Alexander Hamilton, “Report on Manufactures,” 1791. Here Hamilton is referring to the ability of machines to replace human labor, but as I am suggesting here, the Great Falls is here considered to be part of a machine.
A mill raceway is a channel that delivers water from a source, like a river or pond, to a water wheel, concentrating and directing the flow of water to provide the necessary force to turn the wheel.
Levi Trumbull, A History of Industrial Paterson (Paterson: Carleton M. Herrick, 1882), 31.
Leland M. Roth, ed., America Builds: Source Documents in American Architecture and Planning (New York: Harper & Row, 1983). Indeed, it seems that Roth had a particular, if never fully developed interest in the industrial history of the nation’s waterfalls, of which he wrote about in “Three Industrial Towns by McKim, Mead, and White,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38, no. 4 (December 1979): 317–47.
Colin Rowe, “Chicago Frame,” in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); originally published in Architectural Review, 1956. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).
See, for example, Mabel Wilson, “Notes on the Virginia Capitol: Nation, Race, and Slavery in Jefferson’s America” and Reinhold Martin, “Drawing the Color Line: Silence and Civilization from Jefferson to Mumford” both in Race and Modern Architecture, Irene Cheng et al., ed., (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 22–42, 58–78.
Other systems were used to a lesser extent including the French Long Lot system used along rivers in Michigan and Wisconsin, the Dutch Patroon system in New Netherland, and Spanish/ Mexican land grants in territories.
See, for example, Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Appropriation, Subdivision, Abstraction: A Political History of the Urban Grid,” in Architecture and Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023).
Though he acknowledged the need for human labor in factories, which, as he outlined in his prospectus for SUM, could be unskilled labor executed by women, immigrants, and child labor. Alexander Hamilton, “Prospectus for the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures,” 1791, National Archives, ➝.
