The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life. Allison Chisolm
town or city to establish a trade school, independent of the existing school system, with its own board of trustees. Higgins was appointed by the governor to the new Commission on Industrial Education in 1907. The city of Worcester approved the trade school proposal almost immediately, local industrialists raised more than $100,000, and the free Worcester Boys’ Trade High School opened its doors to 52 boys in February 1910, with four-year programs for the cabinet making, pattern making and machinist trades. Similarly funded with private and public dollars, the David Hale Fanning School began as a girls’ trade school in 1921.
The businesses of Worcester had designed and constructed a pipeline for future workers, but the dynamic contributions of the city’s diverse population would supply more energy and ideas than anyone anticipated.
THE POWER OF PEOPLE
Construction of the Blackstone Canal brought growth, riches and immigrants to Worcester. Irish workers cleared many of the waterways and built the series of locks to accommodate the changing topography between Worcester and Providence. More Irish arrived after the 1845 famine in Ireland. Many French Canadians also arrived before the Civil War to work in the city’s textile mills and plentiful boot and shoe factories.
As the metals and abrasives businesses grew, several companies, including Morgan Construction, recruited Swedes with experience in their home country’s successful ironworks. The population shift was rapid. Where in 1875 there were only 166 Swedish residents, ten years later that number had increased thirteen times to 2,112. In another 10 years, the Swedish population tripled again, so that by 1900, fully 10 percent of all Worcester residents were from Swedish families. Finns came to Worcester as well. At the turn of the century, almost half of all male Scandinavians had jobs in the metals trades. Typically ambitious and upwardly mobile, Swedes soon filled the more skilled positions in rolling mills and wire making, supervising more recently arrived immigrants among Irish, Lithuanian, Polish, Finnish and Armenian laborers.
The 1910 census lists Russians as one of the top five ethnic populations in the city, and Russian Jewish immigrants tended to settle near but not with the Poles and Lithuanians. Armenians (listed as “Turkey in Asia”), Turks (from “Turkey in Europe”), Albanians, Syrians and Greeks arrived in greater numbers in that first decade of the twentieth century. Germans, English Canadians, Scots, Welsh and English were also in the mix. Almost three-fourths of Worcester residents were foreign-born or born of foreign parents in 1920. Each group had its designated neighborhood within the city, and for quite some time, there was little interaction between groups.
The presence of so many newcomers meant that the terms “immigrant” and “blue-collar worker” were virtually interchangeable in turn-of-the century Worcester. Business owners benefited from lower-cost labor and, in an era of increasing union activity, profited from the divisions among ethnic groups. The Worcester Merchants Association’s 1913 promotional brochure, “Facts about Worcester,” noted that 45 nationalities were represented in the city’s population.
Like the generations before them, these newcomers also brought the power of new ideas and innovations, all to Worcester’s gain. Their achievements would take the city in different directions, but not necessarily according to the 19th century patterns of success. “Many of our mechanics own their own homes, and are naturally deeply interested in the welfare of the city,” wrote Ichabod Washburn’s descendant, historian Charles G. Washburn in his 1917 Industrial Worcester. “Avenues of advancement are always open to the capable and industrious ... From their ranks will come the leading businessmen of the next generation upon whom the continuance of prosperity will depend.”
While Washburn could not have predicted the global forces that would change the face of Worcester in the twentieth century, the city had many lessons to draw on from its successful history. Behind the inventors and innovators stood the many men and women whose contributions to the making of an industrial city are often veiled in anonymity but were no less important than the investments and improvements made by the likes of Washburn, Salisbury, Higgins, Merrifield and Morgan.
Charles Morgan’s life story is significant for its intersection with many of the key moments in Worcester’s industrial history. As the city began its meteoric growth, Morgan worked on Merrifield’s longest-lasting steam engine for his incubator building. When a new type of school needed a shop supervisor, Morgan found Milton Higgins. When Washburn & Moen needed more expertise to expand its markets overseas, Morgan encouraged his Swedish metal-working colleagues to make the journey to the U.S. And when Barber’s Crossing in Greendale started to expand as an industrial center, he moved the Morgan Spring Company and several Morgan Construction Co. departments up there. The story of Worcester’s growth and development parallels much of the story of Charles Morgan’s life.
His legacy has ensured the city’s continued success in education, manufacturing and invention. While Worcester today may be known more for biotechnology than metals manufacturing, Morgan Construction’s operations remain in the city as part of Siemens AG. WPI students learn modern mechanical engineering skills in the renovated Washburn Shops. And WPI professors enjoy support from the Morgan Teaching and Learning Center, which helps to guide their work as they prepare the next generation of people in the mould of Charles Hill Morgan—innovative engineers, scientists and industry leaders.
Two
Assembling All the Right Tools, 1831–1860
1827 advertisement for Charles J. Hill’s store in Rochester
AMERICA’S FIRST INLAND BOOMTOWN, Rochester, New York was the fastest-growing community in the United States in 1829. Rochester was thriving thanks to the water power and easy transportation provided by its location at the junction of the Genesee River and the expanding Erie Canal. Several waterfalls punctuated the river’s progress to Lake Ontario, one of which plunged 97 feet in the center of town, supplying hydropower that Rochester’s business owners quickly put to use. Farmers’ wagons would line the river’s docks, clogging the roads and sidewalks with their wares for the city dwellers. The city’s leaders were a new class of merchants, millers and manufacturers.
Rochester’s growth could be measured in barrels of flour, as flour mills, rising four and five stories high, lined the river banks and dominated the economy. Annual flour production had increased nearly a hundredfold, from 2,600 to 200,000 barrels in the decade between 1818 and 1828. The Erie Canal, once famously denounced as “Clinton’s Ditch” after the project’s champion New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, brought hundreds more customers and tons more freight into the city every day.
Hiram and Clarissa Lucina Morgan settled in Rochester in 1829. Less than two years later, when their son, Charles Hill Morgan, was born on January 8, 1831, Rochester was the nation’s newest city, having just crossed the 10,000 population threshold. While Charles would move to other places as he grew into manhood, his life experiences would mirror the same remarkable growth that Rochester underwent, gaining opportunities unimagined by his father’s generation.
Charles was born in a time of change for the nation as well as his city. President Andrew Jackson, known as “Old Hickory,” was the first man to be elected from a frontier state—Tennessee—and not one of the original 13 colonies. The old colonial-era families and power structures were giving way to newcomers with new ideas. Rochester was such a new community, first settled with just over 300 people in 1815, that it could be truthfully reported that every adult who lived there in 1831 had come from somewhere else. While primarily drawing from the New England states, residents also came from England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Canada, Norway and Switzerland. Charles was a member of the first generation able to claim authentic Rochester roots. His heritage would be one of industry and innovation.
Hiram and Clarissa settled in Rochester’s fourth ward after their September 24, 1829 wedding. Both New Englanders, they were married in her western Massachusetts hometown, South Egremont, near Great Barrington in the Berkshires. Clarissa shared her mother’s name but was known by her middle name, Lucina. While she had grown up in Massachusetts