HI and Happy New Year to All,
Marilyn Fletcher, our Senior Warden, wants you to know your pledge envelopes will be in the narthex of our church for pickup. Since your number may have changed names and addresses are on each box for easy ID. She would also like you to pick up envelopes for family, friends or neighbors of our parish, if possible, to save mailing costs, which are up sharply. Thank you for your kind attention to this.
Shortly before Christmas, Marilyn and Walter Scott, financial liaison to the Diocese, met with Bishop Wolfe and Canon Fornal to provide our financial and structural reports for the last nine months without a Rector. Both Bishop and Canon were amazed at our progress in both areas, and were very happy to help set our course for the next two years.
Marilyn and Walter asked permission to call the Rev. Cecelia (Cece) Perry as long term supply priest, to serve until the end of 2012, and permission was thankfully granted. Cece has since signed the necessary papers, and will begin in this capacity this Sunday She has acted as our supply priest several times, including a re-dedication, and loves our church and the dedicated members she has met, and she has high hopes for our future. Cece will serve at both the 8 AM and 10 AM services, and will be available for weddings, funerals, home and hospital visits. At the request of Bishop Wolfe she will also attend Vestry meetings. Our church will be greatly blessed to have the continuity she will provide. The second phase of our two year plan will start at the end of 2012, when again the Bishop (a new one then) will be presented with the necessary paperwork for 2013. She or he will again be asked for permission to acquire the services of a long term supply priest until the end of 2013, when we believe we will be in a position to begin the search for a new Rector at the start of 2014. This is a very conservative plan which should reap benefits for us in the long term.
At this time we have approximately 112 pledging units. This number is down considerably since we voted to NOT merge with Emmanuel, as was suggested by former church leaders, causing some of our parishoners to change their membership. However, it was the general consensus that GOd wanted Christ Church to remain a vital and active ministry, just as it has been for the past 176 years, and with his continuous demonstrations of love, guidance and blessings in 2011, we will continue on the path HE has set for us all. We hope to see everyone at the Annual Meeting on Sunday, February 12 after the 10 AM service.
**Submitted with permission of Joan Reid and Leslie Willis**

Cindy & Tom Mulvey

This is the 175th anniversary celebration of Christ Church, here, in the Lincoln village of Lonsdale. Next month, April, is the 175th anniversary of the death of Samuel Slater, the founder of the American textile industry. He began that important American industry here in the Blackstone Valley. Slater’s passing in 1835 marked the end of the first era of textile manufacturing. The origins of this church and the rise of the Lonsdale Village marked a second chapter of this important American story.

Slater had weathered early ups and down times, the birth pains of the industry, in the depression years, 1816 to 1819, 1828, and even the year of his death, the Panic of 1835. He died a millionaire a hundred and seventy-five years ago.

Slater’s industrial era was physically characterized by small, wooden-framed mills, with bell cupolas like those on barns. His work force was comprised of local farm families who were ready to try something new. Many lived on marginally productive farms whose lands were worn out, or that had been made smaller over generations of subdividing. They struggled with crop failures, weather, and insects. They traded in their worn-out farmsteads on the hillsides over-looking Mr. Blackstone’s river in exchange for neat rows of new wooden houses near the mill. The houses could accommodate two or four families. The change, they thought, could bring reliable, dependable, work. Perhaps this would be a path to a better life. All members of the family, down to children as young as six or seven, could have a job.

However, they had to give up a lot. Their lives were no longer their own; they were regulated by the ringing of the mill bell. It told them when to wake up, when to be in the mill at their machine, it told them when they could go home, and it told them when to go to bed. They bought their needs at the company store, and their rent was deducted from their pay. In the beginning, they only got paid twice a year. Moreover, because they became renters, living as it were on someone else’s land, in someone else’s house, they lost the right to vote under state law. They were not entitled to take part in elections, or get a say at town meetings. The concept of selling ones’ time turned out not to be to everyone’s liking. Not everyone submitted easily to this kind of regimentation, and so some of these former farm families eventually left the mill, either to go back to their hillside farms or to strike out for new lands in the American West, or to take up another kind of business in one of the growing commercial centers like Providence or Pawtucket.

Slater’s gift to the area was not just starting the first mills in Pawtucket, where he had the help of local artisans and craftsmen from the Wilkinson and Jenckes families. Slater’s bigger contribution lay in training hundreds of would-be mechanics and mill-wrights in the ways of making cloth. He showed them how to use the forceful flow of the river to power the machines. These Slater-trained mechanics spread up and down the length of this river starting new mills or working under owners and managers who were willing to risk their money, investing in the new technology. Slater himself had the financial backing of Quaker merchant, Moses Brown of Providence. Brown was part of a prominent Providence family of merchants with interests in the China Trade, the ownership of many farm properties, and a smattering of manufacturing experience in the making of candles and iron ware products.

Another contribution of Slater was the creation of a new manufacturing model, the factory village. In the collaboration with Moses Brown, Samuel and his brother, John, ‘invented’ the industrial mill village formula in Slatersville, located on the Branch River in northern Rhode Island. That formula was used here in Lonsdale and expanded and refined. Mill villages were the essential combination of residential worker housing and factory buildings for an industry. Harnessing the forceful flow of water could only occur at places where it was possible to build a restraining dam across a river. In most cases, this meant locations of empty countryside. Therefore, houses for the workers and a village support system of school, store, and church – all within walking distance of the mill –had to be made from scratch. This was the case at Lonsdale. The evolution of the village of Lonsdale over time took place in at least four separate stages –more, if you include its expansion to the Cumberland side of the river, a development known as Lonsdale New Village.

Lonsdale village was built on an elevated hillside, overlooking river, meadow and marsh; more accurately, it was built on a narrow ridge of land, with the river on its east –abutted by a large meadow, and the Blackstone Canal on its west which ran through a hollow to Scott’s Pond. A higher plateau of land on the other side of the hollow became Prospect Hill, what we call the Front Street area of Lonsdale. At the time Lonsdale was begun, there was no Town of Lincoln. All of what is now Lincoln, Central Falls, present day Smithfield, and North Smithfield had been set off from Providence in 1731 as the Town of Smithfield.

So, Lonsdale, then in Smithfield, represented the second phase of the industrialization story, a story of larger scale and larger size, a story of innovation, and a story of a sustaining, reliable, and resilient mill management from a family group based in Providence. It was a new step forward, taken just at the close of step one, with the death of Slater in the spring of 1835. It came just as the new textile industry was catching its second wind.

The significant differences between the first age of mills and the second became evident as Lonsdale village grew. The change showed up in the form of basic factory construction. The use of the smaller wooden mill buildings gave way to stout stone factories, and later to brick mills of a size which dwarfed the earlier factories. . Wooden houses for the workers were eventually succeeded by those also of brick. Instead of local farm families making up the work force, or, in addition to them, came experienced textile working families from England and Scotland. Also, in addition to the existing religious bodies, such as the Baptists and Quakers, already nearby, came churches representing Anglican Episcopal, or sometime Methodist fellowships.

In phase two, due to the relatively isolated, rural, locations of the mill villages –their growing distance from Providence and their dependence on supplies of raw cotton and wool — it became essential more than ever that connecting transportation links to the Port of Providence be built. Old wagon roads, like the one from Providence to Great Road were no longer sufficient. Even larger wagons could only carry a few big bales of cotton arriving at Providence in boats from the South. By the time of the building of Christ Church in 1835, improved toll roads, called turnpikes, the Blackstone Canal, and eventually the Providence and Worcester Railroad, provided these links of local manufacturing to the Port of Providence. Behind all of these developments, as well as the creation of the Lonsdale village itself, was the Providence merchant firm of Nicholas Brown and their in-laws, the family of Thomas P. Ives. They were nephews and cousins to the firm of Almy, Brown, and Slater. Although still alive at the time, but into his 90s, Moses Brown, like Slater was part of the first era of industrialization, now waning; his death followed Slater’s a year later in 1836. It was a significant passage. Although formally incorporated, the firm of Brown and Ives was run in the fashion of a trading company, as a partnership. The new Lonsdale Company was just one of their interests.

If any one person were to be singled out as the ‘founder’ of Lonsdale Village it could be Captain Wilbur Kelly, an agent of Brown and Ives, the former sea captain of the Ann and Hope. Kelly was born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, in 1782, and came to the Providence area, becoming a sea captain. He settled first in North Providence where he married a local girl by the name of Abby Eliza Whipple in 1810; they had four children. His sea-going fame was made on voyages to China and back as captain of the second Ann and Hope, setting speed records and making good profits for the company which they used in expanding their textile manufacturing. Kelly was an interesting figure, representing those up- and -comers who had one career foot in the maritime industry and the other in manufacturing.

Lonsdale was Kelly’s third mill village enterprise. In 1816, he and another sailor tried their hand in running a mill in North Providence. Their timing was bad, and it failed. They were bailed out with the help of Edward Carrington, a prominent merchant in Providence who had a great deal of experience in the China Trade ( having once served as a consul in Canton) as well as background in the lesser known trade with South America. Carrington, like Kelly, however, also invested in mills, here in Lincoln, and in Woonsocket. One of the streets across the way from this church bears his name.

After Kelly’s failed attempt in North Providence, where reputedly he drew the plans for the Mineral Spring Turnpike, he returned to the sea, conducting coastal voyages to places like Philadelphia for Brown and Ives. In 1823, however, he bought another mill site here in Lincoln.

It was called the Smithfield Cotton and Woolen Manufactory and was located in what we today call Quinnville. It was on the west bank of the Blackstone opposite the Cumberland village of Ashton. Old Ashton was one of its names; at the time Kelly bought it the site, however, was called Sinking Fund Factory. Kelly, with Carrington’s help purchased Sinking Fund Factory from George Olney who represented various local owners, including River Road farmer, Simon Whipple, whose home is opposite the present Lincoln Town Hall. It was probably then the smallest mill village in Rhode Island, comprised of a stone cotton mill, a dam, a saw and gristmill, and five workers houses. When Sinking Fund was being operated it employed fewer than thirty people, mostly women and children. Olney, himself had built a machine shop on Great Road, now known as the Moffett Mill (scheduled to be open to visitors this year), and he had a thread mill in what is now Lincoln Woods. Kelly lived at his new purchase at Sinking Fund from 1823 to 1830. The meadow at this site also boasted a 17 acre farm. Today it is part of the Blackstone River State Park and Bike Path. Kelly’s superintendent’s house is open May through October as a little transportation museum.

Historians believe Kelly bought Sinking Fund Factory because he had word that his former employers, Brown and Ives were about to build a canal between Providence and Worcester to open the hinterland mill sites of the Blackstone as a transportation improvement to serve the Port of Providence and, most importantly, improve the fortunes of their own Blackstone Manufacturing Company in the Town of Blackstone, located just across the Rhode Island state line in Massachusetts. They were already contemplating a business shift away from maritime enterprises and going more heavily into manufacturing. Their plans called for the canal company to put its trench right through Kelly’s new mill land and, within two years of the arrival of the canal, the closed Sinking Fund manufactory was back on the rise. Their plans also called for plotting the Canal route through Scotts Pond, which would directly improve the value of their site of the future manufacturing village of Lonsdale. One wonders if Kelly really wanted to make his mark as a manufacturer at Old Ashton, or whether it was just a tack in the course of his personal voyage. Within a year, 1826, Kelly sold most of his interest in Sinking Fund to Brown and Ives (it became the Upper Mill of the Lonsdale Company), and he became a real estate agent for them in buying up nearly four miles of river bank, both sides, from Ashton to Scott’s Pond. It was some 435 acres. Acting as a stalking horse, or front man, for the Providence merchants, Kelly was able to assemble this remarkable real estate parcel without local land owners being much the wiser. Brown and Ives formed the Lonsdale Water Company at this time, and in 1831 they incorporated the Lonsdale Manufacturing Company. By this time Kelly had filled the roles as their manufacturing manager at Sinking Fund, their cargo consignment agent for the Blackstone Canal Company, and now as their manager or agent for the new mills they built at Lonsdale. The first footprint of the village was a small grid: two north/south streets on top of the ridge between the meadow and the Canal, modern Lonsdale Avenue; it was crossed by two short streets, School and Scott, now John Street which intersects the church and parish house. The fourth street was Main Street, a second north/south street overlooking the mills and the Canal, Scott’s Pond, and joining Lonsdale Avenue at the southern end of the village.

Lonsdale Company records at the Rhode Island Historical Society record a vote of the Brown and Ives partners on June 7, 1834, authorizing Wilbur Kelly to contract for the building two dwelling houses of two tenements each, and one dwelling house of four tenements. He is also authorized to erect a church. While a congregation had already been gathered and met first in homes, later in a space in the mill provided by the Company, this vote marks the step to build a church edifice. In August, Kelly was subsequently authorized to provide for a village store. A year later, in May of 1835, four new houses were added.

At first Lonsdale Avenue was called Church Street and the church was just about the only building on the east side of the road. At the northern end of Church Street the ridge went down to the river just before it crossed the Whipple Bridge into Cumberland and Lonsdale Avenue becomes Mendon Road, Cumberland On the Cumberland side were three terraces of the sloping meadow once owned by the Rev. William Blackstone, made famous for his roses, apple orchards, and his eccentricity for riding about on the back of a white bull. Blackstone, the area’s first settler had his name bestowed on the river which meandered at the foot of his farm.

As Lonsdale’s founder, it is yet unclear how much influence Captain Wilbur Kelly exerted in the design or ground plan of the village. There is no other planner of record in the Lonsdale Company Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society. Nor, is there evidence to indicate that the owners of Brown and Ives altered their practice carried over from their shipping days of second guessing their sea captain. Long distance captains, on voyages of a year and a half to China and India, one might say, were given plenty of latitude in guiding every day events. Kelly was definitely their main man in Lincoln, then the town of Smithfield. Not only was he in charge at Lonsdale, but also at Sinking Fund Factory, a few miles to the north, which he had sold them, and now called the ‘Upper Mill’ of the Lonsdale Company. At Lonsdale, instead of owning a fleet of ships, Brown and Ives began a fleet of mills, with the help of Kelly. Mill #1 was erected in 1831, followed a year later by Mill #2, and Mill # 3 in 1834. By 1835, with the dedication of the church building, the historical record shows that in addition to the three mills, the store was in operation. There was a ‘counting’ house, a school house, an office, twenty worker dwellings, two barns, and one building for bailing(sic) cloth and storing coal. Two years later, in 1837, for on the site repairs, a machine shop and blacksmith shop were added. Also, on the Lincoln, or as it was called, then, the Smithfield side of the Blackstone, a cloth finishing bleachery was built in 1844, ten years later. Eventually, the bleachery would grow to seven buildings of its own and be called the Lincoln Bleachery. It was the place where all the final ‘finishing’ processes of the cloth were administered. It was to have a century of operations and was the last element of the Lonsdale Company to be eventually sold off in 1945.

Although tied directly to Providence, some six miles away by Lonsdale Avenue, the Lonsdale mill complex, which was then the second biggest in New England, was nonetheless still isolated. Saylesville Finishing Company, at the other end of Scotts Pond began to emerge after 1844 with its own finishing mill and its own mill village, but there was nothing between Lonsdale and the Upper Mill at Ashton but farms, and, most of them were back, away from the river on hillsides. So, Lonsdale’s functioning depended on having all the elements necessary for its daily operations in walking distance: worker housing, a dairy farm, a store, a school and a church. Pedestrian proximity – mill house to factory- was key to having everyone at his place in front of his or her machine when the works started up each day. Smooth, uninterrupted spinning and weaving was essential for manufacturing efficiency. Work in the Lonsdale mills typically began around six am. There was a pause for a snack or break around 8:30. Dinner was at noon with children arriving with dinner pails. At 12:30 or so, the machines resumed and work continued until seven or eight o’clock depending on daylight. A ceremony for lighting candles occurred in the late fall, and a ‘blowing out’ ceremony marked the arrival of spring light. Mills were designed with a row of small windows in the roof line to allow more light in the upper story.

Widths of the mill buildings were determined by the distance from the walls that light could penetrate through the side windows. Much like working conditions in a barn, the mills were largely unheated. They were cold in the winter, and they were sweltering in the summer. In all seasons the noise from the machines was loud.

Historians have only recently discovered that another key element for these villages was the presence of factory-owned farms. These fed the local villagers and were also the place where key factory operatives worked in order to keep them busy when the textile business went into slumps and depressions. Kelly’s Upper Mill at Ashton was on a 17 acre farm. The meadow at Lonsdale which eventually became the Drive-In Movie was the site of the company dairy farm.

People within living memory recall Lonsdale farm wagons making their way up Mendon Road, Cumberland to deliver fertilizer to the farm at Ashton. Others have told me of seeing the herd from the dairy meadow being led by village boys into Cumberland to graze on fields on Marshall Avenue, now known as Meadowcrest suburban housing. Another part of the Lonsdale dairy herd went to fields in Lincoln now used as sites for St. Jude’s Church and Bellows Funeral Home. Historians need to recast their historical sequencing of this region as being the story of ‘farm to factory.’ It was more ‘farm and factory,’ with the factory owning some of the biggest farms.

Since the owners in Providence, Brown and Ives, were Episcopalian as was their resident manager, Captain Kelly, it is not surprising they introduced the Episcopalian tradition to the village in 1834 and 1835. This decision made even more sense given the great lengths Brown and Ives went to in attracting experienced English textile workers from the Lancashire region of England to fill the work slots of their village. The newcomers from Lancashire brought their English traditions with them like their cuisine which featured meat pies and their beloved male choral society tradition. Many mill owners believed churches were good influences in the factory villages in promoting morality and order, also as a countervailing force against the presence of taverns. Some mill owners even went so far as extending the size and area of their mill estates just so they could exclude the presence of taverns in the villages.

Kelly had purchased enough land along the Blackstone, including parcels in Cumberland, to enable the eventual expansion – actually the creation of nearly an entire second village – some thirty years later across the river in Cumberland. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Lonsdale New Village in Cumberland was the site in 1860 of Mill # 4. This mill specialized in finer grade muslin, Lonsdale Cambric Muslins. Its success, despite the difficulty during the war of obtaining cotton, led the company in 1867 to erect a mill and village at Ashton, in Cumberland, opposite the old Sinking Fund Mill in Lincoln. Business success made it possible in 1872 to create Berkeley Village and the Berkeley Mill, the only production facility up to that time which did not depend on river water power, hence its location far removed from the banks of the Blackstone. It is located midway between Ashton and the New Lonsdale village. Then, in 1886, the Ann and Hope Mill was built in Cumberland, largely to replace the aging mills, nos. 1,2,and 3 in Lincoln. It was during these expansions that the second phase of building on the Lincoln side occurred. This phase is represented physically by the addition of the brick worker houses at Cook St. towards Whipple Bridge and Mendon Road and the expansion of housing and other village buildings on the same side of Lonsdale Avenue as Christ Church.

Captain Kelly, who died in 1846, never lived to see all of his land purchases utilized by his Providence owners. From 1830 until his death, although out and about in Lincoln, overseeing his various responsibilities, the Captain none-the-less lived in a house on Benefit Street, Providence, in the neighborhood of other China Trade captains and merchants. His role as manager for the Lonsdale Company mills was taken up in 1850 by the Goddard brothers, new partners of Brown and Ives through marriage.

Old Lonsdale, the Lincoln village, as noted, went through several stages of development following its arrival in the mid-1830s, the days parallel to the emergence of Christ Church parish. A key force in shaping the local landscape was the building of a massive dam across the Blackstone known as the Hunt Dam, begun in 1826. It held back enough ponded water to create a drop within the three mills so that the force of the flow would turn water wheels and turbines. When it was raised in 1846, the river created a huge mill pond from the dam north for about a mile. The Providence and Worcester Railroad’s tracks cutting across Mendon Road and knifing north to Berkeley bisected the pond. To accomplish the same purpose in Lincoln, but also to supply Lonsdale New Village in Cumberland, the Hunt Dam was replaced by the Pratt Dam (where the bikeway now crosses the Blackstone) in 1893/1894. Mill trenches from the river and its impoundment conducted water in narrow channels to the mills. Once the Lonsdale Old Village mill machinery used this force, the water left the mill and returned to the Blackstone Canal and to Scott’s Pond at the southerly edge of Lonsdale Village. One of the complaints against the Blackstone Canal Company by mill owners south of Lonsdale was that the Canal drew off too much water from the river and never put it back because the Canal diverted too much water through Scott’s Pond and into the Moshassuck River. In the mid 1830’s a law suit instigated by Pawtucket area mill owners successfully took most of the profits of the Canal Company to compensate for their losses. It led to the reputation of the Blackstone Canal being a bad investment for its stock holders; although it was really the competition from the Providence and Worcester Railroad that did the Canal in. Covering their bets, as always, Brown and Ives were the main financial backers and long term owners of the Railroad just as they had been the primary investors in the Canal.

Taking their cues from the template, or typical village plan, perfected by Moses Brown and the Slaters at Slatersville in 1807, Brown and Ives, and probably Wilbur Kelly, laid out that small grid of streets along the west side of Lonsdale Avenue for the first version of workers homes in Lonsdale Village of the 1830s. As indicated earlier, these were clapboarded wooden frame, two- family homes built in the then popular Greek Revival architectural style, in its simplest version without projected pillared porticoes. The Greek Revival Style of temple-like buildings – the Arcade and Round Top Church in Providence – was a popular style in America during the 1820s and 1830s, both for residences and public buildings. The first version of Christ Church was built in the Greek Revival Style, as was the first Baptist meeting house down the street. That particular structure, still in use, went through several iterations. In 1910 when the Baptist’s decided to build their new building at the southern end of the village overlooking Scott’s Pond, they sold their first church structure to the Town of Lincoln for use as a town hall/office. Since 1965 when the new town hall opened on River Road, the building has been a dance studio and is now an early childhood center. There are several such Greek Revival structures, though modified here in Lonsdale. They are best noted for their symmetry, the vertical indented corner boards intended to look like Greek pillars. Another surviving example of this style is at Kelly House at Quinnville, which the Captain built for the superintendent at that mill who turned out to be one of his own sons, Christopher.

Today, a walking tour of the village beginning on the front steps of Christ Church clearly delineates the progression of architectural styles favored in the 19th century for mill villages. Across the street, are the recently restored Greek-Revival style wooden tenements. A stroll around the block to their rear facing on Main Street Lonsdale reveals a complete block of such houses, while the other side of Main Street has examples of Greek Revival, the Victorian era brick tenements, some Victorian Mansard-roof double houses, and the most recent English cottage style of the mid 1920s. The parade of styles continues on the extension of Main Street beyond the intersecting Scott Street/Front Street. Grant Street, which loops behind the Christ Church Parish House continues the brick Victorian tenements, and the east side of Lonsdale Avenue, on the same side as the Parish House, features mid- and late 19th century mill manager homes.

Another phase of village expansion actually took place just to the west of the mill complex, on the rise of land, known as Prospect Hill beginning in the mid 19th century. Here were built homes not owned and operated by the Lonsdale Company, though most of the Prospect Hill residents worked in the mills. So far as I can tell, this was not company real estate. Located just off of Front Street on streets like Hope, Arnold, Union, and Grove, are dozens of modest homes, again reflecting the same mill village architecture as the old village of Lonsdale laid out by Brown and Ives and Kelly, although the uniform parade of styles is lacking. They are well over a hundred years old. Though tied to the company village of Lonsdale, economically, Prospect Hill developed its own personality and sense of community. Numerous businesses over the years served this part of Lonsdale. Here’s where the Lonsdale Hotel was located; there were stores, another school, and eventually a fire house. Lincoln shopping center, the post office, and a bank comprises most of the commercial activity, today. Its earlier years are detailed in a wonderful recollection of Memories of Prospect Hill by William Slattery.

In old Lonsdale Village, itself, community services extended beyond the furnishing of the two places of worship by the Lonsdale Company: the original school, abutting the location of the World War I Memorial School, the Lonsdale Hall with its library and reading room and an auditorium large enough for plays and school graduations, and one of the few post offices in the country built by a corporation for the benefit of the U.S. government, most recently used as a church.

The Town of Old Smithfield was divided in 1871. Lincoln, Smithfield, and North Smithfield emerged. Originally, Central Falls was part of the new Town of Lincoln. As the most built-up portion of the new town, it was where Lincoln town government was conducted. In 1893, however, Central Falls was set off on its own. Lonsdale, Lincoln, became the new town center with town offices, school, churches, post office, stores, and Lonsdale Hall providing most of the community needs. Lonsdale remained as the town center until 1965 when the shift of town government took place to its current place on River Road, with its police station, and the building of the Junior High/Senior High educational complex and town library, all near the intersection of River Road and the George Washington Highway. Until that development, one could argue that Lincoln as a town was a mere political convenience – almost merely a figure of speech — and that the residents were more personally identified with their village loyalties than any affiliation with the larger town entity.

The vigor and vitality of the Lonsdale Company and its villages lasted a little more than a century. In its first fifty years or so, the company had doubled its wealth and doubled it again, with expansions into Cumberland at Ashton, Berkeley, and New Lonsdale. Its mills had gone from heavy stone to brick. For a while Lonsdale Company even produced its own gas utility, used for illuminating the mills in Lincoln and at Ashton. There was a coal refractory building on Lonsdale Avenue, near the Whipple Bridge and a domed gasometer, or gas holder. Gas was made by cooking coal and piped to the mills. Across the Blackstone, the Ann and Hope Mill was possibly the largest mill of its kind when it was built in 1886. The company’s sole reliance on river water power shifted to steam engines, eventually to electricity. Its product line was diversified, and it was making a great variety of cloth types and picking up prizes for their quality at world’s fairs. The last new workers’ houses in the original Lonsdale Village were built along Main Street. By the 1920s, however, the American textile industry as a whole began to decline. Brown and Ives had many other investment opportunities which seemed more promising: farm land in the West, railroads, steel companies, banking. In both world wars the company furnished specialty cloth to the Navy. But in the 1930s they began to close the mills during bad economic times, and in 1944/1945 they sold the last of their holdings, the Lincoln Bleachery to Royal Little’s emerging Textron conglomerate. Lonsdale’s name became more prominent, beginning in the 1930s with the auto speedway on the Cumberland side of the Blackstone River. Then later, after WWII, with the new retail phenomenon of discount shopping at the Ann and Hope Store, a forerunner of Walmart, and lastly with the Lonsdale Twin Drive-in Movie Theater, now converted back to its natural state as a meadow with a bike path running through it. In all, it’s been quite a story.