Industry on the Shewatuck River began in the colonial period with a mill pond, a sawmill, and a grist mill at a site named for the Narragansett village of Showatucquese, meaning "place between the small streams." Early operations also included a tannery that processed traditional hides as well as porpoise hide from Narragansett Bay into saddle leather. In 1800 a cotton yarn spinning mill was built here and soon became a weaving mill making cotton cloth. In 1847 Robert Rodman bought the mill from his in-laws in the intermarried Taylor and Sanford families and retooled it to weave wool and cotton-wool worsted twill blends known as Kersey fabrics. The most important of these was Kentucky jean, a durable coarse fabric in the pre-Civil War period classed as "negro cloth" or "negro goods" and sold to southern and mid-Atlantic plantation owners for slave clothing. South County millowners, limited by the size of their rivers and unable to compete with larger broadcloth mills to the north, captured a large share of this niche market from southern and English producers while also weaving higher-grade fabrics for New York and New England markets. Profits from Robert Rodman's negro cloth production enabled him to acquire additional mills that became Rodman Manufacturing, and the scale of that company helped him secure lucrative military contracts at the start of the Civil War, financing later expansion at Lafayette. Robert Rodman's plans for major expansion were shaped by seeing the Corliss steam engine at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where he realized the machine's potential for overcoming the Shewatuck River's limited power capacity.