Old Slater Mill

The story

Samuel Slater apprenticed under Jedediah Strutt in Belper, England, and left with the Arkwright spinning system in his head — Britain banned the export of the machines and the drawings alike, so memory was the only way to carry it out. Moses Brown, the Providence merchant, hired him to build the machinery; the yellow clapboard mill on the Blackstone was finished in 1793, the first water-powered cotton mill in America to run the Arkwright system. The falls beside it are the entire explanation for where the building sits.

The rest of the campus fills in around it. The Wilkinson Mill went up alongside in 1810 — fieldstone, built by David and Oziel Wilkinson, with a machine shop on the ground floor and spinning above. Restored in the early 1970s, it still turns a 16,000-pound breastshot waterwheel that drives shafts and leather belting through the shop; the American Society of Mechanical Engineers made it a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1977. The 1758 Sylvanus Brown House was moved onto the grounds in the 1960s. The Old Slater Mill Association formed in 1921 and opened the site as a museum in 1955, and in 1966 it was among the first listings on the new National Register. The Park Service took over key buildings in 2021, which is why rangers give the tours now.

The ghost stories grow out of the labor history rather than sitting on top of it. Children as young as seven worked the frames, some losing fingers and limbs to the machinery and some their lives; in 1824 young women in Pawtucket's mills walked out in what is generally counted as the first factory strike in the United States. Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger gave the complex a New England Legends episode, “Ghosts in the Machines,” and rank it among Rhode Island's most active haunts. Admission is free.