Lafayette stood at the center of Robert Rodman’s manufacturing world, but he also controlled the Shady Lea and Silver Spring Mills in North Kingstown and for a time the Rocky Brook Mill between Peacedale and Wakefield, running them together with his brother Daniel’s South Kingstown textile mills. He operated the mills in concert, shifting work among them as contracts required, with warps prepared at one mill for weaving at another and yarn spun in Lafayette sometimes woven in Silver Spring or Shady Lea and vice versa. His sons Albert, Charles, and Franklin managed the mills, but Robert made the major business decisions. Rodman began operating the Lafayette mill site in 1847 after purchasing the property from the Sanfords, his mother-in-law’s family, and built his new mill about thirty years after the original purchase of the property. By 1895, Lafayette had doubled in population and buildings because of the new mill complex and the sharp expansion of employment. Robert Rodman built his mansion in 1863 and also had a house built for his daughter Hortense after her marriage to George O. Allen; the Hortense Allen House was greatly enlarged in 1882, and homes for her brothers Franklin and Charles were later built nearby by Maxson & Company of Westerly R.I. Born in 1818 in South Kingstown, Robert Rodman was six generations removed from John Rodman of Barbados, and family ties to the Hazards helped move him from farm life into textile manufacturing. His first large-scale success came at the Silver Spring Mill on the Mettatuxet River, which he leased from his father-in-law in 1841 and used to make negro cloth, providing the financial basis for his purchase of the Lafayette property; he later bought Silver Spring in 1868. In the same year, he purchased Shady Lea with profits from government contracts for Kersey uniform fabrics during the Civil War. Rodman Manufacturing affected much of South County for more than a century, but nowhere more than in Lafayette.