New England

The American industrial revolution started in a small wooden building beside a waterfall in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. In 1793, Samuel Slater, an English mechanic who had memorized the design of British spinning machinery, helped build a water-powered cotton mill there. Within a few decades, mills lined nearly every fast river in southern New England.

Rhode Island is a small state with 2 very different faces in the pictures. One is the mill village, with rows of worker housing built by the company next to the mill it served. The other is Newport, where the richest families of the Gilded Age built summer houses they called cottages. The Breakers, finished for Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1895, has about 70 rooms.

Connecticut was a state of makers. Its towns turned out clocks, firearms, brass goods, hats and silverware. Hartford became the insurance capital of the country, and Mark Twain built his house there in the 1870s. Along the shore, New London and Mystic sent ships out whaling and sealing, and Mystic's shipyards built clipper ships in the 1850s.

Vermont looks the way many people imagine all of New England looked. Dairy farms. Covered bridges. White churches on the green. The state also had real industry. Marble was quarried around Proctor, and granite around Barre, and stone from both went into buildings and monuments all over the country. In late winter, farm families tapped their maple trees and boiled the sap down in sugarhouses, and that annual work shows up often in old photographs.

A good thing to look for in New England pictures is the stone wall. Farmers cleared millions of rocks from their fields in the 1700s and 1800s and piled them along the edges. Many of those farms were later abandoned for better land in the West, and the forest grew back. Old photographs show the walls running across open pasture. Today many of them run through the middle of the woods.