The links between Belper, Derbyshire, UK and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, USA and views of East Lodge garden..
Views of East Lodge Garden.
Best Residential Garden in East Midlands, 2002
Linda and her garden wass featured on BBC Video Nation where she made four short videos of the seasons.
Beaucause these are not reliably reproduced on the BBC website anymore, a combined version is reproduced here.
Download Video:
Closed Format: "MP4"
Open Format: "Ogg"
Links with Pawtucket, Rhode Island, USA
Samuel Slater was born at the family farm Holly House in
1768 to William Slater one of the landed gentry of
Blackbrook, near Belper, England. William was an associate
of Jedediah Strutt whom he helped secure the ground
and water necessary for a new mill at Milford.
Samuel was apprenticed at this Strutt mill in 1782
aged 14, and was brought up in the Strutt family
home.
William died soon after, as the result of a farm
accident, but Jedediah continued with his son's
apprenticeship enabling Samuel to retain his inheritance
intact. He was a very able student but could see that,
because of all Jedediah's sons, he would never manage at
one of his benefactor's cotton mills. Although there is
some controversy since there was a law about taking
information out of the country (what we would call a
"Brain Drain"), Samuel left secretly for America in 1789
and after a short employment in a New York mill he went
to work for a Quaker, Moses Brown and his partner William
Almy, in Providence. Samuel had heard about their
advanced machines and experimental work and offered to
work with no contract, to prove his worth. During this
time he reworked one of their spinning frames similar to
Arkwright's Water Frame and was subsequently offered a
partnership. Samuel improved various machines, using his
overall knowledge of the whole spinning process to
concentrate on the bottlenecks.
Later Samuel used his management training to teach his
businessmen colleagues the techniques that had made
Jedediah's mills so successful. His aim was to run the
mill at full capacity and develop a market for all the
yarn that was produced. His partners had been making to
order causing peaks and troughs in the demand. His sucess
at running the business in Pawtucket, Rhode Island led to
the "Slater
Mill" being built in 1792. This is acknowledged as
the first successful American cotton spinning mill.
Samuel's view on how to be successful differed from his
partners. He had shown that a mill specialising in a
single process was viable but Moses and William wanted to
be involved with the whole process up to the finished
knitted goods. In 1797 Samuel left the partnership to
build his own White Mill on the other side of the
river.
In 1791 he married Hannah the daughter of a Quaker, Oziel
Wilkinson, with whom he had been lodging and with this
family developed equipment and built mills during the
spread of the American industrial revolution. His
knowledge of Strutt's equipment and fireproof building
design was invaluable to this development. The arrival
from England of Samuel's brother with more tool and
pattern designs led to further expansion and the village
of Slatersville developing.
Hannah died in 1812 leaving Samuel with seven children
and in 1817 he married Mrs Ester Parkinson, a widow.
Samuel died in 1835 being known as the father of the
American Cotton industry.
