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Article ID: CBB998530351

America's 19th-Century British-Style Fireproof Factories (2001)

Wermiel, Sara E. (Author)

IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology
Volume: 27
Issue: 2
Pages: 23-36

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40968568

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Cross-national comparison Textile Mills Buildings, Industrial Architecture, Industrial Industrial archaeology Fire Insurance 19th century Great Britain United States

The divergence in the characteristic types of multistory textile factories found in the United States and Great Britain in the 19th century is an interesting case of dissimilar solutions to a common problem. The problem was fire. To safeguard buildings, machinery, and valuable stock, American and British manufacturers developed their respective systems of fire-resisting construction: slow burning in the United States, fireproof in Britain. Despite American manufacturers' great interest in British manufacturing practice and the availability in Britain of publications describing American mill buildings, there were probably no slowburning textile factories in Britain nor iron and brick textile factories in America in the 19th century. But while American textile manufacturers rejected fireproof construction for their mills, some manufactures in other industries did adopt it. In addition, American textile manufacturers occasionally used fireproof construction in small ways: for constructing special buildings and rooms for particularly hazardous operations within a mill complex. These iron and brick fireproof factories were rare, which makes the surviving ones all the more significant, both historically and as examples of a high-tech construction system of their day. However, few people today recognize the system for what it was: not a means to make building strong so much as to make them noncombustible. This paper describes the system and its use in factory construction in the United States. It surveys 19th-century American fireproof factories and parts of factories and examines several notable surviving examples. It then draws some conclusions about what sort of manufacturers were most likely to build using the fireproof system of construction.

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