My name is Archibald Jones. Throughout my lifetime I lived through a ton of advancements in industrial production. I’ve ever heard some people call it a revolution – an industrial revolution. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but from when I first moved into my farm and to where I am today, I can tell you, things have changed a ton.
I never got along that well with my father, so when I got word that my grandfather had passed away and that I’d be able to take over his plot of land out in Ohio near the Ohio river I jumped at the opportunity to set out on my own. Oh, I couldn’t have a day passed 20 at the time, but I’d grown up on my family’s farm and gotten used to the ins and outs of it all, so I was pretty confident I wouldn’t have enough difficulty doing it. Besides, my friends Cyrus from childhood would be there and he said we could trade some duties. The Revolution hadn’t started so I think it was probably 1755 when I moved out there, but I’d have to check the dates on that.
That first month I got there I spent almost entirely at Cyrus’ farm, helping him with the ins and outs of it all and he paid me in fruit crops and milk from his dairy. I realized early on the rickety shack my grandfather was living in wouldn’t be enough to put together the farm I wanted, so on the weekends I would go back to the property and start chopping trees from the woods behind the river. Back then you didn’t have any fancy ways of going about it, so piece-by-piece I had to chop and wood and bring it together to get the barn extension set up. I didn’t really know how much wood I would need so I just kept chopping. It turned out I’d got a lot more than I needed, but I was able to trade some of it for some new shirts from one of Cyrus’ friends. Back then you didn’t have these fancy ways of rigging that cotton together, so I remember that she would sit there and first get all the cotton off the sheep and then use one of those handheld devices to turn that cotton into cloth. She had to card the wool and then turn it into whispy slivers and then stretch them on a spinning wheel ("Industrial Revolution: Spinning Mills"). Only then was it possible to weave the shirts out of She had to card the wool It was a lot of work seeing what she had to go through, but when I remember how difficult it had been for me to cut down those trees with just my ax I felt it was a fair trade ("What Is Carded Cotton? (With Pictures)".
So every couple months it was like that, me trading wood for clothes. Then one time I was down in the trade depot complaining to Jeremiah about what a task it was to keep chopping wood for clothes and he said that he’d just visited a farm in Massachusetts where they were using a mill to handle a bunch of these tasks. I’d heard of mills before, but when I went and visited this thing, it was nothing like I’d ever see it. Better yet, having my farm right next to the Ohio River, I knew that I had the perfect spot for putting one of those water mills into use. I’d never been a person very good at sewing, but I was a solid enough engineer that I was able to put that machine together and was turning that spools of wool into slivers at a rate faster than Debbie, Cyrus’ neighbor could ever have imagined. After then we worked out a deal with that I would get her these materials and then she would put them in clothing and we’d both selling them at the local depot. I thought for sure I was set out to be a farmer, but when I saw how much money we were making it didn’t take me long to realizing that maybe putting clothing together was the best choice for me at that time.
We were making a lot of money locally, but it was tough for us to compete with some of the neighboring counties. I thought that my little contraption was something that would set me apart, but when I visited some of these farms one winter, I sure got a lesson in the real world. There was one of them that was using what they called a spinning “mule.” They said they called it that because it was the offspring off two earlier machines, just like a mule was the offspring of two different types of animals. Anyways, this spinning mule would take the raw cotton on one end and turn it into cloth on the other. Earlier my water mill was just powering one loom, now we could hook 18-20 of these things up together to one water wheel and that thing would just power them all. Woah! You have no idea how much clothing we were churning out at that point. So much that me and Debbie couldn’t handle it ourselves, so we decided to build us a little barn/shed and we’d hire a lot of the local women to come and help us turn all this cloth into clothing. The men didn’t seem so interested in putting these shirts together, but anytime we needed to expand the workspace it was never too difficult to get them together to help us get it going. It was the first time a lot of them had a stable wage coming in, so it seemed to change things a little for them. Plus, when we got a lot of the women in there they would sometimes start fighting amongst each other or they’d slack of, you know it goes with workers, so some of them we’d use as supervisors to make sure everything was running as smoothly as it should.
Our little clothing operation and factory was so successful that we kept having to expand and expand, hiring more people. Debbie and I, we were pretty important people in town around those days. Some people claiming we had started the entire spinning industry, but of course that wasn’t the case. We just copied peoples’ ideas from those who were around us. Still, though that didn’t stop me from getting in touch with those government officials and convincing them about the importance of the dam. There was a little commotion at first as to who would build it and where all the money would go, but when we offered to pay for the costs and showed them some of the profits the city could get from allowing us to put it up they couldn’t have been more happy to go ahead with the plan. That’s when our factory got even bigger. We had three floors of this things called a lathe.
We must have kept up with the factory workers helping us put together the clothes by hand for another few years until another invention came our way. This thing they called it a power loom. While before each worker would have to take our spools of cloth and weave them into clothes, now the power loom would be just kick this material out at a rabbit’s pace. These thing weren’t without dangers though, during that time we had one person die when the machine broke and shot out a piece that lodged into his head. It was a terrible tragedy and it caused us to really rethink our safety precautions in the production building. From then on, we’d have small dangers happen, but nothing that was quite as catastrophic as that first death. Truthfully, I still think of that poor man and his family today.
Archibald II get an idea and decided that he would put together like a dormitory type style work situation together in partnership with the local government. In this situation we would recruit women from the surrounding counties and have them all work for us. In order to determine which employees would receive what type of pay we ended up dividing the laborers into different categories. The most skilled we just called them skilled, and then from there we had semi-skilled and unskilled (The Hierarchies Of Victorian Workers”). That helped us determine what sort of work they were doing and how valuable they were to us in the entire factory organization. We set up different requirements too, such as attending church, which they’d ring a bell and the women would go and meet-up in there. The rest of the time except on their days off they’d work long days in the factory. I’d say probably 10-12 hour days, 70 hours a week. It was hard work, no doubt, but they’d get paid a decent wage and for many of the workers it was the only work they could find in the area so I think they appreciated the opportunity pretty mightily to work in these factories. We’d make sure they were well fed and really had everything taken care of them that they would need.
With these larger factories we’d see a lot more injuries though. It was all just a part of the change in the speed of invention I always figured and the amount of times that these people were working something was bound to happen I reasoned. A lot of times the workers would get angry at us and when I look back on the situation it’s tough for me to think if we should have done something different. When a woman would get hurt and couldn’t work there were so many other women hungry to take her place that we didn’t really have the chance to offer her money for the time off ("Untitled Document"). It was a competitive environment, so if they weren’t able to keep up they had to be replaced. It wasn’t until a long-time after that a lot of these workers started organizing together and started demanding these types of things. And besides, I don’t think that if we had implemented them back then, paying every work for every injury they had if we’d ever have been able to run that factory properly. All that money’d of just gone to the workers and we’d never be able to keep expanding and adding to things. It wasn’t just these women who benefitting you know?
As I was saying, from that time I moved into my spot of land near the Ohio river to the time I’m talking to you right now, this city has changed so much. Just look around you. Let me show something. You see that factory building on the corner there with the bakery beneath it and all those buildings along that entire path? When I first moved here that entire piece of land was nothing but trees. I literally had to walk for 30 minutes to get anywhere. My factory and my son’s factory literally changed the landscape of this entire city, turning it from just a rural country town to the urban area you see before you. Sometimes I think to myself philosophically about the process of it all. Like was I responsible for this stuff through trying to make money or was this just the natural occurrence of life. The more I think about things the more I think it was just going to happen even if people like me and my son didn’t put it together. Today if I want to get a new shirt I just walk to the store and can buy it with a few coins. Before that same shirt would require me to spend hours chopping down wood for trade. The things my son and I did made that possible for people in this town.
Similarly, people want to criticize us for the way we treated our workers in those factories, but I don’t think it was really our moral decisions that we were making. This was just supply and demand of the entire market. If we didn’t run our factories that way someone else in the neighboring country would have and we wouldn’t have been able to operate. Truly, this whole industrial revolution as they’re calling it these days was something that was just blooming from deep inside peoples’ souls and all that energy got put into the machines and the progress that came about. So look around you, look at society and the ease of doing some of the essential things in life and tell me we haven’t made great progress.
Works Cited
"The Hierarchies Of Victorian Workers: Craftsman, Semi-Skilled Factory Operatives, And
Laborers". Victorianweb.org. N.p., 2001. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.
"Industrial Revolution: Spinning Mills". YouTube. N.p., 2016. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.
"Untitled Document". Webs.bcp.org. N.p., 2016. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.
"What Is Carded Cotton? (With Pictures)". wiseGEEK. N.p., 2016. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.
