Company
DissolvedArkwright's mills
Cromford · Since 1771
Cotton spinning at Cromford ended in the nineteenth century. The mill survives as a museum of the system it invented.
In 1771 Richard Arkwright opened a cotton mill at Cromford, in Derbyshire, powered by the Bonsall brook. The water frame spun thread strong enough for warp. The machine mattered. The building mattered more. He put the machines, the workers, and the clock in one place and locked the gate.
Arkwright was not the only inventor of the machinery, and the patents were later challenged. He was the one who made a factory system people copied: shifts, rules posted on the wall, housing for families who would otherwise not have lived within reach of a rural stream.
A day measured by the bell
Children and women tended the frames. Men built and repaired them, or moved material. The mill ran long hours because the water ran and the machines did not tire. Fines enforced punctuality. Cromford also had a pub the workers did not own and a chapel the employer approved of. The job was no longer a piece of work finished at home and brought to a putter-out. It was attendance.
The mill outlived the spinner
Arkwright died in 1792, knighted and rich. Cotton spinning at Cromford declined as steam let mills move to the coal and the ports, and the site left the industry in the nineteenth century. The buildings are now a museum run by the Arkwright Society. The system he demonstrated did not need his name. Every later mill in this catalogue is, in part, a copy.
The work it organized
- Frame tenter
- Millwright
- Overlooker
- Piecer
On the timeline
Related
- Boulton & WattDissolved
- WedgwoodReorganized