Cranston Historical Society

CRANSTON – In most of Cranston’s historic cemeteries, a four-foot tall headstone is the sign of an important man.
David Whitman got a 15-foot obelisk.

 

Erected “by his friends and the friends of American Industry,” it towers over the three dozen gravestones in the Joseph Burton Lot on Seven Mile Road, honoring the bobbin boy who grew up and transformed the textile industry.

 

Whitman was born in Coventry in 1799, six years after Samuel Slater started his mill in Pawtucket. Whitman’s father Reuben built one on the Pawtuxet River in West Warwick and 12 year-old David worked in it.

 

He was a prodigy, mastering the mechanics of the looms and the water wheels and gears that powered them. The Manufacturers Journal said he “seemed to possess an innate knowledge of mathematics and geometry, in their most abstruse and recondite forms.”  

 

At 21 he was hired as superintendent of a mill in Pomfret, Conn. It was the first stop on a four-decade management career that took him all over New England and ended with him in an historic place in the engineering profession.

 

After his success in Pomfret, he came home to help his father build the Phenix Mill in West Warwick. He supervised and consulted on projects in Providence and Westerly in Rhode Island; Thompsonville, Killingly and Willimantic in Connecticut; New Bedford and Lowell in Massachusetts and Lewiston, Maine. 

 

He was “The Mill Doctor,” the one called to oversee building a new mill or rebuilding an old one. The Boston Evening Transcript said “in every part of New England and all over the country where there is a cotton mill, he was soon recognized and acknowledged as the very best cotton spinner in the United States.” 

 

He developed “The Whitman Tables,” a book of what we would call spreadsheets that broke down the cost of a yard of cloth based on the types of yarn, the type and number of looms used, workers’ pay, interest on any loans and wear and tear on equipment.

 

The tables “probably represent the first printed figures compiled in this country for the use in a cost system for manufacturing …” according to Samuel B. Lincoln in “Lockwood Greene: The History of an Engineering Business,” a 1960 history of the company that grew out of Whitman’s practice.

 

In other words, Whitman invented the consulting engineer.

 

He’d come to a town, design and supervise construction of a mill and run it for two or three years to make sure the enterprise took off. Then he’d move on to the next job and do it again.

 

While an expert on machines, accounts of his life note he never forgot the people he worked with when he was that 12-year old bobbin boy. 

 

“In the complex and often clashing interests of labor an capital, he was ever on the side of the weak …”  the Manufacturers Journal said. He “never failed to denounce with an honest indignation that policy which classes men, women and children with inert matter, from whom the greatest amount of toil is to be wrung and to whom the smallest return is grudgingly doled.”

 

Histories of the villages he worked in praise him for his competence and willingness to share his methods. His memorial calls him “a man of mild and genial manners, of wondrous skill in his profession, combined with kind and generous affections and unspotted integrity.”

 

By 1842 Whitman wanted to retire to his farm on Seven Mile Road. But he kept getting called to advise on projects. In 1847 the Lewiston (Maine) Water-Power Co. asked him to help them build a water power plant.

 

He spent the next decade essentially rebuilding the Lewiston textile industry, working with Pepperell Manufacturing, Bates Mills and the Lewiston Bleachery & Dye Works. In July of 1858, while getting out of a carriage in Lewiston, he hurt his leg. It was an era before antibiotics, when even a minor scratch could get infected. His did, and he lingered painfully for seven weeks before dying on Aug. 30. 

 

His young partner, Amos Lockwood, carried on the business, and it grew into a firm called Lockwood Greene, one of the major consulting firms in the 20th century United States. It specialized in institutional and industrial buildings and designing and building “clean room" facilities for pharmaceutical and electronics companies. 

 

In 1975, 117 years after Whitman’s death, Lockwood Greene was still honoring him. The company paid for a granite block in front of the (now former) Coventry police station celebrating him as a “textile industry pioneer.” It’s still there.

 

Today, behind the cemetery on Seven Mile Road, in the fields where the Mill Doctor wanted to plant crops, stand rows of solar panels drawing energy from the sunlight that shines on them.

 

As a man who culled power from rivers, he would like that.