Central Woolen Mills District

Central Woolen Mills is a four-acre industrial complex on Mendon and Cross Streets in Uxbridge, built over nearly seventy-five years. Moses Taft built the first mill in 1852 after fire destroyed his Rhode Island mill. Its power came from the abandoned Blackstone Canal, whose bed Taft bought and diverted beneath the main building. The tail race then fed Hecla Pond for reuse downstream. The site holds a four-storey wood-frame main building, brick storehouses, a picker and boiler house, an assorting building, a dye house, a machine shop and an Italianate office, with additions through the 1920s and later. During the Civil War the mill's cloth went to the U.S. government. Later operators included the Calumet Woolen Company and, from 1905, the Stanley Woolen Company, which made khakis and overcoatings in World War I. The complex was listed for its architecture, its link to Taft and its canal-powered mill history.