority albeit at sometimes overarching expense of emotional will and exorbitant use of non-MOTU (mobile technical units 6 & 7) detachments in the Mediterranean (Det Med) and Pacific (Det Pac). The staff particularly loathed routine obo (high priority) messages from the USS ???. But, the point was clear. Commanding officers determined the priority.
Meanwhile, Navy units had to deal with these computers that occupied significant space. Unlike mainframes, mini-computers fit on the majority of ships in the fleet. And, shore based non-real time access to information is not of much value at sea. However, the submarine force particularly loathed their SNAP II (Harris 300 minicomputer designated AN/UYK-62 (V)) computers where even rack space is a premium. The Roman numeral II signified deployment on cruisers, destroyers and smaller units, even shore based for Pegasus units. Whereas, SNAP I (Honeywell DPS-6 minicomputer running an emulator) was deployed on carriers and large units to support Navy and Marine Corps Air logistical methods.
None the less, my best recollection and case for its effectiveness were the printing of maintenance requests that eliminated a laborious process of carbon copy paperwork for the 3-M coordinator. Remarkably, the USS Caron's chief engineer in 1984, who had plenty of criticism for SNAP II as the terminals occupied significant desk space, recognized the cost savings from hours to minutes to request maintenance support from the tender. Similar issues were resolved in management of the stock battery, ship store and tedious IBM Selectric typewriter tasks. Thank goodness for the text editor application named Muse. It rendered those Selectrics obsolete.
Although I never fully understood or appreciated what they did or why they did it, Oak Ridge National lab evaluated SNAP requirements and training in 1986. However, SNAPpy acronyms always get much more budget attention than basic research. Besides, what's better than SNAP I or II? Snap III of course!
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.
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.
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.
Si fa un gran parlare del Raspberry Pi : un minicomputer da $25. È un vero e proprio computer con sistema operativo Linux, processore ARM a 700MHz, porta USB e qualche extra a pagamento (Slot SD, porta Ethernet etc.). In pratica è una scheda madre miniaturizzata (maggiori info sul sito ufficiale ). ... Post originale: pasqualeborriello.com/raspberry-pi-e-davvero-una-rivoluzione
Si fa un gran parlare del Raspberry Pi : un minicomputer da $25. È un vero e proprio computer con sistema operativo Linux, processore ARM a 700MHz, porta USB e qualche extra a pagamento (Slot SD, porta Ethernet etc.). In pratica è una scheda madre miniaturizzata (maggiori info sul sito ufficiale ). ... Post originale: pasqualeborriello.com/raspberry-pi-e-davvero-una-rivoluzione
This PDP-8/s is at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA. The PDP-8/s was the first computer to be available for less than $10,000 US. It was also the first to be sold off-the-shelf. It was popular for its time because of the low price. 1024 units were made. The "s" in the name stands for serial, although some said it stands for "slow". To economize on gates and transistors, all arithmetic operations were performed serial-by-bit. The PDP-8 is a 12-bit word-length machine, so to add two 12-bit numbers, they were cycled through a 1-bit adder, and added 1 bit at a time. The machine was constructed using modular "Flip-chip" plug-ins. Many of the plug-in modules were interchangeable -- thus a module from the program counter could also be used in the accumulator. One common module contained two flip-flops (4 transistors), thus functioned as two bits in a register. The front panel displayed pretty much the entire state of the machine. The far right column of lights showed the phase of instruction execution. The next column of lights from the right shows the current instruction opcode (all eight of them!). This computer featured 4K words of core memory.
AMD produced what is probably the first floating point "coprocessor" for microprocessors, the AMD 9511 "arithmetic circuit" (1979), which performed 32 bit (23 + 7 bit floating point) RPN-style operations (4 element stack) under CPU control.
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AM9511 APU (arithmetic processing unit) performs floating point calculations that would be too time-consuming or cumbersome if done on Z80 microprocessor.
In addition to the four basic operations, the 9511 can implement transcendental functions (sin, log, etc.), and it can also perform conversion from floating point to fixed point and vice versa. It can also perform operations in 16 or 32 bit fixed point two's complement integer representation.
The fastest instruction is 16 bit fixed point addition which takes 4 microsec, the slowest instruction is arc-tangent which takes almost 2 milisec; 32 bit floating point addition takes 14-87 microsec.
The 9511 is an autonomous processor: it acts like a peripheral and it in not tied to any particular microcrocessor. AM9511 is configured as a pair of I/O ports with the capability of causing the Z80 to pause for completion of the processor's operation if it has not been completed by the time the Z80 code requires the results.
The 9511 is a stack orientaded processor. Operands are first pushed onto the internal stack, and then a comand is issued to the processor to perform an operation on the stack. Results are removed from the stack.
All transfers, including operands, results, status and command information, take place over an 8-bit bidirectional data bus. The internal data paths and the internal ALU are 16 bits wide, even though some operations are on 32 bits operands (this fact indicates that extending the 9511 to handle double precision format could have been implemented internally quite easily). The transcendental functions are evaluated using Chebyshev Polynomials which provide an even distribution of errors within the selected data representation.
The 9511 was in 1980's an high cost device: the APU was far more complex than the CPU and the volume of sales was not so high. As a result this was reflected in the price: in 1983 the Am9511@2Mhz cost £90 (considering inflation it would cost £240 now in 2009), the 3Mhz £123.75, the 4Mhz £146.25 ..
Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, 1969. At the San Jose Computer History Museum.
"The Kitchen Computer was featured in the 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog as a $10,600 tool for housewives to store and retrieve recipes. Unfortunately, the user interface was only binary lights and switches. There is no evidence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold. Inside was a standard Honeywell 316 minicomputer, billed as the first 16-bit machine at that price from a major computer manufacturer. Gift of Boudreau Computer Services, Ltd. "
Speed: 0.6MHz.
Memory: 16K (16-bit), Core
I can only imagine how much this cost back in the day, with dual 5 1/4" drives built in. Someone yanked this out of goodness knows where and had left it in the lobby.
MK3880P-10 (Z80 CPU)
§ Purple Ceramic
§ 2.5 MHz
§ -40° to +85°C
§ Data code: 1980
Here is protected by a transparent plexiglass window
Mostek cut a deal with a startup Zilog, in which Mostek provided fab resources to manufacture the Zilog microprocessors in return for second sourcing rights to the Zilog family. Mostek produced MK3880, the Zilog Z80 and a series of Z80 support chips, until Zilog built their own fab.
MK3880P-10 (Z80 CPU)
§ Purple Ceramic
§ 2.5 MHz
§ -40° to +85°C
§ Data code: 1980
Here is protected by a transparent plexiglass window
Mostek cut a deal with a startup Zilog, in which Mostek provided fab resources to manufacture the Zilog microprocessors in return for second sourcing rights to the Zilog family. Mostek produced MK3880, the Zilog Z80 and a series of Z80 support chips, until Zilog built their own fab.
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
This board:
1) Second 64K (8kx8) SRAM: CDM6264E3 (datacode 1982)
2) Serial RS232 Interface with 8251 USART
3) Memory mapped 8 bit parallel IN/OUT with LS374 latched outputs and LS244 inputs with one interrupt line
4) Memory mapped co-processor C8231A: 16 bit floating point arithmetic unit running @ 2.5 Mhz