Welcome to Thread City

In the mid-1980s, life in Willimantic, one of Connecticut’s many 19th-century mill communities, changed forever. The American Thread Company, the community’s signature industry, closed its last New England plant and consolidated operations in North Carolina. The closing was part of a larger trend: for decades, since the late 1800s, New England’s once ubiquitous textile mills — whose whirring spindles and thumping looms had for 150 years symbolized America’s Industrial Revolution — had been shutting down. Today, only one Connecticut textile mill — the American Woolen Company in Stafford Springs — remains of what were once dozens.

Yet, at the same time, something new was being born. The next year, a group of local residents led by Laura Knott Twine, a fiber artist and weaver, met around Twine’s kitchen table and planned the Windham Textile and History Museum, later nicknamed the Mill Museum. Two of the eleven buildings of the old Willimantic Mills complex — the former company store and a 19th-century warehouse — were converted into the Museum, which opened to the public in 1989.

The people Windham, CT and its former industrial borough of Willimantic founded the Museum for two reasons. First, the Museum was to be a place where Connecticans and other New Englanders could preserve, remember, and honor their industrial past, to recall an era when Connecticut was a maker state, and New England was the cockpit of the American Industrial Revolution. While, in the 19th century, the western half of Connecticut had been dominated by the metals and precision-machine industries (making it the Silicon Valley of the 19th century), for 150 years eastern Connecticut had led the state in textile production. Indeed, combined with Rhode Island, eastern Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire, and southwestern Maine, Connecticut had formed the industrial heartland of the United States. By the 1880s the Willimantic Mills had become the largest thread factory, not just in Connecticut, but in the United States, producing roughly 90% of the country’s cotton sewing-machine thread. Nearby Manchester, CT, was a silk manufacturing center; Rockville and Stafford Springs produced woolens; and mammoth factories in Norwich, Baltic, and elsewhere manufactured uncounted yards of woven cloth. For more than a century, Willimantic had boomed as America’s Thread City. Its busy mills manufactured the thread in U. S. Army uniforms, NASA spacesuits, General Motors seat belts, and major league baseballs. Its sprawling Mill No. 2 was the first factory in the world to be electrified, and in the 1880s its grand showplace Mill No. 4 — the first factory in the world designed specifically for electricity — was the largest single-story factory in the world. As a pioneer in electricity, Willimantic was the home of the second shift and the coffee break. The story of the Industrial Revolution in eastern Connecticut was a history worth preserving, and worth telling.