Beverly Cotton Manufactory
cotton mill in Beverly, Massachusetts
Beverly Cotton Manufactory was the first cotton mill built in America, and the largest cotton mill to be built during its era. It was built hoping for economic success, but reached a downturn due to technical limitations of the then early production process and limitations of the machines being used. Being the birthplace and testing grounds of the cotton milling industry at the time, it has been called the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.
History
The founders of the original mill business concept were Thomas Somers and James Leonard, who had recruited others to build and create the mill and machines. In 1787, Beverly Cotton Manufactory was established by The Proprietors of the Beverly Cotton Manufactory, a Massachusetts company that consisted of Capt. John Cabot, George Cabot, Andrew Cabot, Deborah Higginson Cabot, Henry Higginson, Dr. Joshua Fisher, Moses Brown, Israel Thorndike, and Isaac Chapman. In 1789, legislation had shown that 22/40 of company ownership was shared by Cabot and Higginson incorporators, with 9/40 being owned by Fisher, 4/40 by Brown, 4/40 by Thorndike, and 1/40 belonging to Chapman. Capt. Cabot and Fisher were the largest shareholders individually, 19/40 together, and were the managers of the manufactory.
“Beverly Cotton Manufactory” enters the record as cotton mill in Beverly, Massachusetts. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Beverly, Cotton and Manufactory can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4899498. Authority coordinates are 42.573, -70.893. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1787 and 1789.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beverly Cotton Manufactory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.