The Picker Field

Back in the world. For the last four years I have spent my vacation week volunteering at the TPC Golf Tournament in Norton. While not exactly the Magic Kingdom, New Englanders are too dour to make anyplace here "the happiest place on Earth," the TPC in Norton really is an otherworldly experience. Now I'm back home with a stiff neck and a sore throat, wondering whether that last mosquito bite was "the one."

At any rate someone was checking out a map on their cell phone the other day and came across a place called the Ricker Field. We quickly determined that it was a misspelling for Picker Field which lead to a discussion of who Picker was. Picker Field is at the end of Picker Lane a short side street off Canton Street. Picker wasn't anybody-the Picker Field is named for a machine that was housed there almost two centuries ago. Old George Ferguson built a dam at the site sometime before 1759, and he and others ran a sawmill until shortly before 1815. George and some family members are buried in a little cemetery nearby. About twenty years later E. J. W. Morse installed a cotton picking machine at this old dam giving the street its name.

It's interesting that the name stuck just like Hoe Shop Street. By 1835 the shovel works was roaring along and it had become clear that despite a number of shoe shops and cotton mills we were going to be Shovel Town not Shoe or Spindle City. If things had been different could we have become a textile town?

At Lowell the major processes of producing textiles were unified into one building. There were three main steps. Picking machines, a variety of cotton gin, cleaned the baled cotton and then another machine called a carder straitened the fibers. These fibers were then spun into thread. Finally, the thread was woven into cloth. At each step the machines needed to do this became increasingly complex. The cotton gin was invented in 1793 by Eli Whitney. In the same year Samuel Slater arrived in Rhode Island with plans for a spinning machine "stolen" from an English company. The Rhode Island model adopted by Slater used machines to produce thread which was then sold or given out to local weavers who produced the cloth on home looms. This idea spread quickly and soon people like Elijah Howard, David Manley, and even Old Oliver Ames were running Slater style businesses in Easton

Meanwhile many people including several here, tried to perfect a power loom, then an English monopoly, but it wasn't until 1814 that Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody announced the creation of the first American power loom. At that point there were apparently a number of balky, cranky, and unreliable looms occasionally in operation in small mills in this area. When the Lowell and Moody power loom was perfected in 1817 their firm, the Boston Manufacturing Company, was in position to unify all the steps in the textile making process in one building. Ultimately the Slater model of "putting out" the thread for home weaving became obsolete. So was it the lack of water power or the business model that presented the problem here in town?

All the great textile cities had vastly more water available than Easton so it would seem that a textile mill with its many machines needed more power than a shovel factory with a few trip hammers. The one successful textile manufacturer in Easton arrived after the great textile mills of Lowell were already under way. E. J. W. Morse realized with all that cloth coming out of those great mills someone needed to provide the finely spun thread needed to sew it all together. His main factory still stands at the corner of Central Street and Washington Street, but for many years he had smaller shops at other dams like the one at the Picker Field doing the initial steps in the thread making process. So he made use of the limited water power and made a high quality niche product that didn't compete with the big mills. Towards the end of the 19th century J. P. Morgan created a thread monopoly that became the familiar brand Coates and Clark. The Morse family sold the patents for their premium thread to the new business and moved on to other things like automobile production. Coates and Clark's Silkateen thread, still available today, is the same thread perfected by Morse at places like the Picker Field way back in 1835.

For many years the Picker Field was the site of annual picnics by Irish shovel workers. In 1975, the Bicentennial Commission created a bicycle path that started at the field. When about to ride the path, I ran into a large snapping turtle burying her eggs, a much more memorable event to me than all this history!