HISTORIC HARRISVILLE INC.

History of the Mill Village

"Harrisville's history includes in miniature many developments important to the history of the nation. Here one finds, successively, a frontier community of self-sufficient farmers, the utilization of waterpower to run small mills, the erection of a factory village, the rise and fall of a paternalistic authority, the color and conflict brought by mass immigration, the railroad mania, clashes between farmers and mill population, a separatist movement, the transformation of an economy punctuated by booms and busts, and the slow growth of a sense of community." - John Borden Armstrong,

Factory Under the Elms

The mill village was, from its earliest days, defined by water—ten square miles of upstream ponds and watershed—and by the ravine where the outlet stream of Harrisville Pond falls 100 feet over the course of a quarter mile. Goose Brook, as it was then called, became the setting for a cluster of water-powered woolen mills, storehouses, boarding houses, tenements, and homes, most of which were built during a 50-year period, roughly 1820-1870, when textile mills transformed the economy of New England.

Because of the confines of the narrow, rocky ravine, mills in Harrisville were placed astride the brook, and their turbines were powered directly by the flow of the stream. For nearly 150 years, they manufactured woolen cloth and were the lifeblood of the community. As much as 45% of the village population worked in the mills as carders, spinners, dyers, weavers, finishers, and mechanics. Beyond that, the countryside supplied wool for spinning, wood for the boilers, and food for the population.

The large Harris family established the factory village early in the 19th-century and was followed by the Colony family and its Cheshire Mills about 1850. By 1900, no Harris family members remained in the town that bears the name.

Cheshire Mills, one of the last New England textile mills in operation, closed its doors in1970. But there remains in Harrisville a collective memory: the clang of the work bell in the cupola that brought workers into the mill; the skills required in spinning and weaving; the sound of the factory in full operation; and what it was like to grow up in the tiny, close-knit world of the factory village.