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Reviews
| Watkins Mill: The Factory on the Farm. By Louis W. Potts and Ann M. Sligar. Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State Univ. Press, 2004. 216 pp., maps, diags., tables, illus., appends., refs., bibl., index. $29.95 pb (ISBN 1-931112-22-3).
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Many IA readers are no doubt all too familiar with the scenario of visiting a historical industrial site, like a mill or furnace or factory, and then visiting the gift shop only to find a miniscule pamphlet with little technical detail; sometimes the shops don't even have that much. It is rare to find a historical industrial site, outside the big ones, that is well documented, well preserved, and well published. Although Watkins Mill in northwestern Missouri may not be as famous as Lowell in Massachusetts or Slater's Mill in Rhode Island, it is even more interesting for being such a curious example of mid-19th-century industry in the trans-Mississippian west. This volume, well illustrated throughout, is exactly the sort of souvenir publication for an industrial installation that is both tied to the site and puts the site into the wider context. It also makes both aspects interesting, even for those who have not visited the site, and can prove useful, even if the site is never visited.
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Too many of these sorts of books are clearly labors of love for a local historical society but only amount to 50-page genealogies that collect every scrap of information known about the old proprietors of whatever local industry is being covered and not much else. Potts and Sligar have done a much better job, not only discussing the Watkins family and the mill building itself but also the culture and economics of that part of the country and the economics of the woolen industry. Admittedly, given that the mill is a National Mechanical Engineering Landmark, they might have gone into greater depth on the machinery and the fabric of the mill, but these areas are not completely neglected. Clearly, they targeted this book at the non-IA audience most likely to visit the State Park where the mill still stands. Although I have never been to Watkins Mill myself, Potts and Sligar's book lets me visit it virtually and put it into a larger context.
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The first chapters inevitably explain the life and times of Waltus Watkins, what he was doing in the American West by 1839, and why he erected a woolen mill on the far frontier in 1861. A very interesting chapter on the effects of the Civil War on the farm and factory is well worth reading, although not all that germane for IA. Drawing on Watkins family correspondence, lawsuits, census data, historic files at the mill itself, HAER records, as well as ample secondary literature, the authors show how Watkins leveraged wise investment in land, livestock, crops, and capital machinery into a largely self-sustaining semi-plantation system of cloth manufacture on the Missouri River. They also document family marriages, religious conversions, and attitudes towards everything from temperance and politics to flour and cloth production. Interestingly, Potts and Sligar chose not to use the concept of plantation as a unit of analysis for the Watkins story, although slaves do make a small appearance, and there are discussions of post-Civil War politics in the area and on the Watkins' lands—Watkins was a Unionist but still held slaves, a reminder that these things do not always fall into neat categories. In the end, this narrative is more like the history of a company town (without the labor history), merged with a family history (without endless genealogies).
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Chapters 6 and 7 will be of most interest to industrial archaeologists, for the authors generally explore the operation of the woolen mill (building campaigns involving the whole community are described in previous chapters) and the machinery in the mill itself. The last two chapters explore the social and economic history of the woolen industry of which the mill was part and then the decline and demise of Watkins experiment on the prairie.
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Chapters are given somewhat epigraphic titles that do not always clearly reflect their contents, although after reading the chapter, the logic is clear. The chapter entitled "Considerable Knowledge and Mechanical Ingenuity," for example, is actually a summary of the field-to-market process of producing cloth. It is written generally enough to stand largely independent of Watkins Mill, yet it is copiously illustrated with the old machinery still in the mill. There is, admittedly, a bit of a disconnect here as those interested in the photos of the 1860s patent looms and spindle machines will only find a general description of the process in the adjacent text. Similarly, someone unfamiliar with the machinery, having read the text, may still be unclear on what each machine, as detailed in the photo captions, did and how it did so. Some line diagrams of how these fully described processes worked on the machinery would have been helpful, as would diagrams of machinery layout on each floor of the mill. Here is one place where the authors tip their hands as not being that industrially inclined, preferring instead to let the HAER photos speak (quietly) for themselves rather than engage readers in any nuts-and-bolts history of the machinery or mill. On the other hand, the authors should be commended for not exhibiting a complete phobia about numerical and technical data and including tables and charts for analysis, such as showing family production on the farms, purchasing power, comparative factory systems in Lowell and Waltham, and an excellent raw-material workflow illustration for the mill itself (p. 97).
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| The volume is well produced, with clear grayscale photos and a 16-page color section in the center. The writing is fine, although one can detect a certain unnecessary deference to academic historians when they are quoted. The authors seem to have read widely in regional and woolen history and moderately in social history and in the history of technology to contextualize Watkins Mill. The mill would have made a fabulous case study of a conundrum for both the Jeffersonian agriculturalists and the Hamiltonian industrializers in early-19th-century America, although Potts and Sligar do not quite make that leap. Still, they have no need to defer to university historians, as they have produced a very effective history for a fascinating local site which, although off the radar of most IA people on the east and west coasts, is a great example of Leo Marx's idea of The Machine in the Garden before the Civil War. |
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