Boston Manufacturing Company

Boston Manufacturing Company
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark District
Boston Manufacturing Company, Waltham, Massachusetts
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Location	144-190 Moody St., Waltham, Massachusetts
Coordinates	42°22′23″N 71°14′9″W / 42.37306°N 71.23583°W / 42.37306; -71.23583
Built	1813
Architect	Paul Moody
NRHP reference No.	77001412
Significant dates
Added to NRHP	December 22, 1977[1]
Designated NHLD	December 22, 1977[2]

The Boston Manufacturing Company was a business that operated one of the first factories in America. It was organized in 1813 by Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, in partnership with a group of investors later known as The Boston Associates, for the manufacture of cotton textiles. It built the first integrated spinning and weaving factory in the world at Waltham, Massachusetts, using water power. They used plans for a power loom that he smuggled out of England as well as trade secrets from the earlier horse-powered Beverly Cotton Manufactory, of Beverly, Massachusetts, of 1788.^[3] This was the largest factory in the U.S., with a workforce of about 300. It was a very efficient, highly profitable mill that, with the aid of the Tariff of 1816, competed effectively with British textiles at a time when many smaller operations were being forced out of business.^[4] While the Rhode Island System that followed was famously employed by Samuel Slater, the Boston Associates improved upon it with the "Waltham System". The idea was successfully copied at Lowell, Massachusetts, and elsewhere in New England. Many rural towns now had their own textile mills.