Skip to content

Innovation · Chapter 11, 1880–1920

The Wood Worsted Behemoth

The 'eighth wonder of the world' on the Merrimack.

The American Woolen Company's Wood Worsted Mill in Lawrence, at its opening the largest mill building in the world.
The American Woolen Company's Wood Worsted Mill in Lawrence, at its opening the largest mill building in the world.Emw, "Wood Worsted Mills; west and south sides; Lawrence, MA" (2011). Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The American Woolen Company built the Wood Worsted Mill in Lawrence between 1905 and 1909, and it was already in operation by April 1906. The six-story brick mill originally stretched about 1,900 feet along the Merrimack—roughly 1,300 feet of it survive—and held some thirty acres of floor space and, by one account, about seventeen miles of aisles. The company advertised it as the largest worsted mill in the world, and Lawrence residents called it 'the eighth wonder of the world.' Named for the company's president, William M. Wood, the mill consolidated sorting, combing, spinning, weaving, and finishing under a single management. Its scale represented the apex of New England industrial confidence. Within seven years its workers would be at the heart of the 1912 strike.

Sources

  1. Government recordWood Worsted Mill, National Register of Historic Places nomination. National Park Service.
  2. Primary sourceJustus Ebert. The Trial of a New Society. I.W.W. Publishing Bureau, 1913.

Cite this page (Chicago)