Welcome to the Mill Museum Digital Archives
This digital archive preserves the collections, exhibits, and published history of the Windham Textile and History Museum (the Mill Museum) in Willimantic, Connecticut. It includes historical photographs, oral history interviews, exhibit records, and articles documenting the American Thread Company and the region's textile manufacturing history.
Materials in this archive are made available for research, education, and public access. Individual items may carry different rights and permissions; please check the rights statement listed on each item before reuse.
Read our Research Guide
To learn how to navigate the collection, we have a dedicated research guide.
Timeline of the Mills
The Timeline of the Mills historical article collection is a good place to start learning about the local history of the town, the industrial revolution, immigration and labor.
Historical Timeline of the Mills
A collection of articles exploring the story of textiles, industry, and the people who built Connecticut's mill towns — from the colonial era through today. Primarily written and researched by Windham Town Historian, Jamie Eves, alongside contributions from other local historians, tracing everything from preindustrial water-powered mills to the rise of the American Thread Company, the lives of the workers who kept the machines running, and the eventual decline of New England's textile industry.
- Part 1: Before the Industrial Revolution
- Part 2: Swift Waters, Hot Steam, Electric Motors: The Coming of Industrialization
- Part 3: The Din of Machines: Inside the Mills
- Part 4: Captains of Industry: Mill Owners and Managers
- Part 5: The Sweat of Their Brows: Mill Workers
- Part 6: Unraveled Threads: The Decline of the Connecticut Textile Industry
- Part 7: The Peoples of the Mill Towns: Individual Lives
- Part 8: Mill Towns as Historical Places
- Part 9: Antebellum Industrial Willimantic: A Chronology