A Mechanic's Life

Tradition holds that Ebenezer Jenks built this house in 1758. He was the grandson of Pawtucket's first settler, Joseph Jenks, Jr. By the end of the 1700s, the property belonged to mechanic Sylvanus Brown, who welcomed Samuel Slater on his first night in Pawtucket and helped him achieve his first success there. Brown later continued to work with the Slater Mill, making full-scale wooden models, called patterns, for Slater's machines. The house was once filled with the hum of a spinning wheel and the rhythm of a loom, and Brown's wife, Ruth, along with other workers, wove cloth by hand before the invention of the power loom in the early 1800s. Threatened with demolition in the 1960s, the 40-ton house was preserved when citizens raised funds and moved it to this site in 1962.

Pawtucket, Rhode Island · United States