Boston Manufacturing Company

This mill complex on Moody Street in Waltham sits between the railroad and the Charles River. It holds sixteen buildings erected from 1814 to 1921, along with a granite dam built in 1847 and raised in 1850, and traces of the race that carried water to the mills. The Boston Manufacturing Company began here in 1813 and produced its first cloth in early 1815. Historians quoted in the document call it the first truly modern American factory, because it brought spinning and weaving together under one management and one roof. Paul Moody's machine shop developed power looms and other equipment. Later brick mills, a picker house, boiler and engine houses, and a finishing building show growth through the nineteenth century, with the 1873-80 mill the largest. The district extends an earlier landmark designation that covered only part of the site, since most of the surviving industrial space dates after 1850. Several altered buildings are noted as no longer contributing.