The beginnings of the Lorraine Manufacturing Company and the MacColl family in America were modest and deeply intertwined. For sixty years, both had a powerful impact on the city of Pawtucket and the international textile industry.
In the late 1800s, Rhode Islanders William F. and Frederick C. Sayles decided to enter the rapidly-growing textile manufacturing industry when their tenants vacated a cotton mill on Mineral Spring Avenue just outside downtown Pawtucket.
Being entrepreneurial and ambitious (Frederick was the first mayor of Pawtucket), but not experienced in the wool business they planned, the Sayles brothers lured 26-year-old Scotsman James Roberton MacColl from his clothing business in Glasgow to manage the new enterprise.
MacColl typified the energetic immigrant. Within eight years as manager of the new Lorraine Manufacturing Company, he had earned the respect and trust of his employers, such that, when William Sayles died in 1894, MacColl was named the executor and trustee of the Sayles' estate, an honor of great distinction.
Two years later, he became secretary and treasurer and a minority shareholder of a newly-incorporated Lorraine Manufacturing. In 1920, following the death of the last Sayles actively involved in management, MacColl became president, a title that stayed with the MacColl family for the next 33 years as the company grew to be one of the nation's largest woolen manufacturers and Pawtucket's largest employers.
In 1900 an advertisement for Lorraine Manufacturing read: "All good Americans will naturally feel pride in this example of progress in high-grade manufacturing, the goods having won [the only Grand Prize at the Paris Exposition], where manufacturers of all nations had been invited to compete. [The] excellence of quality and finish cannot be surpassed anywhere."
James Roberton MacColl was a hands-on executive who, while expert in the handling of cloth, was simultaneously finding his way as a captain of industry. In the MacColl family's collection at the Slater Mill Historical Society are dozens of tiny pocket- sized diaries in which MacColl kept voluminous notes on the latest cloth production and bolt sizes, but also lists of salaries, bonuses, and bills.
He was equally meticulous with his 2,000-man workforce in Pawtucket and Westerly, to the degree that his employee manual included this about gardening: "Lorraine has set aside several acres of ground for the benefit of employees who are desirous of raising produce. Opportunity is thus afforded to him not only to add materially to his income, create a beneficial recreation and pastime, but to fulfill a patriotic duty in producing from the soil."
MacColl was also asking questions about matters that later came to dominate labor. He wrote to his brother in Scotland, asking how large mills there handled medical care for employees: "Do [they] provide medical care free or at reduced cost? What arrangement do they make with the physician? What is the usual medical fee charged to working people by doctors of good standing for visits to their homes?"
His elegant correspondence, each carefully copied into onionskin volumes, speak of a growing involvement with a national association of cotton producers and international meetings with manufacturers in England and France. He attended to political matters, and began working with Rhode Island's Congressional delegation to put trade matters before the President of the United States. Before long he was president of the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and president of three international conferences of cotton growers and manufacturers.
MacColl also found time for a family of six children and deep involvement in his community. In memory of their only daughter, Margaret, who had died at age 5, he and his wife Agnes contributed $200,000 anonymously to Memorial Hospital for a new children's ward and maternity department. He was a trustee there and with the American Red Cross in Providence, a vice president with the Community Fund, and president of the Rhode Island Anti-Tuberculosis Association. He was a president of the Pawtucket YMCA, which dedicated the James R. MacColl Field to his memory in 1951.
At the time of James Roberton MacColl's death at age 75 in 1931, Lorraine Manufacturing was producing 13 million yards of award-winning cloth each year. The company had offices in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
A Different Time, A Different Challenge
MacColl's son William and, when William died in 1941, his son Norman assumed the presidency of Lorraine Manufacturing, inheriting the vastly different challenges of what was now a mature company after World War 1. Where the creation of an industry had been the senior MacColl's concern, its maintenance and expansion were his sons' responsibility.
While Lorraine and the industry prospered for many of those years - and the company won an "E for Excellence" award from the U.S. government for its efforts in World War II - new factors came in to play. The company's newspaper files are dominated by reports of labor actions - including the first industry-wide strike in 1951 that idled 1,400 workers at Lorraine - as well as the rapidly-increasing costs of wool and cotton. The Depression descended. Synthetic fabrics began to be introduced. Increased competition came from factories in the South, as well as from outside the country.
At the critical time the company had to consider investing in new plants, probably outside Rhode Island, the next generation of MacColls were turning their sights elsewhere - to the ministry, higher education, and banking, in some cases - or were too young to enter the business.
Norman and the rest of the MacColl family - still minority owners - made the difficult decision in 1953 to sell the business, which they did, coincidentally, to a company bearing the Sayles name, the Sayles Biltmore Bleacheries. The company appears to have largely dissolved afterwards.
Norman was still young enough at 58 to devote serious time to community pursuits, and he did so with dedication. Living another 35 years, he became deeply involved with the Slater Mill Historical Association, as well as in his father's interests at Memorial Hospital and the Pawtucket YMCA.
Along the way, both father and son created philanthropic legacies to match their historic legacies in Rhode Island. In 1917, James MacColl had established a charitable trust with 1,000 shares of Lorraine stock which he and family members and trusted associates oversaw. In 1973, the trustees voted to transfer the now $1.2 million fund to The Rhode Island Foundation as an unrestricted fund. The MacColl Benevolent Fund now totals $3.5 million and generates more than $100,000 annually in grants. In 1967, Norman and his wife Mary had created their own unrestricted fund at the Foundation, and it now totals $155,000. Norman was recommending grants up until 1988, the year he died at age 93.
The third and later generations of MacColls are now diversely settled, in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and the West Coast, among other places. But not before the MacColl name and that of Lorraine Manufacturing earned their places in the history books.
