Sylvanus Brown House

Sylvanus Brown lived in this cottage from 1784 to 1824. His proven pattern-making and carpentry skills earned him a place alongside Samuel Slater, and Brown had also built water-powered mills and visited European mill sites. Between 1789 and 1791, he helped Slater produce mechanized textile machinery. As a skilled woodworker and patternmaker, Brown made accurate, full-scale wooden models, or patterns, of machine parts for Slater's machinery, an important role in creating new machine parts. The house, built in 1758, is a typical artisan's dwelling of the mid- to late 1700s. It is furnished based on Brown's 1825 probate inventory and contains a loom, spinning wheels, and other tools used to make cloth by hand. Brown's wife, Ruth, and other workers wove cloth by hand at home for their own use and for factory sale until after the invention of the power loom in the early 1800s. Samuel Slater's carding machine, an early fiber-processing mechanism, was perfected with assistance from Brown and other artisans; its frame, rollers, and pulleys were built of wood, and patterns were used to create other parts made of iron. Brown's house once stood beside his carpenter's shop near present-day Interstate 95. When urban development threatened it in the 1960s, a citizens group called the "Live Wires" of the Pawtucket-Blackstone Valley Chamber of Commerce sold shares to save "Memory Cottage" from demolition. In 1962 the house, weighing nearly 40 tons, was lifted from its foundation and transported by platform truck to its present site.

Pawtucket, Rhode Island · United States