“Free for Me” Week at the Slater Mill Museum, Sponsored by AMICA

Pawtucket, Rhode Island -- Slater Mill Museum and “Free for Me” program sponsor Amica invite school children to visit Slater Mill for free during spring vacation in the week of April 16th through the 20th. When a child comes to Slater Mill accompanied by an adult, the child will visit the Museum free. Adults pay the regular admission fare, and one child per adult will be admitted free of charge.

Regular admission rates apply. Adults: $12.00; Children ages 6-12: $8.50; Senior Citizens: $10.00; Children under six: Free.

For more information about our hours of operation, programs and events, or to schedule a private tour, please visit our website: www.slatermill.org. Slater Mill Museum is located on the Blackstone River at 67 Roosevelt Avenue in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, next to City Hall and across the street from the Pawtucket Visitor Center

Tours include Slater Mill, Wilkinson Mill and the Sylvanus Brown House. Each building is a National Historic Landmark and visiting children and parents have an opportunity to see and learn about many subjects first hand, including what life was like in a pre-industrial, agrarian America. They learn about innovation, the entrepreneurial spirit, immigration, espionage, hydropower, unions and child labor, and children visiting Slater Mill cannot help but relate when they learn how six year-olds once worked at highly specialized, often dangerous tasks in the mills from dawn to dusk, ten to fourteen hours daily, with just half an hour off for lunch, six days of every week. They watch the 16,000 pound waterwheel catch water shunted from the Blackstone River, its power turning gears that drive leather belts which connect to machine tools, amazing visitors with the possibilities, just as they once must have amazed the Wilkinsons and Samuel Slater in 1810. Today, the waterwheel rekindles the idea of renewable resources at a time when modern inventors once again need to consider the scarcity of energy, and how to meet our needs for it in the future.

Each of the Museum buildings exhibits something educational, entertaining and inspirational, always with the goal of developing an informed understanding of American heritage in innovative economic, industrial, cultural, artistic and social terms.

Slater Mill (1793) is a National Historic Landmark, known by historians as the Birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. Costumed interpretive staff share the history of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, the “cotton economy” and Samuel Slater’s “Rhode Island System” of hiring child and adult workers from the same family to operate his manufacturing enterprise, demonstrating how to card cotton, spin thread, to weave and braid cotton textiles.

Filled with 18th and 19th century machinery and hand tools, the three story, fieldstone Wilkinson Mill (1810) was built to produce the machinery for Slater’s inventions next door. There the Wilkinsons patented many ideas and designs, including one for the first precision screw-cutting lathe.

In the Sylvanus Brown House (1758) visitors see how an 18th century American colonial family subsisted, long before the advent of the factory and factory towns, as generalists in the art of survival, prior to an age of increasing specialization, when people became less self-reliant. Children soon realize just how difficult it was to live ‘back in the day’, visiting its kitchen and vegetable and herbal gardens growing cotton, flax and plants used to create dyes. They may even spy a woodchuck upon occasion.