(eerie music) - This was the home of Lizzy Borden.

In the summer of 1892, It is said that Lizzy murdered her father and her stepmother with an ax.

(screams) The following year, she was infamously tried and acquitted, and no one else was ever convicted.

Today, her Fall River home is a bed and breakfast with ghost tours and souvenirs to commemorate the horrific events that took place there.

Throughout the house, plenty of photographs of Lizzie are displayed.

Of the two murders that occurred, the first was of her father in front of this mantle.

This is the corpse of her father on their living room couch.

The second was that of her stepmother in the upstairs bedroom.

And right next to that, would've been Lizzy's bedroom, but we didn't come here to talk about Lizzy.

After all, this is the story of Slatersville and there was no more vivid or poetic in account about the origins of the village than the one written by the man who served as her spiritual advisor during her trial, Reverend Edwin Augustus Buck.

In 1866, shortly before he transitioned to a Sabbath school in Fall River, Reverend Buck was pastor of the Slatersville Congregational Church.

In June of that year, he wrote a tribute to Mme.

Ruth Slater, then in her final year of life and delivered it in the very church she had built.

Included would be his account of the history of her village's foundation.

- In 1805, Mr. Samuel Slater with his brother, John, both then men of limited means, passed through all this region prospecting for the site of a mill.

In her mind today, there exists the view of this whole section of country, as it was upwards of three score years ago.

Then a dense forest covered many of these now cleared and pleasant fields.

The beautiful basin in which these factories are nestled was then a tangled swamp.

- This was kind of a no man's land.

This is where they came if they had misbehaved in the big cities, if they had perhaps robbed or maybe murdered somebody.

The Congregational church and the Methodist church sent pastors here, they were missionaries here.

This was such a wild area.

- The place was known as Buffums Mills, owned by Quakers Richard and Joseph Buffum.

And very few people called it home.

The place had a nasty reputation for crime, and it was a great distance from the city where their first cotton mill remained.

- What was here though, is that the Branch River drops about 40 feet in a mile.

Now 40 feet is a lot more than they're gonna use.

They only needed around eight to 10 feet of a drop to spin a waterwheel so he saw the opportunity that it wasn't going to be just one mill, but they're gonna be able to have a spot where they could have multiple mills.

- This is the original deed for the sale and purchase of the land and its water rights, which was made official on the 26th of May, 1806 and well, you know what they named it.

- Where did they get this idea?

- One of the most knowledgeable American historians of the Slater family is is Barbara Tucker.

- When you're recruiting family labor and people are reluctant to go into this new lifestyle, it had to be frightening.

How do you get them to go into a factory?

Remember the fathers would not go, the mothers would not go either into and work in the factory.

You have to attract that family to that factory and ease that transition between an agricultural and an industrial way of life.

What better way to do it than to give them something they could understand, a New England village.

- Many of you here today have the place in your mind's eye.

You remember every house, barn, shop, store, and factory, every road and fence, boulder and ledge, marsh and brook.

But to the rest of us, the outlines being given, we have to fill out the picture for ourselves.

(elegant music) - When I was 12, 13 years old, I ran into a man at the mill who was photographing it and drawing it.

And he said that he was doing a book about it.

It ended up being David Macaulay.

And if you look at David Macaulay's books, his drawings are the Slatersville Mill.

- I wrote a book about the building of textile mills in Rhode Island, in new England.

Having lived here for a few years, I began to realize that I was surrounded by these wonderful pieces of architecture that I never really thought about.

Just drove past them like everybody else.

- But once he stopped to look at these structures, David Macaulay set out to learn how the earliest of inventions created the demand for these mills to be built.

- You turn yarn into fabric on a loom, and this is a typical hand loom.

Now weaving was done by both men and women.

So I should probably do okay at this.

First of all, we have to set up the loom by drawing threads from the warp beam behind the loom, across the top to another beam near my feet.

The warp threads pass through harnesses, which I can raise or lower by pressing down on these foot pedals.

And when I do that, it creates a space between alternating sets of warp threads.

I'm gonna take the shuttle and I'm gonna push it across through that space.

I then press it down, change pedals to raise the other harness, to create that over and under pattern that you get used to seeing in weaving.

I send the shuttle back through, pull it snug, tamp it down and repeat this process over and over again until there's something else I'm supposed to do, or my arms fall off.

You can see just how much time is going to go into this to produce enough fabric to make clothes.

I mean, there's the carding and the spinning and the weaving.

Then there's the cutting and the stitching and so on, which sort of explains why people back then would've had relatively few clothes.

- So to make clothing a whole lot faster, mills needed water power, but in order for a new mill at Slatersville to make anything, the Slaters would have to construct their own water power system.

But how did they do that?

And how did they stop the river?

Seriously?

- I mean, think about it.

How did they stop the river?

In the book I talk about that question of, well, how do you actually stop the river?

What you're doing is building boxes or wicker baskets or whatever, filled with stone, moving them out by cutting off at least part of the river, building these things, these sort of coffers.

You build a structure like this, so that as the water comes in, there's less and less of it.

The weight is greater here.

It's pushing down on this, it's supporting what the rock is already doing, and you do that in stages.

And then you've got stone under it, planks on top of it to support the water.

So you're taking advantage of the weight of the water to hold the dam in place.

And you're raising the height at which the water, that the water would have to reach if it's gonna fall off and continue flowing.

And that's what you're after.

You're not stopping the river.

- John Slater created one of the most innovative water power systems in America at that time.

But how did he know it would even work?

Some folks visited from his hometown.

- Looking now at part of the mill system and water system that you have here.

Now above that waterfall is actually one of only two reservoirs.

So there's about 300 acres of water with these ponds out there.

So plenty of water so they could run the mills all year round.

- This morning, we've been down by the river and we've seen the water system, how it works.

See what the principle was by home, see where you've got the weir, it's just identical to the mill in Belper.

- Oh, Belper weir.

(laughs) When I saw it, it's about the weir.

(dramatic music) - This is the horseshoe weir, a massive water management system for the mills here at Belper.

It was built about 1797.

It was effectively the biggest water management system of the 18th century that we know of, holding back 3.4 hectares of water so that all of that water could then be pushed through the mills and work the 11 water wheels that were on the site.

It was becoming the biggest industrial complex on the planet in single ownership.

So it needed to hold back vast amount of water.

- Without a doubt, the similarities between Belper and Slatersville are quite striking.

- By that time, they would've had much more sophisticated machinery in England, but I'm sure he let Sam know this is the condition of what's going on in England.

And if you wanna stay ahead of the game, you're gonna have to move your game up as well.

- Samuel wouldn't have known it.

This is after Samuel had gone, but John would've still been here.

Certainly he would've been around to see this massive undertaking.

- John got it right.

John Slater got it right.

This is still one of the best water power sites in the Blackstone Valley.

- And just like in Belper, the Slaters made sure their purchases could contain enough water to power multiple mills.

All of which was carried out through an intricate system of engineering.

- At Slatersville there's a fantastic curved dam and it's curved because the arch is the strongest shape we know how to build.

There are straight dams.

There's a straight dam between the reservoir and the lower mill pond.

That's just to sort of control the flow a little bit and to keep the reservoir as stocked as possible.

I mean, they thought about every aspect of this thing.

Pouring hot iron, designing gears and cutting gears, learning how to cut gears so that they would mesh as seamlessly as possible, all to raise the sequence necessary to lift this gate up and down.

- When it was completed, the original mill building was the largest cotton spinning mill in America.

It housed 1500 spindles and was four times the size of their first mill in Pawtucket, which it closely resembled.

And with this mighty three-dam system of water power in place, the Slatersville mill was opened on a holiday.

July 4th, 1807 for its first day of manufacturing.

Then five months later in retaliation for England's behavior on the high seas, President Thomas Jefferson put an embargo on British goods.

This prohibited trade with France and England, which included the importing of textiles.

- That combination of things actually in this region led to robust investment in the textile industry.

And the fact that we couldn't import English cloth meant that we could buy American cloth.

The Slaters took advantage of that in a big way.

They were well positioned.

- And that brings us to something worth showing you, an artifact that sits in this museum in Willimantic, Connecticut.

- This is a piece of cloth cut from the first web woven by water power, done at Slatersville, Rhode Island, 1808 I think.

Given to me by Mrs. Slater, wife of Mr. John Slater.

- By 1808 as this boom intensified, they found themselves running the largest mill in America, but not without being cautious.

- North Providence, August 2nd, 1808.

Dear brother, There is some late news in Boston that Bonaparte has lately decreed that all American vessels found on the high seas shall be taken by his ships and carried in and considered in their course on a superposition that the Americans have been trading with John Bull.

In haste, Mr. S.S. Slater.

(cannon fires) - When the embargo was followed by the war of 1812, things only intensified.

- The local farmers turned Slater employees were simply not enough to meet the demand.

They needed to import workers, which meant they needed to provide them with housing.

But how would they orchestrate this?

- Strutt, when he came to Belper to build his mills, had the water source with the River Derwent, and he had the site, he bought the land and what he didn't have was labor.

So he advertised in newspapers for large families and he built good housing for those families to move into.

- That's.

When Jedediah Strutt created his famous row of houses.

There was Short Row, and then there was Long Row.

- There are two types of houses on Long Row.

You've got these really big three story for the big families, but the Strutts wanted to attract the smaller families as well.

So there are small two story houses as well, much smaller, but as long as you'd got a child working in the mills, their wage would cover that rent.

- This housing is ridiculous amounts of money nowadays.

He was providing allotments where they could grow their veg.

Their chimneys were swept regularly to keep them healthy and everything he could think of to keep a happy community.

The entire infrastructure.

- Agricultural people working out in the fields were coming in.

They could see that Belper had got something to give them.

Women and children in the mills, but there's a third story.

So on that top story, the men could be working.

They didn't want men down there 'cause it cost just that little bit more than they needed.

And the housing here was amazing.

It's like no kind of housing that anybody, any one of that status in the 18th century would've ever seen before.

They really wanted everyone to come to Belper and work for them 'cause they needed that labor.

- And when it came to building Slatersville, John Slater took this fundamental part of Strutt's success and ran with it by laying out the streets and houses of their own village and adopting a more paternalistic approach.

- Slater built a lot of town, what we call townhouses.

It was all in Main Street in Slatersville.

So a whole row of houses and they're still there.

Green Street had a whole row of houses and they're still there.

School Street had a few houses here and there.

Then there was a part of the town called Railroad Street.

There were a lot of tenement houses there.

- It's just an amazing visual history.

It's an amazing political history.

It's an amazing history of architecture for an early federal period in Northern Rhode Island on the Blackstone River pertaining to one thing.

One thing only, that's the mill.

- And among them all stood the home of John and Ruth Slater, who would be running this new village.

- Yeah.

We purchased this property early in 2002.

This actually was the only house we looked at.

We came up here several times from Cincinnati and ended up buying this house purely because we fell in love with it.

If I'm to be honest, I didn't really grasp the true history of the building.

Understanding where the Slater family came from.

All of that.

No, I had no idea at all.

- And neither did I to be honest, it's a shame to say.

- And just like Strutt, the Slaters built homes for these families.

For the first time in America, they introduced the concept of uniformity in their construction.

Most of them housed large families in small rooms that served multiple needs.

They often ate, dressed and slept in the same spaces, with shared ovens, chimneys and stairways.

As for the attics, if the mill was faced with an overflow of workers, that's where they were put.

Oh, and we can't forget to mention this shared experience.

- 'Cause all the houses didn't have toilets.

They had the outhouses out behind.

Every house had their own outhouse.

- Including this lovely home.

- So many people have lived in this house.

It wasn't that long ago that there were four families living in this house, all of whom worked across the street.

And they pretty much stayed in the village.

- They had to work here.

They had to go to a store here that they were paid with store dollars.

If you need supplies, you go to that one supply area that you have dollars paid from the mill for your work that are the currency for that store.

- And all that was on Green Street, while Main Street was down below.

- The hosts that go up Main Street, they're known as one and a halfs, 'cause that's what they are.

The upstairs is very slanted roof so you have to bend down.

There's two rooms upstairs here for the attic.

It it's come down like this, but they're all wallpapered.

- This house is built a little bit different from the other houses.

The apartments were a little bit bigger.

And my grandmother said that when the Slaters first came here, this was their house until they built what was going to be their own house eventually.

That's what my grandmother said.

I don't know if it's true or not.

- It's not.

- They built these mills where there was water power.

And then they had to find labor.

Because they had to import labor is they would import whole families.

So the Slater system was essentially employing the whole family.

- On June 23rd, 1805, John Slater and Ruth Bucklin were married in Rehoboth, Massachusetts.

As soon as Slatersville was founded, they built a home there and raised a family.

- The cotton to be carted and spun must first be picked over by hand.

This was done in the surrounding farmhouses at from five to six cents a pound.

The cotton was spun into yarn, which was colored and sold by the skein.

Having been spun, it was reeled by hand at from three to four cents a doff.

- These are huge machines and there are instances in the Slater contracts where they want their kids to be taught how to be mule spinners, because that is the most lucrative.

- Speaking of lucrative, let's not forget how Samuel Slater's biographer embellished the village.

- It is impossible to contemplate such a village as this, without the most pleasing sensations and reflections.

What a seat of wealth, a focus of activity and a nursery of industry .

Who can look upon such manufacturing villages as this without regarding them as the germs of the future Manchesters of America.

- But the truth was harder to accept.

No matter how utopian George White made Slatersville out to be, the reality was anything but rosy.

- My grandfather was a farmer, had a farm at the top of the hill on this street named Tabor Hill.

And as a side job, he was also the superintendent of the cemetery.

He took care of it.

So he needed help there often.

He had my father, Herb Bailey working for him and I would go in at times when they couldn't be there and help with the mowing and the trimming.

Later, I also took part in some of the grave digging, but I prefer the mowing and the trimming.

Historic cemetery.

It has the fenced in area where the Slater family is resting for eternity and a lot of history in that cemetery.

- And from what we can see behind this gate, the Slater family knew illness and tragedy all too well.

- Dear brother, We, having the smallpox here and as our domestics have not had the disorder, they will probably be going away for a short time.

My family is in hopes of keeping clear, but should the boys take the smallpox or we should conclude by and by to have them inoculated and go into the hospital.

It would be exceedingly pleasing to have somebody take care of them who they were acquainted with.

- John and Ruth Slater had 11 children.

Over the span of three decades, they would outlive eight of them and they would also survive many of their own grandchildren.

- Half of all children died before the age of five and they're dying from teething and they're dying from cholera.

They're dying from tuberculosis and it's a disease that is peculiar to communities that do not have decent ventilation.

Some things are just accepted.

TB was accepted in a Slater community.

The white plague as it was called, it was endemic like the common cold.

You could trace it from one factory house to another.

The water supply.

They are drinking from the same water supply, probably.

- In 1812 Samuel's wife Hannah Wilkinson, died at the age of 37.

Soon after her passing Samuel settled in Oxford, Massachusetts, where he built a new mill.

He later married a woman from Pennsylvania, Esther Parkinson.

From Oxford, he would establish the town of Webster where he and many of his descendants are buried.

However, both Hannah and Esther are buried all the way back in Pawtucket.

We don't exactly know why, but Samuel left his brother John to manage Slatersville.

John and his wife Ruth led their village in a more patriarchal way.

In rising above their own struggles, they adopted methods of the day that gave birth to a whole new way of life.

Reverend Buck.

- Mingling with the workman as one of their number, they partook of his zeal in the work.

He gathered around him a highly worthy class of laborers, many of them of a decidedly religious character.

And by his regard for their interests, secured their hearty cooperation in promoting his.

- Dear Sir, The house ought to be got ready immediately that the families who are to occupy them may move in and board the lands as the Irishmen will be with you perhaps as soon as this.

Set them to cleaning out the river below the factory, that the water may have a chance to escape and shovel the dirt that comes out against the banks.

I would recommend you to have an understanding with the hands, with mill to work late and early, for we must at all events get off all that can be done and get some goods into the market.

Yours truly, John Slater.

- And what that leads to here is what's known as the Rhode Island system of manufacture.

It's the creation of an industrial center.

Usually it's a company mill, often family owned and they're fairly small mills.

Entire families are recruiter to come and live and work in these villages.

- This place was the first time that a mill owner said we're gonna come into this area and we're gonna develop and plan the entire village.

- All the pieces from the factory to the housing, to the church, to the green.

- Because if you look at the way it's set up, I mean, you still get that hierarchy.

The lower you were, the lower you lived generally speaking.

- And I a Assume they were taking cooks outta the profits from all those various things.

- And all of the people that work here, these weren't black people, were enslaved because they owed their soul to the company store.

- Children would get about a nickel an hour.

And if their families owed rent or any tabs at the company store, it was taken out of their pay.

Oftentimes they were paid in company scrip, which was barely ever honored outside the town.

These were effective methods that mill owners devised to control the lives of their workers.

And they knew it well.

(tower bell rings) Their typical days ran for 11 hours with a 4:00 AM wake-up ringing by the mill tower bell.

- You and your entire family are now dependent on Slater.

- Accidents in these Slater, Slater style mill was almost a given, but they're not discussed in the papers.

- This was followed by a 6:00 AM arrival at the mill and an hour off for lunch.

- If you go on strike, you're not just striking against your boss, you're striking against your landlord.

You're striking against the store owner that you owe money to.

- They operated into the early evening.

You're gonna have open flames with all of this lint.

I mean, it's gonna make for a fire.

- They worked in average of 60 hours a week, including half days on Saturdays.

- If this goes badly, you and your entire family, not just one wage earner, the entire family could be out of work, out of your home.

And they could call in your debt at the store to be paid immediately.

- You're gonna have girls with long hair getting it caught.

You're gonna have finger.

These are kids.

These are eight years, 10 years old.

horrible ways children were disciplined.

Children were attached to the water wheel and as it went around, that was one form of punishment.

I don't ever remember seeing that with Slater, but don't forget Slater had self control.

- But nothing ever worked perfectly.

- Dear brother.

this will be handed you by Mrs. Slater, by whom I send you a Hank of bleached yarn which was bleached at Smithfield as a specimen of the last yarn that was sent down here.

You'll observe that it is very much tangled and also very tender.

Some of which I presume would not hold a mouse by the tail.

If you may depend on the Smithfield yarn, it is much injured by whitening as the last sent down here, the sales of both will stop very soon as this is a matter of most consequence, you will not fail showing the yarn now sent.

- But as to accidents, I can't see Slater being benevolent in keeping a family on unless they could provide another child in its stead, then Slater would say fine.

- And then there was always Sunday.

- It's surprising the number of men over the age of 12 or 15 was actually the smallest number of employees in the mill.

And then the next larger group were women.

But the largest group were children between the ages of seven and 12.

- That was very common.

In other parts of the world, children were being used in deep coalmines.

They were being used to clean chimneys.

I mean, it's not something that anybody should be proud of, but to judge it by contemporary standards, I think is a fault that we all fall into.

We said, well, we would never do that.

- Because we talk about we're appalled by that idea that there were children working in the mills here, and yet you can go and buy a t-shirt for $5.

And I can guarantee you that t-shirt was not made by a full-grown man or woman.

So I think that's the sort of thing that we do need to think about, judge rightly and I would say judge history rightly but also judge ourselves.

- Lately I've been thinking about the children of this town.

Someday I'd like to do something for them.

Hannah, do you know what a Sunday school is?

- No.

- We must build one, a place where the children of the town can be taught an understanding of God, where they can have religious training.

- I don't think there is such a place in the country.

- There will be, Hannah.

- Like when the church was first here and people would be worshiping inside.

People would be playing outside the church windows because church was just not what they did.

The story goes that there were some children who were caught stealing apples.

And one of John Slater's managers decided that perhaps it was time to start a Sunday school.

- And that manager would be Amos Lockwood.

- At one time, he was the only male member of this church.

Amos Lockwood was very careful in who he hired.

He wanted to make sure that he hired people who would attend Slatersville Congregational Church.

- You don't need to have a building to be a church.

And so a few people gathered together along with Ruth Slater to become a congregation.

- In 1816, the church began with a minister.

He was known as the father of Slatersville Congregational Church.

His name is Daniel Waldo.

Prior to Daniel Waldo coming in here, they had hired another minister named Jotham Sewall, who came from Maine.

And they came in and preached periodically in the meeting house, which was erected in 1808.

- There is a circa 1815 map of the village.

The one thing that really stands out as dramatic new information is our building down here, which with its tall spire.

In 1887, they moved the meeting house from School street to Green Street.

They took the tower off and they made it into a two-family home.

- So this house is likely where the earliest Sunday schools of Slatersville were held.

- So you do laundry on Sunday, 'cause you have a baby and you have diapers and you hang those out on the line.

That might be enough to get you kicked out of the church.

- I think they realized that religion could be used as social control.

- Anything that is secular, that does not require mercy.

- Slater needed a way to discipline the children.

And he started a school on Sunday.

You keep these kids working seven days a week and they stay outta trouble.

And it's literally what the rules and regulations in the factory would be.

No dancing, no talking, no laughing.

- And the man who would run that Sunday school lived right on Green Street.

- There is is a circa 1815.

Once we bought this house, we wanted to remodel it.

In doing so we found something up in the attic space.

- Very unexpected.

- Very unexpected.

- There were these shoes, these old leather shoes.

In doing some researching, we found that they're called concealed shoes.

- Even children's.

- These were apparently put in concealed places like in ceilings, in floorboards.

It apparently kept evil spirits away.

- So when they were building the house, before they finished up the house, they would throw them in and tighten it up.

- On Sunday morning, the children would go and he would stand in front of them and he would call out Ms. Jones and her kids would go up and follow Ms. Jones, all in front of the superintendent.

He was in charge of them six days a week.

He was in charge of those kids seven days a week basically.

- I'm not really sure if it was the Lockwood family or just maybe the builders themselves that had that.

- Yeah, because we know.

- That superstition.

- We know that Lockwood lived here.

These kids are not going to talk back.

These kids are not going to revolt.

To my mind, this is one of the reasons why there weren't strikes.

They were made to feel guilty for any deviant behavior.

And deviant behavior Slater said, was stealing time from the company.

- Sam Slater from ages 14 to 21 was an apprentice at a mill.

He knew exactly what this lifestyle was like for these kids.

- A Sunday school had been started in Britain.

- This is the Unitarian school room started out as the meeting house for the Unitarians.

They were here before Strutt arrived.

- Now we are only seven miles from Darby.

They could easily have walked off to Darby and found another job if they weren't happy here.

And that's why he had to look after his workers.

It was in his own interest.

He'd trained them.

He wanted them to stay.

- Jedediah Strutt encouraged his workers to become Unitarians or at least to go to chapel.

Jedediah Strutt thought it was very important that his workers were able to learn and have a moral understanding.

So he would make sure that you had been to chapel.

If you hadn't, your wages were docked.

- But eventually no matter how hard they tried , the Slaters and their supervisors couldn't control everything.

- Here is a receipt dated 1814 for the payment of $10 for the shipping of these bales of cotton from Charleston, South Carolina.

- North Providence, November 4th, 1816, Dear brother, Been making any progress with water loops at Smithfield.

I do think we ought to get some underway as soon as it is practicable.

- In 1814, there was a man came to work in the mill named Gilmore and he invented a loom and he proposed that they put looms in so that they could manufacture cloth within the mill and Samuel Slater was not in favor of it, and John was.

- Since Samuel did not like anything operating in his mills that he did not authorize or control, he could be prone to making decisions that were inevitable setbacks.

- So Gilmore left and he went to North Providence and he puts the first looms in the state of Rhode Island in North Providence, where Slaters were lost out on the opportunity to put those first looms in.

It wasn't until 1818 that they actually put looms into the mill here in Slatersville.

At first Gilmore's invention proved to be faulty in too many mills, which could have been the reason for Sam turning it down.

But eventually his system improved putting the Slaters behind their competition and forcing them into greater expansion.

So they built their first stone structures known as the Western Mills in 1821.

Only two of its buildings remain today.

- Part of the expansion that went on there was that they could be including weaving operations, dying operations, and other things so they're gonna be producing a more finished product than they were with the original mill.

- Then there was the canal, but most people in town knew it as The Trench, which was dug to power these mills.

These are the remains of the trench today.

- The trench went all the way down to where the stone bridge is and was diverted right through the mill.

And it would run a water wheel in there.

And that water wheel had gears attached to it, which would run the machines in the mill and they would raise and lower the level of the water in the trench through gates along each of the three dams.

- There'd been a lot of attempts at the mills, but they didn't make the money.

Sam and John showed this nation number one, how to be industrious, how to be technological and how to make money.

- As respect to the spinners who refused to tend more than two sides, you will inform a Squire Farnum to case them down as soon as it can be legally done.

All my spinners at Oxford tend four sides of 128 spindles, saving the end frames or rather the outside sides.

In regard to giving the tenants notice, I conceive the measure advisable, especially to all those who have in any degree shown the cloven thought.

- Any time there was a push or shove in the economy, management would attempt to find a way to make up for lost revenue.

And oftentimes the only place they had to go was for the workforce.

- The first factory strike in us history happens in Pawtucket in 1824.

It happens as a result of the mill owners deciding to cut the wages of specifically the young women workers in these mills.

15 to 30 year old women who are brought into operate these new power loops.

And the mill owners continue to treat them as if they were seven year old children and believed that they were earning too much money for young women to be earning.

All of the mill owners in Pawtucket got together and decided across the city to cut the wages and also to increase the length of the working day.

And they thought these were young women workers.

They were just gonna sit down and accept this.

They're of course, wrong.

Almost immediately over a hundred women cross Pawtucket simply walk out of the job saying they're not coming back to work until the old wage rates are restored.

And so Pawtucket is just in an uproar for about a week where there's all these journals from mill owners describing it as a riot, describing the mill workers marching to the mansions of the mill owners and throwing stones at them.

Part of one of the mills goes up in flame.

And actually by the end of the week.

- They worked out some type of negotiated settlement.

We don't know a blessed thing about it.

Most times when you hear about Slater's mill, it's oh, well that's Rhode Island, we're number one.

You never ever hear anyone talking about it being the site of the first female strike because it ruins that rural peace.

It shows that there was antagonism there almost of a class nature, way before that's supposed to happen.

And so that was hidden away for generations.

It was only in the last 40, 50 years that that's come to light.

- And now for a short story.

In July of 1900, Mrs. Anna Sheldon Andrews was celebrating her centennial birthday and her memory was rather sharp for her age.

Anna had outlived her husband and two of her children and could recall the war of 1812.

She and her husband Thomas owned a tavern, which was also a boarding house.

(bell rings) It was the place John Quincy Adams was said to have had dinner with his wife on their way to Wooster back in 1826.

But shortly after they were married, Thomas also became proprietor of the Slatersville Tavern, less than a mile away.

He ran that for five years.

Very few images of this building exist.

But one thing we know for sure is that they were not allowed to serve alcohol.

Now back at the Andrews Tavern they could, for it was right on the outskirts of the village, but no one calling for liquor at the tavern could secure more than two drinks.

One early Sunday morning, a man Anna described as a respectable-appearing gentleman came to this tavern.

He ordered breakfast along with two drinks, but when he asked for a third, he was denied.

Later that morning her husband attended church and was surprised to find that the same gentleman who called for drinks was the preacher of the sermon.

On returning to the tavern.

Mr. Andrews complimented him for the eloquence of his preaching.

The minister replied that his sermon would have been more eloquent if he had secured the third drink.

- Farmers drinking whenever they wanted throughout the day did not bode well for factory life.

Inebriated workers would damage machinery or cause accidents and mill supervisors were among the first to take notice.

- In Slatersville, you had a very strong ethic for temperance because you had a very diverse group of workers coming in.

Some of the groups, the ethnic groups were noted for strong drink.

- Amongst Slater in Webster and these other places, they are amongst the first to go dry.

And it's the churches that lead the way.

Slater paid for the construction of the church.

He paid for the pews.

He paid for the minister's salary and he was not a Congregationalist himself, Samuel Slater.

He was an Episcopalian.

- Sometimes people were asked to leave the church because they had been found drinking that might have even been in their own homes that alcohol was.

- No liquors to be sold on the property.

And there were to be no firearm sold on the property.

- Not only could you not store any, you could not drink any.

- And if you were going to live in Slatersville, you had to follow these rules.

That is unless you actually worked for the Slaters.

- Slater originally paid his workers in alcohol.

- Wait, what?

- Yes.

In alcohol, you got a cup of gin.

- Okay, so we established that the two people who ran Slatersville were John and Ruth Slater.

But when it came to alcohol, they each took very different paths.

As John oversaw all aspects related to the mill, Ruth ran everything else.

- Ruth Slater was always referred to as Mme.

Slater.

And I don't think it was Madam as opposed to Mr.

I think it was Madam because she was the ruling member of the family if you wanna put it that way.

- She attended many different churches.

She would go to Quaker meeting houses.

She would go to Baptist churches.

- Ruth was deeply religious.

Her husband, not so much.

- John Slater was a member of the Church of England, which would've been an Episcopalian church.

He never became a member of this church, although he did attend here.

- And why is that?

First John, like his brother Samuel, was a businessman like Jedediah Strutt back in England.

He knew he could not lose his workers and that he had to do whatever he could to keep them living happily within his village.

And part of that meant rewarding them with alcohol.

Second, since the Slaters themselves had set rules against the use of alcohol in their own village, John Slater obtained a liquor license all the way over in Griswold, Connecticut, a whole 40 miles outside of Slatersville, where he would load up on alcohol and bring it back to the village.

So while Ruth preached against the use of alcohol, John was going out of his way just to get it.

- One family lost their membership here because they wanted a liquor license and they wanted to sell alcohol here in town.

- It was a very useful tool in keeping a village a peaceful kind of place.

- Well, not always.

- Murder most foul.

We were yesterday furnished with the details of a horrid murder committed in Slatersville Smithfield, which is scarcely paralleled in the catalog of crime.

On Wednesday last, Andrew Davis, a native of Scotland, whose brutal ferocity had been excited towards his wife on account of her absence on a visit to her mother's house, entered the room where she was sitting, having a knife of five inches in length with which he stabbed her in three places.

Her cries for assistance reached the ears of Mr. Isaac Mason, who immediately ran to her aid and on entering the room, received a stab in the abdomen.

The perpetrator of this diabolical transaction then attempted to cut his own throat and made several gashes by which his wind pipe was nearly severed.

He was however, prevented from executing the deed by the interference of the neighbors having heard the cries of the wounded.

Mrs. Davis died about five o'clock yesterday morning.

She received three wounds, one behind her right ear, one in her breast, and one which proved fatal in her leg that reached an artery.

Mr. Mason died about 10 o'clock.

He was a respectable and industrious man.

It appears that Davis had become incensed toward his wife on her refusal to return immediately home at his solicitation.

No, no previous difficulty had existed between them.

He had prepared himself for the performance of this tragedy by drinking a considerable amount of brandy a few moments before it's commencement, a circumstance which proves conclusively the state of mind in which he then was, could not have been the effective insanity.

He is a man of about 26 years of age and has one child five weeks old.

And it was from the same boarding house that on one winter night in February of that same year, Mrs. Andrews spotted a fire.

(flames roar) - In 1826, the original mill was burned.

The image of which fire is still fresh in the minds of those but children then in all this section for a score of miles around.

- Workers are protesting Usually in small ways, workers leaving, running away, records of workers stealing stuff.

There's a number of arsons that happen that were likely workers setting the fire.

- Mr. Slater expressed gladness that the mill was gone.

Being hastily built after 20 years use, he regarded it as some measured dangerous to the operatives.

The burning of it therefore was a relief to his mind.

He felt deeply for the families thus in mid-winter thrown out of the employment and made a special efforts for their relief and to secure employment for them.

- Later that year, the original wooden mill was quickly replaced with a stone mill.

It was constructed further away from the road while the Western mills up river continued their operations.

This stone mill would have a bell tower that originated in the form of a steeple.

And no matter how its height and appearance would evolve over time, it would serve as the iconic symbol for the town and a nation.

- This is now a stone construction, a stone building with a tower in the center, the power system inside it eventually as the mill gets big enough, requires a pair of water wheels.

And those water wheels are connected by gears to a line shaft system that goes up four floors.

And you're talking about turning the power of water into rotary motion, and then through gears, changing the direction of the rotary motion and then with straps and belting taking that rotary motion, off line shafts that run down the length of the floor and connect to however many looms or machines you're running.

- And this system can still be seen in operation at the Wilkinson Mill, right next door to the old Slater mill back in Pawtucket.

- Originally the shaft went up to all the floors and ran the machines on the other floors too.

You can see why they build a building long with only one shaft all the way down.

And they're running belts.

- Every other community has been built by copying what Strutt did.

- Oh wow.

You've got the north one at the front.

You've got the east mill behind it.

You've got the Congregational Church behind that.

You've got St. Peter's Church behind that.

In between, can you see the long rows, the terraces of houses of Strutt housing in there as well?

I just love that view.

That's fantastic.

- That's mind blowing.

- And that's exactly what Slater did over in Rhode Island.

- And so what worked here gets imitated.

- These are the Blackstone Valley mill villages that remain mostly intact today.

- We basically start around nine or 10 mills here in Rhode Island in 1807, 1808.

By 1815 is 100.

And so is a tremendous boom.

Hundreds of other folks imitate and duplicate what happens.

And then you just end up with the entire Blackstone Valley becoming an industrialized landscape.

- They're picture books.

Each building tells its own story in a way, and looking at the remains of, the derelict remains of the main mill at Slatersville, I remember thinking, oh, I mean, this is so sad.

It was, you never know what's gonna happen with something like this.

It can burn down or it can just fall down.

Every time you lose something like that, you lose such a potentially powerful connection to the history of America.

The history of technology.

It really looked like it was on its last legs.

I sort of thought I'm really lucky to see this because this is not gonna be here.

This is on its way out.

(dramatic music)