This is the eighth profile in The City That…, a series about American cities that invented an industry, led the world in it, and then watched the center move on. We tell their stories plainly and with affection — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding
The city was an argument before it was a place. Alexander Hamilton had made it in the Federalist and in his Report on Manufactures: that a republic which only farmed and shipped would stay a client of Europe, and that to be free a country must learn to make things. 
He wanted to prove it on the ground. He found his proof forty miles up from the harbor, where the Passaic River comes to a granite ledge and falls seventy-seven feet into a gorge — the second-greatest waterfall by volume east of the Mississippi, after Niagara. Two billion gallons a day went over it and did nothing but roar. Hamilton looked at that and saw the power to run a nation’s mills.
In 1791 the plan he had backed took a charter from New Jersey: the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, a private company with a public purpose, exempt from taxes for ten years.
The idea had come first from Tench Coxe, but Hamilton carried it. They named the town for William Paterson, the state’s governor and a signer of the Constitution, who signed the charter. Hamilton hired Pierre Charles L’Enfant — the man laying out the new capital at Washington — to design the raceways, the tiered stone canals that would carry the falls’ power to the factory floors. It was the first planned industrial city in America, drawn on paper before a wheel turned. Hamilton called it a national manufactory.
The Society’s own mills failed inside five years. But the plan survived by becoming a landlord: the company kept the dams and the water and sold power to anyone who would build. Cotton came first, then locomotives and machinery, then the guns — Samuel Colt made his first revolvers in a Paterson mill in the 1830s before he took the business to Hartford. The falls turned whatever was set before them. And then, around 1840, a man named John Ryle put the first silk on a bobbin in Paterson, and the city found the thing it would become the word for.
The Height
Silk is the hardest of the textiles and the most exacting, and that is why it came to Paterson and stayed. It needed skill more than it needed cheapness — weavers and dyers who had served long apprenticeships in the old silk towns of Europe. They came, and they brought their trade with them: from Macclesfield in England, from Krefeld in Germany, from Como in Italy, from Lodz in Poland. They settled in the shadow of the mills in neighborhoods that took the names of the places they had left — Weavertown, Little Italy, Little Holland — and by 1910 three of every four workers in the city were foreign-born.
By then Paterson was Silk City, and the country had no rival for it. They called it the Lyon of America, after the great silk city of France, and the boast held.
New Jersey made about a third of all the silk in the United States, and nine-tenths of that came out of Paterson — hundreds of mills and dye houses, tens of thousands of hands, the looms running six days a week. The dye houses along the lower falls turned the raw skeins the deep jewel colors the fashion trade wanted, and the master dyers of those houses, many from Lyon and Como, were craftsmen as fine as any in the city. Jacquard looms wove figured ribbon and broad silk that went down to the garment houses of New York and out to dress the whole country.
It was skilled and dangerous work. The women who ran the looms kept their hair bound tight and their sleeves close, because the drive belts and the shuttles took hold of anything loose and did not let go. Above the valley, on the shoulder of Garret Mountain, the silk baron Catholina Lambert — who had come to America a poor English boy and made a fortune in ribbon — built himself a stone castle and filled it with paintings, and from its windows he could look down on the smoke of his own mills. The wealth was real, and the skill was real, and so was the distance between the castle on the mountain and the tenements by the water. That distance was the other thing Paterson made, and in 1913 it came due.
The Turn
The trouble came in through the looms.
The owners wanted every weaver to run four looms at once instead of two — the same wage, or less, for twice the machines, and half as many weavers needed. The weavers had fought over the pace of the work since the 1880s, and they knew what four looms meant. It was not the first time Paterson’s workers had said no; as far back as 1835, thousands had walked out, many of them children, against the thirteen-hour day. But 1913 was the reckoning.
It started small, a few hundred weavers out of the Doherty mill in late January. By the end of February it was the whole city — near twenty-four thousand workers, three hundred mills and dye houses gone silent. They called in the Industrial Workers of the World, and the organizers came: Big Bill Haywood, Carlo Tresca, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was twenty-two and held meetings for the women alone. The city would not let them assemble, so the strike moved across the line to Haledon, where the mayor would, and a silk weaver named Pietro Botto opened his house; the speakers addressed crowds of twenty thousand from his second-floor porch. To raise money and spirit, the strikers took a train to New York in June and filled Madison Square Garden, more than a thousand of them acting out their own strike on a stage, the picket line and the funeral of a shot worker played before the city that bought the silk.
It was, for its size and its bitterness, remarkably without violence on the strikers’ side. It held for five months. And it lost. The owners had the deeper pockets and a simple weapon: they already owned mills in the cheaper towns of Pennsylvania, and they ran the work there while Paterson starved. By the end of July the weavers went back with nothing, loom for loom as before. The strike that drew the nation’s eye to the loom did not change the loom. It only showed which way the work was already going.
What Was Lost
After the strike the looms kept leaving, and then the thing they wove went out of fashion. Rayon came in the 1920s, and nylon at the end of the 1930s, and the new fibers did what silk did for less, and washed easier besides. When Japan cut off the raw silk in 1941 there was little left to cut off. The great houses had already gone south and to Pennsylvania and overseas, chasing the cheap hour. The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures — Hamilton’s company, the one that had started it all — sold its charter and its falls to the City of Paterson in 1945 and went out of existence, a hundred and fifty-four years after it drew the first raceway.
What was left was the hardest thing to watch a city lose: not the buildings, which mostly stood, but the reason for them. The dye houses emptied. The looms went quiet or went away. The skill in the hands of the weavers, the apprenticeship of Macclesfield and Como carried across an ocean, had no place to go and no one to be taught to. By the early 1980s Paterson was counted among the poorest cities in America. The mills along the raceways became what mills become when the work ends — brick shells over dry canals, holding the shape of an industry that had gone.
What Remains
The falls remain, and the falls were always the point. They are a national historical park now — authorized in 2009, established in 2011 — the gorge and the raceways and the surviving mills kept as what they are: the place where America first tried to prove it could make things. A hydroelectric plant at the foot of the falls still turns the water into power, quietly, the way Hamilton meant it to. The Paterson Museum, in the old locomotive works, keeps the looms and the story. Across the line in Haledon the Botto house is the American Labor Museum, so the strike that lost is not forgotten. And the city is still what it always was — a gateway, the first American ground under immigrant feet, only now the feet come from Lima and Ramallah and Dhaka instead of Lyon and Lodz.
But the truest thing Paterson kept is not in a museum.
A doctor named William Carlos Williams delivered babies and set bones in these neighborhoods for forty years, and all the while he was listening to the falls, and he made them the voice of a great American poem. He called it Paterson, and in it the city is a giant lying asleep in the valley with the river pouring through his dreams, and the strike is in it, and the mills are in it, and the immigrant names are in it — no ideas but in things, he wrote, and the thing was this city.
Hamilton chose the falls to prove a republic could make things. It made cotton and guns and locomotives, and then it made the finest silk in America, and when the silk was gone it turned out the falls had been making something else the whole time, something the cheap mills of Pennsylvania could never take away. The water that ran the looms ran into a poem, and the poem is still running.
Paterson spun the silk that dressed America, and that is worth remembering.
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Why Paterson? It was the republic’s first planned industrial city, chosen by Hamilton at the Great Falls to prove America could manufacture — and by 1910 its mills wove the overwhelming share of a nation’s silk, enough that the country called it, plainly, Silk City.
Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach “Critical Skills” and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
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