Last updated: January 23, 2025
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Forged in the Fire of Revolution: David Wilkinson and the Rise of American Industry
In April 1776, one year after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, delegates from all thirteen colonies met at Philadelphia to discuss their collective future. Just three months later, the delegates signed the Declaration of Independence, further diminishing any possibility of attempts to restore peace between Great Britain and its North American colonies. While world-changing events transpired in Philadelphia, life-changing events were transpiring in the life of a five-year-old boy who lived about 300 miles away, in a rural community called Smithfield. This Rhode Island boy’s name was David Wilkinson. The fourth son of prominent blacksmith Oziel Wilkinson, David sat on a bench in his father’s workshop watching craftsman Eleazor Smith create a machine in the spring of 1776.
Smith’s machine could cut and bend the small wires used on hand cards. These square, hand-held tools aligned the fibers of wool in preparation for spinning. What David observed was the production of a machine, that made a tool, that in turn, made the production of an important object (yarn) much easier. One day David would make a living out of this very process. Later in life, he remembered the effect this moment had on him during his most formative years: “Seventy years afterwards, I could make a likeness of nearly every piece of that machine.” Although that might be hyperbolic, the effect of this interaction cannot be understated. Even in his earliest years, David had a mind for invention, and his young mind was being formed by the experience of his father’s workshop. He concluded, “So durable are the first impressions of the mind of youth.” The story of the Wilkinson family is one of the more dramatic and important, if generally overlooked, tales in the early development of the Industrial Revolution. Theirs is also a story forged in the fires of revolution.
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David’s father Oziel Wilkinson (1744 – 1815) was born into a family of blacksmiths. His father taught him the skills of the forge, and in turn, he trained at least four of his sons in the trade. Like many of his relatives, Oziel’s way of life was a hybrid of old and new technology. Historian Anthony J. Connors, author of Ingenious Machinists, described Oziel as a “farmer blacksmith.” Oziel lived on and supported himself through his farm, but he also worked as a blacksmith, turning iron into tools. In his forge operations on Mussey Brook (in present-day Lincoln, Rhode Island), Oziel crafted and experimented with new technology that enabled industrial progress. For a time, he produced screw presses for candleworks to create candles made of spermaceti from Sperm Whales. He learned this skill from his relative, Israel Wilkinson (1711 – 1784), who was on the cutting-edge of screw press technology. He was also noted for crafting cold iron into nails (or tacks). Oziel’s second cousin, Jeremiah Wilkinson (1741 – 1831), was also among the first to make nails cut in this manner. This was an important technological advancement in the process of nail making.
Jeremiah and Oziel experimented with cold cutting iron around 1775 – 1776. This work was most likely prompted by a scarcity of imported nails due to the growing conflict between the colonies and Great Britain. The lack of British goods prompted colonial production, and domestic production prompted inventiveness. Anthony Connors, one of Wilkinson's biographers, argues that "war with Great Britain provided the opportunity for inventive men to lend their talents to the revolutionary cause…The war and rise of industrialization reinforced each other.” During the early years of the conflict, the Wilkinsons manufactured products that supported the war effort. Most notably, Israel and Oziel were both engaged in producing cast iron cannons.
The Wilkinsons’ involvement in the War for Independence was curtailed by their religious beliefs. As a family biographer stated about Oziel’s cousin, Israel “did not fire the cannon – he cast them… he put no obstacles in the way of others using whatever was necessary to utterly destroy oppression and tyranny.” As members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), participation in war was strictly forbidden. The War for Independence caused many of their extended relatives to question their commitment to non-violence. Several members of the family openly served in colonial forces. Their actions prompted the Cumberland Society of Friends to disown several of Oziel’s second cousins. Especially for Quakers, the war caused moral strife within families and communities.
In 1777, as fighting ensued around Philadelphia and in upstate New York, David went to work for his father for the first time. Now six years old, David headed nails for his father’s operation. He recalled, “My father made a small pinch press, with different sized impressions, placed on an oak log, with a stirrup for the foot, and sat me astraddle the log, to heading nails.” After observing and working in his father’s shop for the entirety of the Revolutionary War, young David was ready to start designing inventions of his own. At the age of fourteen, he put into work a centerless grinder, likely one of the first examples of a working model of this type of machine in the country.
Around the time young David first went to work for his father, Oziel considered moving his operations to the Pawtucket Falls (modern Pawtucket, Rhode Island). The Falls provided one great incentive: plenty of potential power from the over 20-foot drop. However, the war kept him further north, up in Smithfield. The threat of a British invasion up the Providence River from Newport was too great a risk for Oziel, so he kept his family along Mussey Brook. It was not until peace was declared in 1783 that Oziel moved his family’s operations to the burgeoning village of Pawtucket. This was arguably the most important decision Oziel ever made.
The Next Revolution
During the 18th century, the Wilkinsons were business associates with the prominent Brown family of Providence. The Wilkinsons crafted items like screw presses and anchors for the Brown’s maritime empire. Now, as Oziel established an iron forging operation along the banks of the Pawtucket Falls, Moses Brown turned to the Wilkinsons to help him put into operation the country’s first water-powered cotton spinning machines.
In an attempt to break the economic chains that Great Britain still held on the young United States, Brown wanted to bring English industrial scale operations to North America. He adeptly selected Pawtucket as the ideal place for this experiment. Brown also enlisted the help of a young English immigrant named Samuel Slater. Slater had apprenticed in an English textile mill from the age of eleven. Slater promised Brown that he could get the machines working properly.
Oziel and David played a key role in collaborating with Slater to get the first machines successfully running by December 1790. Oziel’s youngest son, Smith Wilkinson, soon went to work operating the carding engine in the new cotton mill. He was only ten years old at the time. If not for the insightful collaboration and skill of the Wilkinsons, it is unlikely that this experiment would have ever proved a success. Slater also became the newest member of the Wilkinson family when he married Oziel’s daughter Hannah in 1791. This marital bond solidified an alliance between the well-established Wilkinsons and Slater the newcomer.
By 1810, the Wilkinsons constructed a new three and a half story rubble stone mill immediately adjacent to Almy, Brown & Slater’s cotton factory, known today as Old Slater Mill. Although the stone mill possessed spinning and eventually weaving operations, its machine shop was the most important feature. Under the supervision of David, this machine shop became a training ground for the next generation of American machinists. Once again, war with Great Britain in 1812 spurred further industrial growth. Training places like the Wilkinson’s machine shop proved critical in aiding the expansion of American industry that ensued in the years from 1807 – 1820.
David remained on the cutting edge of the latest inventions and technology for most of his adult life. He developed a screw-cutting lathe, tinkered in early mechanized loom technology, and worked successfully in early experimental steam engines. He even installed a steam engine in the Wilkinson Mill as auxiliary power, one of the earliest examples of this type of technology in the Americas. The Wilkinson Mill was named a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1977, and it is now part of the Old Slater Mill National Historic Landmark District in Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park.
The legacy of the Wilkinson family cannot be understated. Neither man served in a single battle of the American Revolution, yet both made tools that enabled the colonies, and then the new United States, to break away from Great Britain. Their contributions to colonial Rhode Island, the War for Independence, and the earliest years of the American Industrial Revolution shaped the future of the United States, and particularly the rise of industry in North America. Oziel and David’s roles in these revolutions extend far beyond the story of Slater Mill. Both were inventors and machinists, and some have even called them both geniuses. From their family workshop along the Pawtucket Falls, the Wilkinsons helped forge the American Industrial Revolution.
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If you would like to learn more about the Wilkinson story, please see: Anthony Connors, Ingenious Machinists: Two Inventive Lives from the American Industrial Revolution (New York: State University of New York Press, 2014).