On a clear day in July of 1778, shortly following the Battle of Monmouth (a crucial pivot point in the Revolutionary War), Alexander Hamilton and General George Washington sat down by the Great Falls of the Passaic River to feast on cold ham, tongue, biscuits, and grog. The waterfalls were both a fearsome and life-giving force, which the Indigenous Lenni Lenape people named Totowa, meaning “to sink, or to be forced down beneath the water by weight.” Roughly a century later, an artist attempted to capture within a single scene the many changes brought to Totowa since Hamilton and Washington’s picnic. The frontispiece to A History of Industrial Paterson, which was written in 1882, at the height of the town’s industrial might, centers a smokestack, its billowy plume carrying its dusky cloud over the tops of Watchung mountains. Humming factories are interspersed along the Passaic’s wooded embankments, and a steel bridge connects the Great Falls’s palisades that lead to a hotel positioned to capture one of the site’s many picturesque views. Altogether, this landscape formed what was in essence, a single machine.
The scene depicted in A History of Industrial Paterson was close to, if not exactly what Hamilton had initially envisioned for the site: a model factory town that would serve as the engine for an industrialized American economy. Indeed, when Hamilton first sat by the falls, it was not to admire their beauty, but their power—an awesome, churning force. While the content of Hamilton and Washington’s conversation at the falls is not known, thirteen years after, Hamilton proposed that the two men could play an important role in overcoming what he described as the shortcomings of the new nation’s “particular situation”: its sparse population (and its attendant lack of laborers) relative to its seemingly fathomless expanse of territory. The power generated by the falls would, according to Hamilton, provide “an increase of hands; an accession of strength, unencumbered … by the expense of maintaining the laborer.”1 In this way, the American landscape itself—its abundant resources and rugged features—was key to the nation’s “true” independence, a sovereignty contingent upon liberating the United States from its dependence on British manufactures.
Useful Manufacturers and L’Enfant
In 1791, Hamilton, who was serving as Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington at the time, chartered a new private corporation, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SUM). The purpose of SUM was to encourage “the establishment of Manufactures in the United States,” which was needed, he argued, for the newly independent republic to achieve “a state of the highest political perfection.” Under the auspices of SUM, Hamilton lobbied for support from the state of New Jersey, and implored local entrepreneurs to set up its first factories and a hotel to attract even more investors. The new “national manufactory” set an example of how one could take full advantage of the geographical and geological features of the new nation. To begin, Hamilton commissioned the prominent New York engineer and surveyor, Cassimer T. Grover, to compare the power-generating potential of various cascades in the surrounding area. Niagara was not considered, as it lay in contested territory on the border with British North America. The next most powerful and far more conveniently located falls were the Great Falls of the Passaic, a waterfall that Grover calculated produced enough power to drive 247 undershot wheels.
Following Grover’s study, Hamilton enlisted Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design Paterson’s new plan. Only recently engaged to draw up plans for Washington, DC, L’Enfant drew Paterson with the same extravagance that he applied to his plan for the nation’s capital, including the same broad (200-foot-wide) avenues. Though instead of centering the new city around monumental architecture, as he did in Washington, he organized Paterson around a waterpower system, the centerpiece of which was a grand aqueduct that would channel water from the Passaic River across a ravine and around a hill to a series of mills. In a design that heavily favored spectacle over practicality, L’Enfant guided the rushing water over a circuitous four-mile course, the climax of which was a raised aqueduct that spanned the ravine. Barge traffic would be towed across by horses riding astride, all of which created the effect of a levitating commercial lane of traffic seventy feet above the ravine bottom. As much stage design as it was engineering, L’Enfant’s plan intended to transform the Great Falls into a theatre of commerce and manufacture.
L’Enfant was fired from the Paterson job after the leaders of SUM realized the costliness of his ambitions. The Frenchman was replaced by a self-educated American, Peter Colt, who submitted a plan that simply dammed up the ravine at one end, creating a reservoir that he connected to a raceway running down the hillside to meet with the water-powered mills below.2 Despite the simplicity of Colt’s scheme, the result was a unified composition that seamlessly incorporated the site’s sheer rock walls, rushing water, dense forests, and surrounding mountains, transforming them from mere natural features into natural “advantages” marshaled towards industrial use. As Levi Trumbull, the fawning author of Industrial Paterson wrote: “Nature … formed and set apart the region … as a vast theatre for manufacturing operations, and that particular locality as the centre toward which all the natural advantages should tend.”3 These included not only the power supplied by rushing waters, but nearby iron ore deposits, “an abundance of timber,” and within “the reach of the eye,” the best harbors and the furthest navigable of Atlantic rivers.
Paterson, Hamilton, and Architectural History
Paterson is not a “canonical” site within US architectural histories. Its exclusion, on its own, is remarkable on account of L’Enfant’s early involvement and Hamilton’s historical status (who still serves in most standard high school US History textbooks as Thomas Jefferson’s most famous foil). Up until today, no major US architectural history has accounted for Paterson’s importance, save for Leland Roth’s inclusion of Hamilton’s own writings on SUM in the 1983 document source book America Builds.4 This is perhaps because the factory, though a staple figure in architectural histories of the United States, is typically assigned the role of an anonymous ancestor of the modern movement, a mid-nineteenth-century type of vast floor space and sawtooth roof profiles “discovered” and or aestheticized by a European avant-garde (a narrative mythology popularized by Colin Rowe and Reyner Banham).5
This historiographical trope overlooks heroic attempts to aestheticize the early industrial ambitions of the United States, attempts to present manufacturing as foundational to American life and society. Reintroducing this history into the stale annals of architecture’s written past may provide a better understanding of how technology and its ecological implications were programmatically considered at the very moment of the nation’s founding. Paterson can, in this sense, even serve as a useful counterpoint to Jefferson’s Monticello (the model farm onto which Jefferson projected fantasies of a yeoman’s republic), which once stood as the classical foundation of US architecture. If recent revisions to the canon of architectural history have provided essential insights into the centrality of chattel slavery and Indigenous dispossession to US history, in a similar way, Hamilton may reveal certain underexamined aspects of industrial capitalism—including the consequences to both the environment and laboring populations that it entailed.6
That this crucial site in US early industrial history has been mostly ignored by architectural historians perhaps had something to do with a little-noticed modification to L’Enfant’s original plan for Washington, DC, a layout that was to serve as both a model and legend for understanding the current and future development of US territory. An entire system of waterways intended to monumentalize the fledgling nation’s commercial and industrial foundations was deleted from the scheme. This was not only the omission of an amenity (it was intended to be an actual means of conveyance for both people and commercial goods), but the erasure of a symbolic foil to the grassy lawn now known as the National Mall. Just as how the National Mall served as an abstracted pasture or field rendered useless (that is, symbolic), commerce and industry was originally meant to be symbolized in the form of a canal that ran through the capital.
A prominent component in L’Enfant’s original design, the canal connected the Anacostia to the Potomac River by canalizing the Tiber Creek. Its headgate sat at the conjunction of the mall, the president’s lawn, and the Potomac. From there it ran alongside the mall, passing in front of the White House (then referred to as the President’s House) and the Capitol Building before exiting the mall’s southwest corner, winding its way through the capital before splitting into two exits (one at the convergence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, and the other on the Anacostia). Construction on the canal began in 1817, but it was poorly planned and expensive to maintain (L’Enfant had not accounted for the large silt deposits that accompanied tidal flows), and was filled in between 1880 and 1930.
Jefferson’s Grid, Hamilton’s Canal
L’Enfant’s initial plan for the National Mall wrote the script for US history, revealing, in nuce, the conflicts and complementarities between the urban north and agrarian south. Indeed, this wasn’t just a plan for the capital, but a projection of the nation’s colonial extension. The plan’s grid (a platting logic recently systematized by Jefferson) propelled settlement forward, while its radiating arteries (and canceled canal) presented both the republic’s unification through continuous circulation and the transformation of its natural features into useful ones. These two systems, L’Enfant’s plan argued, could not exist without each other.
Jefferson’s grid (formalized as the Public Land Survey System, or PLSS), was a surveying method developed and used in the United States to plat, or divide, real property for sale and settling. Originally created by the Land Ordinance of 1785 to survey all lands previously claimed by Britain east of the Mississippi that were ceded to the United States in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the six-by-six-mile grid was the groundwork for Jefferson’s “yeoman’s republic,” enabling the rapid settlement of territories west of the original thirteen colonies. Plats would be both gifted in gratitude for service in the Revolutionary War and sold to new settlers to pay off the nation’s debts.
One shortfall of Jefferson’s grid was that it assumed a landscape similar to the gently rolling hills of his native Virginia, and thus poorly accounted for the nation’s geographical features, its mountainous regions, deserts, rivers, and cataracts. Rivers and streams posed a particular difficulty. In order to approximate a body of water’s position relative to platted property, the PLSS introduced what was called a “meander line,” which was placed at the point where a section line (which divides sections within a township) or a township line (a line dividing townships) meets the ordinary high-water mark of the water body—a highly dynamic point in space, one unreliable for measuring.
This was not the only problem of Jefferson’s grid when it came to bodies of water. In addition to being difficult to pin down in space, the distribution of the “advantages” that they provided was not accounted for. The Great Falls, for instance, is not easily divided into a plat. The power that it generates cannot be geometrically divided. Jefferson’s system, though a convenient method for allocating land, could not account for the value produced by rivers, whether for commercial passage or for the generation of energy.
The conflict between the value of land and the value produced by its features did not yet reveal itself in Paterson, as Jefferson’s survey system only applied to land west of the Appalachians. Previous to this, most property lines were drawn using other surveying methods including the Metes and Bounds system, which used descriptions of a property’s “metes” (length and direction) and “bounds” (physical features like trees or rocks) to create a property’s irregular perimeter.7 The value that undergirded Hamilton’s system, which lay in extraction and the generation of energy rather than in the cultivation of land, has since generated a number of conflicts with Jefferson’s PLSS grid.
Alexander Hamilton, Architect
It is understandable that Hamilton is omitted from architectural histories: he was not trained as an architect, and unlike Jefferson, he never understood any of his work to be architectural in nature. Jefferson’s influence on space, beyond even what he understood to be architecture, is also highly legible as a spatial practice that concretizes an abstract system, and has long served as a subject considered by architectural historians.8 However, the consequences of Hamilton’s land-use policies, and their effect physically shaping the patterns of industrialization of the US, are no less real and consequential. They are, however, more difficult to understand collectively, as each takes advantage of existing features, the quantification of which cannot be geometrically divided, whether it be the hydropotential of Muscle Shoals or the Colorado River, large mineral or oil deposits, tidal shifts, or exposure to solar radiation or offshore wind velocities.
For Hamilton, the specific advantage of Paterson’s Great Falls was that, by turning to the power generated by non-human agents, it directly addressed what he called the nation’s problem of the “dearness of labor.”9 Jefferson, also concerned about the limited supply of laborers, and worried that industrialization and an accompanying urbanization would compromise the character of the nation’s citizenry, preferred to keep manufacturing off American shores. In truth, there was not even enough labor to maintain an agrarian economy based on Jefferson’s ideal at Monticello. Indeed, it is well known that Jefferson’s own estate was fully dependent on an already existing system of chattel slavery.
The history of Paterson begs to consider how technology not only organized the built environment, but also how the American environment was itself considered a technological agent from the outset. Among other things, this may help understand manifold forms of Indigenous deprivation beyond the dispossession of land (which is not even ontologically possible for the Lenni Lenape). With the development of Paterson, the Lenni Lenape were deprived of access to the waters, forests, and animals that lived upon it, which were parsed and transformed from kin and sources of spiritual connection into a fully exploitable nature. Understanding Hamilton’s program for nature may help contextualize the historical significance of recent Indigenous political actions like, for example, the Sioux-led opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, where the Sioux presented themselves as water protectors—a strategy that is based on an Indigenous relationship to nature that complements, but is organizationally different from land back movements.
Amid resistance to Trump’s calls to revive an American “classicism” in light of a supposedly degraded social order, it is worth remembering that both a veneration and criticism of classicism is centered in architectural histories. This narrow examination reinforces its conservative legacies and stunts understanding what American architecture was, is, and should be. A reassessment of the US’s early industrial history, and the lifeways that it displaced, helps account for how its political systems programmed the nation’s ecological organization. Such expansions and revisions to the limited scope of architecture’s historical narratives may even enable us to rethink architectural practice as situated not only on a site, but in dynamic relationship with the environment and its systems.
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, ➝.
