The Hope Village Hydro Historical Museum
by: Patrick T. Conley, J.D., Ph.D.

The area in which Hope Village is situated was part of the outlands of Providence until 1731 when the Town of Scituate was created. Stephen Hopkins, one of two Rhode Island signers of the Declaration of Independence, was the new town’s early leader, becoming Scituate’s first town moderator in 1731 at the age of twenty-four. This post was the initial step in a political career that included election to the office of Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives (seven times), service as governor (nine one-year terms), appointment to the position of chief justice of Rhode Island’s highest court (eleven years), and selection as a Rhode Island delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses (1774-79).

The rise of Hopkins in the world of government was accompanied by a rapid ascent in the business of trade and commerce. Having moved in 1742 from rural Scituate, which he represented in the state legislature, to the port town of Providence, where he immediately secured reelection to the General Assembly and resumed the
post of House Speaker that he first held in 1738, Hopkins formed business partnerships with prominent Newport merchant Godfrey Malbone and then with the powerful Brown family, Providence’s leading eighteenth-century entrepreneurs. Thereafter, his wealth and financial connections fueled his rise to political prominence.

In July, 1765, the Brown Brothers--John, Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses--organized a company to make and sell pig iron (i.e., crude iron cast in blocks). Additional partners in the venture included Hopkins, who undoubtedly selected a Scituate site owned by Thomas Collins and Joseph Remington on the north branch of the Pawtuxet River, “a little below a place called the Salmon Hole,” as the location of this business.
This particular setting was chosen, since the river would supply the power to run the bellows of the furnace, the surrounding woodlands would provide the charcoal for melting the ore, and the local farmers would provide the stone that was heated and melted with the ore. The ore itself was to come from four miles away, at the ore beds in Cranston owned by Jeremiah Burlingame in the present Oaklawn section of the city.
The iron was raked from the bottom of a pond or dug from trenches, then carted to the furnace. A tract of land in Glocester owned by John and William Page furnished an additional source of ore.
Soon a stone hearth and stack rose on the south side of the river bank, and “Furnace Hope”--named for Hope Power, mother of the Browns--began operations on July 18, 1766. The first products were kettles, hinges, nails, hoops, and pans, but under Hopkins’ direct superintendence, 2 1/2 tons of pig iron was produced by November, 1766. Among the early customers for Hope pig iron was forgeman Nathanael Greene of Coventry who regularly made bar iron from the “pigs” he received from Hopkins. By 1775 this business association grew into a far more significant political and military alliance.

The business flourished for a decade under the management of Rufus Hopkins, the governor ’s eldest son, and when the American Revolution erupted, production gradually turned from pig iron to cannon and ball. The vast number of Hope cannon went to individual privateers outfitting their commerce raiders in Northern
seaport towns. Between 1778 and 1781 about 3,000 high quality cannon were produced at Hope Furnace for military and naval use, according to John Brown’s own estimate. Eight of these field pieces were in a battery used by General Washington at the siege of Yorktown.

After independence, a change in market conditions and demand brought an inexorable production decline. The last War Department order came in 1799, and the final blast of Hope Furnace occurred very shortly thereafter.
In May, 1806, the “Furnace Hope Estate and mill privileges” were sold for $7000 to a group headed by Silvanus Hopkins, a grandson of Stephen, and soon textiles replaced cannon as Hope’s product of choice.
From 1806 until 1972 textile manufacturing dominated the site and shaped the growth of Hope Village--a picturesque settlement that grew up around a mill complex built by a succession of Providence entrepreneurs.
Architectural historians believe that a 1 1/2 story, 44-by-22 feet, wood-shingled structure with a gable roof and a clerestory monitor built into a hill near Main Street is
the original mill--and the oldest such structure in Scituate. It was built either by Hopkins
or by his successors Nicholas Brown and Thomas P. Ives who bought the property on

November 10, 1809.* Around the nucleus of the factory, the owners would construct dwellings for their workers, a factory store, and other buildings for the social and educational needs of the mill families.
The Hope Cotton Factory Company, the name given to the first business venture, was acquired in the early 1820s by Ephraim Talbot, a former sea captain for Brown and Ives, and John Whipple, Rhode Island’s leading constitutional lawyer and the mentor of Thomas Wilson Dorr. This Providence duo built a second mill in 1825 which operated until it was damaged by fire in 1844.

Following this setback, Talbot, who had purchased Whipple’s interest in 1833, sold the complex to a group of very prominent Providence investors that included John Carter Brown, the renowned bibliographer, and Moses Brown Ives and Robert Hale Ives, who would later lead the fundraising effort that established Rhode Island Hospital.
This group, which already owned the huge Lonsdale Company on the Blackstone River in Cumberland, founded the Hope Company, and built the large, five story, 55-by-183 feet, stone mill that still dominates the site. Later this 1844-47 building was altered by the removal of its belfry and the flattening of its original gable
roof. By 1850 the Hope Company employed about 165 workers--65 males and 100 women.

*Authorities differ on the date of the first mill’s construction. The architectural survey of Scituate by the State Historic Preservation Commission and the Historic American Engineering Record compiled by the Department of the Interior opt for 1806-07, suggesting the structure was built by the Hopkins group; but in Scituate’s only published history, Cyrus Walker and Hedley Smith assert (p. 137) that Brown and Ives “erected the Hope Mill” after their 1809 purchase. More research is needed.

In 1870-71, the Number 2 Mill, 95-by-151 feet, was added to the north side of the Hope Mill, and the owners added a brick shed with a saw-toothed roof on the east side of the main structure in 1916.
The Lonsdale Company sold its Hope Mill to F. Jacobson and Sons in 1938 and that owner transferred title to the Valley Lace Company in 1948. The 1938 liquidation sale included not only the mill buildings but also forty adjacent brick or frame houses where the mill operatives lived. Valley Lace continued textile production and made further additions at the rear of the stone buildings in 1960 and 1972 to give the complex its present configuration.
A very interesting feature of the Hope Mill historic site is its stone dam, gatehouse, gates, and raceway. This power source dates from 1847. It diverted water from the Pawtuxet River through the gatehouse into a canal, or mill race, which led under the mill. The force of this flowing water was used to run the mill’s machinery. In 1902, a set of horizontal turbines was installed in the basement of the Number 2 Mill to increase the system’s energy output. The dam, raceway, and turbines continue to generate electric power to run the mill, but the gatehouse is much in need of restoration. The Hope Village Hydro Historical Museum will restore and utilize the existing power system and display it as a working example of the technique that powered the region’s textile mills during the course of their nineteenth century development along the banks of Rhode Island’s rivers and streams.

The museum will also pay tribute to the prominent civic leaders and industrialists associated with the site from its origins as “Furnace Hope” to the present, and it will depict life in a prototypical and well-preserved Rhode Island mill village (viz. Hope) over the span of nearly two-and-a-half centuries, explaining why Hope Village has justly earned recognition on the National Register of Historic Places.

Main Street • P.O. Box 178 • Hope, RI 02831
(401) 231-7539

Directions
Email: info@HopeMillVillage.com