The Blackstone River Valley developed from a Native homeland of the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Nipmuck peoples into one of the nation’s earliest industrial landscapes, shaped by farming, water-powered mills, the Blackstone Canal, and later the railroad. In the early 1600s, Native villages in the area relied on fish, cultivated corn, beans, squash, and tobacco, and used a trail that ran the length of the river, but epidemics in 1616 and 1633 after the arrival of Europeans virtually extinguished the local native population. European settlers arrived in the late 1600s and early 1700s, first farming and also mining limestone and bog iron, and by the late 1700s small mills along the river were producing flour, meal, boards, iron goods, and hand tools. By the turn of the century, the valley contained the nation’s first water-powered textile factory, and in the following decades mills multiplied under the Rhode Island system, with small privately financed mills surrounded by villages that included housing, churches, and schools, and that relied on the labor of whole families. Beginning in 1828, the forty-five-mile Blackstone Canal linked Worcester and Providence, carrying goods through a system of trenches and forty-nine locks built by more than one thousand laborers, many of them recent Irish immigrants, whose hard labor transformed the valley’s transportation and commerce until the Providence and Worcester Railroad replaced the canal in 1848. At Plummer’s Landing, Israel Plummer opened a store in 1837 that connected local farmers and their products to regional, national, and international markets, served as an import point for outside goods, and continued after the canal closed by shipping through the railroad. Other valley sites reflected this long economic history: Rice City Pond, created in the early 1800s for flood control and canal water supply, later became wildlife habitat; Voss Farm survived for more than two centuries because of its access to canal and rail transportation and became the region’s largest dairy farm after 1920; and the Stanley Woolen Mill, built in the early 1850s, produced finished woolen cloth, supplied fabric during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, and later used locally made machinery and electricity. In 1986, the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor was established from Worcester to Providence to unite communities in preserving and interpreting the region’s historical and natural resources while encouraging economic growth.
