Plymouth Cordage Company
American rope manufacturing company
The Plymouth Cordage Company was a rope making company located in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
History
The company, founded in 1824, had a large factory located on the Plymouth waterfront. By the late 19th century, the Plymouth Cordage Company had become the largest manufacturer of rope and twine in the world. The company specialized in ship rigging, and was chosen among other competitors in the early 1900s to manufacture the rope used on the USS Constitution.
In January 1916, the company was seeing increased business in their busiest season, preparing twine for both local harvest and foreign countries at war. When wages stayed stagnant despite rising costs of living, Cordage workers, despite not being unionized, spontaneously walked out in the company's first strike, halting company-wide production. Local anarchists from Boston traveled to support the strike, including Luigi Galleani and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who formerly worked at the factory and later blamed his staunch participation in the strike for being blacklisted in the region. Historians contest that the strike had such an effect on workers. After a month-long closure, the factory offered a modest increase in wages below the strike demand, to which the workers accepted and returned.
Upton Sinclair's 1928 historical novel "Boston" has several chapters devoted to the company when his elderly heroine goes to work for the factory.
The public source identifies “Plymouth Cordage Company” as american rope manufacturing company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Plymouth, Cordage and Company.
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This entry incorporates text from “Plymouth Cordage Company” 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.