The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life. Allison Chisolm
Company in 1854. Applying the same power loom concepts to weaving wire, Bigelow soon after opened the Clinton Wire Cloth Company in 1856.
“In this town,” recalled early resident Neil Walker, “E.B. Bigelow did for the weaving industry of this time what Eli Whitney did for the raw cotton industry.” Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had revolutionized cotton production in the United States and across the globe.
Together with the Bigelow brothers’ business, Clintonville village grew throughout the 1840s and, by 1848, began to petition for its independence from Lancaster. Residents were becoming restless, much like colonial revolutionaries under an oppressive government. As one historian noted, “Lancaster was unwilling to spend amounts on schools, roads, and other necessary improvements...[and] Clintonville was unwilling to pay taxes without having the full benefit of them.”
At its birth in 1850, the new town had 2,778 residents. Within five years, that number grew to 3,635. For its independence, Clinton agreed to pay Lancaster $10,000 over 10 years. Clinton, it was reported, “received two-thirds of Lancaster’s population, but only one-fifth of her acreage.” In addition, it acquired “five cheaply-built district schoolhouses.”
Prepared in compliance with the Act of the Legislature of Massachusetts establishing the town of Clinton, the official List of Voters includes the name of Hiram Morgan, noted as a member of the Free-Soil Party. A political party founded only a few years earlier, the Free Soilers supported commercial relations between the Northern and Southern states, but believed that slavery, which was constitutionally protected at the time, should not spread into any new states, such as Kansas or those southwestern territories recently won from Mexico. With the slogan, “free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men,” the party attracted those farmers, workers and merchants who did not want to compete with slave-supported businesses in new regions.
Tower of the Bigelow Carpet Company, Clinton, Massachusetts
NEW FAMILY, NEW CHALLENGES
Charles Morgan’s life found expanded opportunities, as did the new town. The year 1852 was a banner year for him, beginning with his 21st birthday on January 8. Now that he was of legal age, he could not wait another day to declare his love for a Shrewsbury girl, Harriet T. Plympton. So on January 8th, no doubt with a grin across his thin, oval face, he and Harriet registered as the first marriage of the year in Shrewsbury’s town hall and then travelled to the First Congregational Church in West Boylston for their wedding, with Rev. Joseph W. Cross presiding.
The ceremony was attended by Harriet’s parents, Harriet and Alexander Plympton, a Shrewsbury carpenter, machinist and farmer, as well as Hiram and Lucina Morgan. The newlyweds probably followed common practice of the time and moved in with Charles’ parents and paid them rent.
On the marriage registry, Charles listed his occupation as “labour.” Since his drafting lessons four years earlier, he had continued to work for the Bigelows in the machine shop, learning his craft, and gaining skill as a draftsman.
Erastus Bigelow kept an eye on his eager pupil, and within a few months, named him superintendent of the dye-house for the carpet company. Carpet dyes, their color, brilliance and variety, their durability and resistance to fading were essential selling points for the emerging American carpet industry. Creating dyes and understanding how different wools absorbed them required much knowledge and training.
Morgan’s knowledge of chemistry had been limited to the books he could find, so he tackled the new subject with his typical close observations and scientific approach. Titling his diary “Chas Morgan’s Note Book for Coloring M July 1852,” Morgan documented in his initial entries his first days on the job, including shorthand recipes to achieve specific dye colors that yarn will hold.
The experiments were conducted on an industrial scale, as he tested gallons of various mixtures on more than 100 pounds of “yarn waste” at a time. He preserved among his diary’s pages sample strands, one green, one blue. After five days on the job, on July 6, 1852 he summarized this procedure for making and fixing the color of green yarn:
200 lbs Colored Cotton green
100 lbs Fustic (wood from a mulberry tree that produces a yellow color)
35 lbs. Logwood (the heart of a woody type of legume plant)
2 lbs. Sal. Soda (also known as washing soda, a transparent crystalline hydrated sodium carbonate)
Give 12 turns, add
5 ¼ lbs. Blue Vitriol (hydrated copper sulfate)
Give 10 turns, rinse, dry
Once he learned the basics of the dye process, however, he changed jobs. Whether it was the nuances of chemistry or the supervision of others that did not suit him at age 21, he returned to working with machinery with great eagerness. Fewer than a dozen pages into his diary, his entries shift focus to other aspects of the textile business, particularly the construction and timing of loom operations.
CHANGE IN DIRECTION
Morgan seems to have lasted about three months at the dye house. During the fall of 1852, his diary entries change from Clinton to the new town of Lawrence, 38 miles northeast. He was clearly seeking new opportunities to learn and expand his network beyond Clinton. A local history of Clinton describes the September 1852 arrival of Peter Stevenson, 10 years older than Charles, and a man who had learned the trade of a dyer in his native Scotland. Stevenson was hired to become the overseer of the dyeing department of the Bigelow Carpet Company.
By the end of 1852, Morgan had left his position with the Bigelows and moved, leaving Harriet behind with his parents. This marked the beginning of several years when he maintained two households—one where he worked, and one where his family lived. While important for learning his trade and gaining work experience, this situation proved to be a constant strain on his finances.
There was a lot of work to be done in Lawrence, a town founded only seven years earlier with property carved out of Methuen and Andover by a group of businessmen who sought to establish water rights along the Merrimack River. They incorporated the Essex Company in 1845, capitalized at $1 million, and carefully designed the mills that would use that water power—the Atlantic Mill, the Duck Mill, and the Pacific Mills among them.
The business owners also took equal care planning the city, officially chartered just after Morgan’s arrival, in 1853. The Essex Company gave Lawrence the land for its town common, but with building restrictions on the types of property surrounding it, limiting development to churches, civic building and high-end homes only. It also gave the city property for worker housing, this time with specific requirements intended to ensure better quality living conditions.
The Essex Company had also built in 1846 the four-story stone building for the Lawrence Machine Shop, to manufacture and repair textile machinery for the mills along the river. By June 1853, however, the machine shop was legally an independent entity and advertising its services as steam engine builders and manufacturer of machinists’ tools.
A second diary kept by Charles in this period details specifics for the Pacific Loom, most likely within the Pacific Mill, which the Essex Company operated in Lawrence. Morgan’s diary also details his “contingent expenses” to support himself in Lawrence during December 1852, more than half of which included his $15 board bill, as well as many loaves of bread, quarts of oysters, pounds of beef, chicken and saltpork, 500 pounds of coal, one pound of chocolate, barrels of apples, and the latest issue of Scientific American magazine for four cents. He also spent 50 cents for a portrait of that beloved Massachusetts Senator and Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, who had died only a few weeks earlier.
Morgan labored from seven to 13 hours each day that December, working on drawings or designs, first for Pacific loom gears, shafting, and a boiler plate punch, and later in the month, for cams and levers for the Duck Mill’s loom. He did not work Sundays or December 25