We are where the ideas turn to production that changed the world.
A message from the president
On July 4, America will celebrate 250 years of freedom and independence. The story is often told through the lens debate, shouting and ultimately the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence or through battlefield arc from, Lexington and Concord to Yorktown, but independence also depended on productive capacity: mills that ground flour and powder, shops that forged hardware and repaired wagons, yards that built ships, households that spun cloth, furnaces that cast shot and cannon, and inventors who translated craft skill into useful devices. A republic that intended to stay free needed, in addition to bold words and signatures on fine parchment, needed people who could actually make things.
President, MassMEP
The thirteen American colonies, in 1776, were not industrial powers in the modern sense, but they were dense with what we now call makers. They were ironsmiths, ropers, wheelwrights, milliners, coopers, shipbuilders, printers, and blacksmiths. They were artisans and craftsmen whose labor made militia resistance sustainable and war materially possible. In that respect, the achievement of independence rested not only on constitutional imagination and battlefield courage, but also on an economy of workshops, mills, furnaces, farms, and transport networks that war necessity bent toward public purpose. Freedom in 1776 was hammered, spun, cast, milled, fabricated, and hauled into existence.
As one of the original colonies, Massachusetts has the distinct honor of being an innovator and economic driver since the American Revolution.
The Colonial Production Base
The productive landscape of the colonies was regionally varied. New England combined timber, sawmilling, shipbuilding, ropemaking, sailmaking, and fisheries with a dense artisan economy in towns such as Boston, Newport, and Providence. The Middle Colonies, especially Pennsylvania, featured rich grain agriculture, major flour milling, ironworking, printing, leather trades, and urban workshop density centered on Philadelphia. The Chesapeake and the South are often remembered for staple agriculture, but they also depended on blacksmiths, coopers, ship carpenters, millers, wheelwrights, tanners, and small ironworks to sustain both civilian life and wartime mobilization.
Massachusetts
When the first shots of the American Revolution rang out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the patriots of Massachusetts faced a sobering reality: they were going to war against the most powerful military empire on earth, and they had almost nothing — no standing army, no navy, no national arsenal, and precious few of the weapons, cloth, rope, and iron goods that armies require. What they did have was an extraordinary concentration of skilled tradespeople. Blacksmiths, gunsmiths, shipwrights, ropemakers, tanners, weavers, printers, and silversmiths filled the workshops and back lanes of Boston, Salem, Newburyport, Worcester, Northampton, and dozens of smaller towns. For the next eight years, these men and women — the “mechanics” of Massachusetts — turned their crafts toward independence.
Their contributions rarely appear in the textbooks alongside the names of generals and statesmen. Yet without the rope that rigged the Continental Navy’s frigates, the cannon cast in Boston’s North End foundries, the homespun cloth sewn into soldiers’ coats, and the gunpowder milled on the Neponset River, the Continental cause could not have survived. This paper traces the artisans, craftsmen, and makers of Massachusetts who forged a revolution from the bench, the loom, and the forge.
Paul Revere was the foremost manufacturing patriot of Revolutionary Massachusetts. Born in Boston’s North End in 1735, the son of French Huguenot silversmith Apollos Rivoire, Revere parlayed a career making teapots and porringers into an industrial enterprise that supplied the Continental cause from gunpowder to copper sheathing. A member of the Sons of Liberty, the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons, and the North Caucus political club, he engraved the copper plates that documented the Boston Massacre, printed the plates for the first Continental currency, and in late 1775 traveled to Philadelphia to study the colonies’ only powder mill. He returned to establish a gunpowder works on the Neponset River at Canton, commissioned by the Continental Congress in 1776, and that same year advised French engineer Louis de Maresquelle on the casting of bronze cannon for the Massachusetts Board of War — learning the foundry craft he would perfect over the next two decades at his North End works on Lynn and Foster Streets.
In time, Revere became the first American to roll copper into sheets on a commercially viable scale, supplying the hull sheathing for USS Constitution and covering the dome of the Massachusetts State House in 1802. The enterprise survived him, merged into Revere Copper and Brass, Inc., and operates today as Revere Copper Products, Inc. — a 225-year industrial legacy rooted in the Revolution.
Revere was the most visible, but far from the only Massachusetts manufacturer who turned craft skill toward independence.
Seth Pomeroy of Northampton, a fourth-generation blacksmith and gunsmith, had supervised twenty smiths at the siege of Louisbourg in 1745 and brought that same expertise to Bunker Hill at age 68, carrying a musket he had made himself; he died in 1777 as the senior brigadier general of the Continental Army.
Timothy Bigelow, a master blacksmith in Worcester, organized Committees of Safety when the town’s Loyalist gentry would not, turning his shop into a hub of Patriot activity in the interior of the colony.
In Springfield, Henry Knox persuaded Washington to establish an inland arsenal in 1777, where gunsmiths Isaiah Eaton, Enoch Putnam, and John Partridge Bull repaired and produced small arms throughout the war — laying the foundation for the Springfield Armory and the American System of interchangeable-parts manufacturing.
The ropewalks of Boston, operating since John Harrison’s 1642 monopoly on Purchase Street, supplied the cordage that rigged every Continental frigate, and their workers — Samuel Gray and Crispus Attucks among them — had already paid for their patriotism at the Boston Massacre in 1770.
In Newburyport, shipwrights Jonathan Greenleaf and Stephen and Ralph Cross launched USS Hancock and USS Boston in the spring of 1776, among the first warships to fly Continental colors, while John Glover’s regiment of Marblehead mariners fitted out the schooner Hannah at Beverly Harbor as the founding vessel of the United States Navy and later rowed Washington across the Delaware on Christmas night.
The women of the colony were manufacturers too: the Daughters of Liberty organized spinning bees from Boston to Brookfield, and fourteen named women of Newburyport — among them Sarah Moody, Ann Bradish, and Hannah Somerby — were paid in August 1775 to sew clothing for the Continental Army.
From the tanneries of Salem and Peabody that supplied cartridge boxes and soldiers’ shoes, to Isaiah Thomas’s Worcester press that smuggled across the Charles River on the eve of Lexington, Massachusetts made nearly everything the Revolution needed. We continue to keep the innovation alive here.
Happy 4th of July as we celebrate MassMEP’s 30th Anniversary and the Country’s 250th.