The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life. Allison Chisolm
eight miles east of Rochester. Dr. Noah Rich had been one of the early settlers of that town.
Before Lucina married Hiram, she had lived in Rochester with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hill, boarding and perhaps serving the family in some capacity. Charles J. Hill had married a relative of Hiram’s, Salome Morgan of Brimfield, Massachusetts, in 1823, and was a successful merchant as co-owner of the Rochester Cash Store. He advertised his business in 1827 as a “wholesale and retail dealer in dry goods, groceries and such other Miscellaneous Goods as are usually wanted in ‘Town and Country.’” An elder in the Presbyterian Church, a member of the volunteer fire department, and involved in the town’s early governance, it is not surprising Charles Hill impressed Lucina to such a degree that she named her first son after him.
While little else is known of Lucina in this period of her life, a family genealogy notes the story that “her hair turned gray at the age of 18,” seven years before Charles’ birth. As a new mother, she would have followed the advice of the time and considered as her primary responsibility devotion to his physical care and moral upbringing. It’s possible she read the 1831 child rearing bestseller by Lydia Maria Child, The Mother’s Book, which declared “the mind of a child ... is a vessel empty and pure,” formed by outside influences that began with the parents. The stakes were high. Child dedicated her book “to American Mothers, on whose intelligence and discretion the safety and prosperity of our republic so much depend.”
Hiram’s roots were in Brimfield, near Sturbridge, Massachusetts. He came from a long line of New England settlers, and Morgans were among the first to claim land in Brimfield in 1732. They moved there from Springfield where Miles Morgan had settled in 1636, a Welshman who emigrated from Bristol, England to Boston and then almost immediately headed 90 miles west. Two generations later, in 1700, his grandson David petitioned the governor for more land “for our posterity to live comfortably thereon.”
Hiram was skilled in woodturning, and was known as a mechanic, which in nineteenth-century terms meant he understood machinery—how to build it, run it and repair it. Given his talents, he likely worked for one of the many flour mills. Mill work came to him naturally, as his grandfather, Aaron Morgan, had established the first grist and saw mill in Brimfield. A flour mill is not a simple operation, however. According to an historical account of Rochester from that period, a visitor to one of the city’s flour mills exclaimed upon leaving that it was “as full of machinery as the case of a watch.”
Despite the expanding opportunities for a skilled mechanic, a cholera epidemic in the summer of 1832, prompted the family’s move out of the city. By 1833, the family had relocated to the town of Clyde, some 50 miles east of Rochester, where Charles’ brother, Francis Henry Morgan, was born. They called the baby Henry. Clyde had a thriving economy, known for window glass production, thanks to its location on the Erie Canal, halfway between Rochester and Syracuse.
The Erie Canal helped flour and glass shipments reach urban markets along the eastern seaboard, but also provided a way for many Americans to migrate west, to Buffalo, and then via the Great Lakes to Cleveland and Detroit. The Morgans joined this throng. Within another year or two, the family moved again, most likely in search of better employment opportunities, and travelled to the town of Marshall in Michigan Territory.
Marshall was on the frontier, a full 100 miles west of Detroit, which meant another two long days by stagecoach on the Old Territorial Road. Founded in 1830, Marshall fully expected to become the capital once Michigan gained statehood. As a result, one local history notes, it attracted both notables and ne’er-do-wells, “dozens of doctors, lawyers, ministers, business people and land speculators.” Named after Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, the town was the county seat and served as a stopping point for travelers going west to Chicago.
Charles Morgan’s first school was probably Marshall’s pioneer schoolhouse, built in 1832, and staffed by Miss Eliza Ketchum. The frame building also served as the town hall, courthouse, church and public meeting place. It was a good place to begin an education, as two Marshall citizens, Reverend John Pierce and a lawyer, Isaac Crary, had created the Michigan school system. Established when the state constitution was passed in 1835, the Michigan model was later adopted by other states in the former Northwest Territory. Michigan officially became a state in 1837, but it took another ten years of political wrangling to determine that the capital would be located not in Marshall but in Lansing, which had only a handful of settlers at the time.
Charles’ youngest brother, Cyrus Rich, arrived in Marshall on July 4, 1838 sharing a birthday with the nation. His birth came almost two years to the day after another brother, Hiram Dexter, had been born but, sadly, had only lived a few days.
The Morgan family was growing during a tumultuous time in the nation’s history. The rapid expansion westward and the construction of both canals and railways had led to overspeculation and inflation. In response, President Jackson decided to close the country’s central bank and require banks to pay for all notes with gold or silver.
Within two months of taking office, Jackson’s successor, President Martin Van Buren, helplessly witnessed the Panic of 1837. Banks suspended payments for notes on demand, one-quarter of all banks closed, and unemployment was widespread. Without credit, business owners could not buy raw materials or pay their workers, so factories closed. Farmers could not sell their produce. Food riots broke out in New York as mobs attacked a flour warehouse.
In Boston, however, the “Suffolk System,” a regional central banking arrangement for most New England banks (except in Rhode Island), insulated New England from the worst effects of the crisis. While the nation suffered a decline in growth in 1837, followed by years of slow growth, just over one percent, production numbers for the Massachusetts textile industry averaged seven percent.
HOME TO NEW ENGLAND
Given the economic conditions, a move back to New England certainly made sense for the Morgans. Sometime during the summer of 1839, perhaps in time for Hiram’s sister Malvina’s July wedding, Hiram, Lucina and the three boys moved back east to live in West Boylston, Massachusetts. A growing town of 1,330 residents, West Boylston was 42 miles west of Boston and eight miles north of Worcester.
They moved in with Hiram’s mother, Polly Forbush Morgan, who had relocated to West Boylston from Brimfield after the death of her husband, Calvin, in 1832. The new arrivals crowded into the Morgan home, doubling the household size as Hiram’s unmarried younger siblings, Abigail, Francis, Harriet and Cordelia still lived with Polly. Facing the trials and uncertainties that moving to a new community always create, the Morgans found solace in their Christian faith. Hiram and Lucina officially joined the First Congregational Church of West Boylston on September 1, 1839. Reverend Brown Emerson welcomed them into the congregation.
West Boylston was an attractive place to live, as Hiram would have had several employers to choose from. He could have worked in a boot factory or one of seven cotton mills, all powered by the confluence of the Nashua, Quinapoxet and Stillwater rivers. Drawn to a novel mechanical invention, Hiram might have worked in the factory that made the warp stop motion machine—which brought looms to a halt if a thread broke—a major innovation for the textile industry and one invented by local resident Thomas Keyes.
Other opportunities existed in the nearby community known as Factory Village, which was a section of south Lancaster, a sprawling town that included 12 separate villages. Aptly named, Factory Village by the late 1830s had factories making combs, satinets (finely-woven, satin-like cloth), worsted wool and forks.
One new employer, West Boylston resident and fellow church member with the Morgans, Erastus B. Bigelow started up a coach lace operation in Factory Village in 1838 with his brother Horatio. A serial inventor since childhood, Erastus had invented a hand loom and a machine for making piping cord before he was 14. Erastus’ coach lace invention mechanically produced the narrow borders used to decorate stagecoach cushions and straps, rather than through the traditional handcrafted method. Automation resulted in production costs per yard plummeting from 22 cents to 3 cents, which fueled the company’s 20 percent annual growth for its first seven years.
Bigelow named the new business the Clinton Company, after