Textile Industry

In the 1870s, the largest cotton mill complex in the world was located in Cohoes, New York. The surviving mill buildings and workers’ houses hint at the once thriving industry that began in 1836 when Peter Harmony strategically founded a textile company along the Erie Canal, utilizing water diverted from the Cohoes Falls to power his factory. Raw cotton from southern states was processed, spun, and knitted or woven into printed calicos and fine cotton muslins.

By 1870, Cohoes had eighteen knitting mills and six cotton mills running 203,000 spindles, hence the city’s nickname, the “Spindle City.” The largest mill, Mill No. 3 at Harmony Mills, was built between 1866 and 1872. The building was 1,185 feet long and five stories high. It was considered to be one of the most technologically advanced cotton factories in America. At its peak, Harmony Mills employed 3,100 people and had a predominantly female work force. Mill No. 3 alone housed 2,700 looms that produced 100,000 yards of fabric every sixty hours. The Harmony complex sold in 1937 when the cotton industry became less dependent on water power.

Clark Tompkins of Troy invented and patented the upright rotary knitting machine, illustrated here, to produce knit goods that could be turned into men’s and women’s shirts and drawers. Considered noiseless, the machine could knit, revolve, and wind the material. Machines manufactured by him, and later his sons known as Tompkins Brothers, were used throughout the United States, Canada, and South America.

Steamships

Shortly after 1:00 pm on August 17, 1807, an ungainly vessel fitted with a smokestack pulled away from the dock on the Hudson River at Greenwich Village.Twenty-four hours later the steamboat docked at Clermont, Robert Livingston’s estate 110 miles upriver. The remaining eight hour journey to Albany continued the next morning. Upon arrival, the vessel’s inventor, Robert Fulton, immediately penned letters to friends describing his success. His maiden voyage started a steamship revolution on the Hudson River that lasted for more than a century.

Before steamships, travel and trade by stagecoach or sloop took weeks and months. After Fulton proved his invention would work, steamships regularly traveled the Hudson River between Albany and New York City, transporting passengers and cargo on regular schedules.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, steamships resembled floating palaces complete with interiors fitted with velvet upholstered seating, crystal chandeliers, fine paintings, and wall to wall carpeting. The Hudson River Day Line advertised its steamships in the 1880s as “strictly first-class—no freight.” A newspaper reported: “With rare exceptions, the passengers are nice people. The peanut and sausage eaters; the beer drinkers; the pipe smokers; the expectorators; the loud talkers; the life long enemies of soap and water, are never seen here.” Considerably larger than their predecessors, the new breed of steamships had steel hulls and six boilers. Better than 400 feet in length, these vessels serviced thousands of passengers per voyage.

Steamships eventually succumbed to the automobile and highway systems. On December 31, 1948, the Hudson River Day Line officially terminated service, ending the steamship era on the Hudson.