The Boston Associates

Nathan Appleton

Abbott Lawrence

Patrick Tracy Jackson

The Boston Associates was a term created by historian Vera Shlakmen in Economic History of a Factory Town, A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (1935) to describe a loosely linked group of investors. They included Nathan Appleton, Patrick Tracy Jackson, Abbott Lawrence, and Amos Lawrence, often related directly or through marriage, they were based in Boston, Massachusetts. By 1845, there were 31 textile companies—located in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and southern Maine—produced one-fifth of all textiles in the United States. The textiles were a product of cotton, brought north from the southern cotton states by sea. With the capital earned through these mills, they invested in railroads, such as the Boston and Lowell. These railroads helped transport the cotton from warehouses to factories. These Boston-based investors established banks—such as the Suffolk Bank—and invested in others. In time, they controlled 40% of banking capital in Boston, 40% of all insurance capital in Massachusetts, and 30% of Massachusetts' railroads. Tens of thousands of New Englanders received employment from these investors, working in any one of the hundreds of their mills.

Mill locations established or improved by the Boston Associates:

• Waltham, Massachusetts (1813)
• Lowell, Massachusetts (1822)
• Manchester, New Hampshire (1825)
• Saco, Maine (1831)
• Nashua, New Hampshire (1836)
• Dover, New Hampshire (1836)
• Chicopee, Massachusetts (1838)
• Lawrence, Massachusetts (1845)
• Holyoke, Massachusetts (1847)

See also

• Boston Manufacturing Company
• Francis Cabot Lowell (businessman)
• Paul Moody (inventor)

Further reading

• Robert Sobel The Entrepreneurs: Explorations Within the American Business Tradition (Weybright & Talley 1974), chapter 1, Francis Cabot Lowell: The Patrician as Factory Master. ISBN 0-679-40064-8
• Carl E. Prince, Seth Taylor. Daniel Webster, the Boston Associates, and the U.S. Government's Role in the Industrializing Process, 1815-1830. Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 283-299
• Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. Enterprising Elite, The Boston Associates and the World They Made. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
• Francois Weil; "Capitalism and Industrialization in New England, 1815-1845." The Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 4 (Mar., 1998), pp. 1334-1354.
• Anne Farrow; John Lang; Jennifer Frank; "Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery." Chapter 1. Ballantine Books, The Hartford Courant Company: Hartford, Connecticut. 2005.