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When was the first cloth mill established in Massachusetts?
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textile
An annotated diagram showing how an operator uses a hand wheel, rollers, and spindles on a spinning jenny to draw and twist unspun fiber into thread.
The first cloth mill in Massachusetts was established by English settlers in 1638. In these early facilities, weavers produced fabrics such as heavy cotton fustians, cotton twill jeans, and linsey-woolsey.1
It is important to distinguish these early colonial-era mills from the later, more technologically advanced "factory system" that emerged in the 19th century. While the 1638 mill represents the earliest record of such production in the state, Francis Cabot Lowell is credited with founding the first textile mill in which all operations—from raw cotton to finished cloth—were performed under one roof, with the factory built in Waltham between 1813 and 1814.23