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The City of Fall River
Massachusetts is an industrial community on the banks of the Taunton River
in Bristol County with a long and fascinating history. The first settler
was Benjamin Church, a hero of King Philip's war, who built a sawmill in
1690. The city's geography determined its destiny; as historians have pointed
out, the significant fact about Fall River is that it had water power and
port facilities together, making it both a transfer point for passenger
and freight traffic to New York and the site of intense industrial development.
Its diverse residential population
is made up of immigrants from Great Britain, Portugal and Canada drawn
to the mill jobs available in the city. Fall River's industrial history
began in 1811 when Colonel Joseph Durfee opened the Globe Manufactory.
By 1830 the city had seven textile mills, a steamboat to Providence and
Newport and its own newspaper. A staggering population and industrial boom
made Fall River one of the textile capitals of the nation with more than
100 cotton mills housing four million spindles, employing more than 30,000
people, and generating a weekly payroll of over $500,000. The city boasted
an international market and 130,000 people when its prosperity peaked during
the First World War.
This was a closely knit industrial
complex in which raw materials came into the port of Fall River to be processed
into manufactured goods and then shipped out again from the port. When
textile manufacturing began moving south in the 1920's, the city's decline
began, accelerating during a devastating fire, which destroyed the central
business district, and the Depression. By 1930 the city declared bankruptcy
and its Having learned its lesson, the modern city maintains a highly diversified
industrial profile with chemical operations, electrical and food products
along with the garment and textile industries. It also maximizes tourism
with the largest factory outlet district in New England and a World War
II memorial which opens a variety of American warships to visitors at the
State Pier in Fall River. The city retains a variety of handsome historic
public buildings.
Fall River Massachusetts is located
in Located in Southeastern Massachusetts, bordered by Somerset on the northwest;
Freetown on the north and northeast; Dartmouth on the southwest; Westport
on the south; Tiverton, Rhode Island, on the southwest; and Mount Hope
Bay and the mouth of the Taunton River on the west. Fall River is 50 miles
south of Boston. |
