Our Industrial History

Please note: This page focusses on the Providence Jewelry Manufacturing Historic District, which is not the same as the larger “Jewelry District.” What’s the deal?

A special thanks to the Rhode Island Historical Society for granting access to their invaluable resources. 

The Providence Jewelry Manufacturing Historic District is significant as a visually distinctive concentration of buildings related to the area's development from a predominantly residential neighborhood to the center of the Providence jewelry industry in the 19th and 20th centuries. It marked a significant change from the residential and pastoral settings of the 19th century.

Though late-19th and early 20th century brick and reinforced-concrete factories predominate in the district, there are also important examples of domestic and industrial architecture from the first half of the 19th century when the area was first developed as a part of Providence's West Side.

One of the houses in the district, 137 Chestnut Street, is significant for its associations with two prominent members of a Providence family, Thomas A. Doyle and his sister, Sarah E. Doyle. Thomas A. Doyle was mayor of Providence for eighteen years between 1864 and 1886, during which time he oversaw the completion of numerous public works and the improvement of city services. Sarah E. Doyle, as a teacher in the Providence High School and a leading advocate for the establishment of the coeducational Rhode Island School of Design and the Pembroke College for Women associated with Brown University, was one of the most effective spokesmen for women's educationin Rhode Island and the nation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The factories erected by jewelry manufacturers and real estate investors illustrate broad trends in the development of the jewelry industry both in Rhode Island and in the United States as a whole. They are also significant representatives of major developments in 19th and 20th century industrial architecture in Rhode Island and the rest of the country. They demonstrate the evolution of architectural engineering techniques in the solution of basic industrial needs including fire-prevention construction, improved lighting and the efficient use of space.

The earliest factory in the district, the Elm Street Machine Shop built in 1848. It’s walls were built of stone to reduce the dangers of fire.

The building’s large windows with flat lintels and the long continuous "trapdoor monitor" in the gable roof, designed to provide as much light as possible to the work areas, and the minimal classical styling seen in the plain stone cornice and the round arches of the freight doors.

The late 19th century jewelry factories that followed are quite different. Built in a downtown location where real estate had become very expensive, they are taller than earlier buildings, some of them reaching seven stories high, and they use all of the available space in their often irregular lots. They are built with brick load-bearing walls and slow-burning heavy timber frames. In an effort to increase window space and improve natural lighting, their builders almost universally employed the segmental arch in the window openings, which concentrated more of the wall load in the piers between the windows, thereby allowing for larger windows.

This design concentrated more of the wall load in the piers between the windows, thereby allowing for larger windows an improtant design consideration before electricity and air conditioning.

A further development in this trend was the creation of thicker piers which supported the wall, while the non-load bearing spandrels between the piers contained even larger windows. The flat or near-flat roof, which allowed for maximum use and improved lighting of the top story, had also become common following the introduction of coal tar and tar paper coatings. Stylistically, most of these turn-of-the-century buildings are similar and quite plain, with a corbeled cornice providing the major ornamental touch, as in the Champlin Building and the Doran Building. Occasionally the main entrance is the focus of more elaborate decoration, e.g. the Irons and Russell Building.

In the second decade of the 20th century, the development of flat-slab reinforced-concrete construction transformed the nature of industrial building. In this type of construction, the concrete floor slab and the columns, reinforced by steel rods, became the only structural elements in a building, opening up the interior space and leaving eighty percent of the walls free for windows. First introduced in Rhode Island in the A.T. Wall Building of 1910, flat-slab reinforced-concrete construction was employed in the major factories built in the Jewelry District after that year, including the Doran-Speidel Building, the Little Nemo Building and the Coro Building.

The jewelry industry in Providence had its origins in the late 18th century in the enterprises of two men, Seril Dodge, who was the first jeweler to open a shop in Providence, and his nephew, Nehemiah Dodge, who developed an early process for rolled plated gold. From these small beginnings Providence developed into the center of jewelry manufacturing in the United States in the late 19th century, a position which it has continued to hold.

In 1794, just about the time that Seril Dodge retired, Nehemiah Dodge opened his own shop for the manufacture of 18k gold jewelry. Before long, he abandoned this traditional craft and became the first manufacturer of rolled plated gold. The method which he developed, perhaps with techniques learned from his uncle, consisted of uniting a thin sheet of gold to a thicker sheet of copper with silver solder, and then hammering it and rolling it to the desired thickness. Dodge sold his plated gold to other goldsmiths and thus became the first "manufacturing jeweler." As such, he instituted two trends that would continue to characterize the Providence jewelry industry: the production of jewelry in the lower price ranges; and the specialization and innovation in the technology of jewelry manufacture.

On the foundations laid by the Dodges and their contemporaries, the Providence jewelry industry grew steadily if not rapidly in the early 19th century. One of the aspects of this growth was an expansion of the jewelers' markets. Not content with just local sales, Providence jewelers were soon traveling throughout the country, vending their gold chains and other wares as far away as New Orleans. Though the markets expanded, the average jewelry operation did not.

The most common arrangement was the small partnership of two or more members, with one partner managing the shop and the other keeping the books and marketing the product. Within the shop, the traditional institution of apprenticeship prevailed. After serving their seven-year apprenticeships, two or more journeymen often combined their resources to fora new partnership.

These partnerships were not heavily capitalized nor did they last more than ten years on the average. This was due largely to the volatile nature of the jewelry business. The sales of jewelry, a luxury item, have been particularly sensitive to downturns in the economy, which occurred regularly in the 19th century. Apart from the mood of the general economy, the jeweler also has had to deal with fluctuations in the prices of precious metals as well as changing tastes in fashion.

They produced 80% of the industries costume jewelry. With the majority of the businesses being small independent operations employing 25 to 100 employees. A 1.5 billion dollar industry which was shipping 1 million pounds of costume jewelry a week.

Certain important technological innovations in this period originated in Providence, such as Levi Burdon's invention of seamless-filled wire (c. 1887) which stimulated the chain-making industry. Another technological advance, electroplating, was quickly taken up by Providence jewelers and applied to the manufacture of novelties, such as buttons, studs, emblems, badges and other metal ornaments. Mechanization also led to increasing specialization, with many firms contributing to the manufacture of a final product. One of the largest of these specialized industries was the production of jewelers' findings, the pin-stems, catches, hubs and dies and other hardware for pins, earrings, necklaces and novelties. Electroplating, coloring, engraving, chasing, refining, tool making and jewelry box and case-making were other areas where specialized firms emerged.

Within the individual firms, the craft traditions, while not disappearing completely, were being supplanted by specialization as well. Workers increasingly performed a single type of job, such as soldering, operating a press, polishing or stone-setting. There was in addition a large amount of low-skill work, such as stringing beads and assembling jewelry, which was done by semi- or unskilled workers at home. These workers, many of them immigrant women and children often labored for low wages in unsafe working conditions. This type of work has been largely but not completely eliminated.

A major manifestation of the jewelry industry's expansion in the second half of the 19th century was the growth of a Jewelry District. Prior to 1850 most of the jewelry shops had been on or near North Main Street. By the end of the Civil War, they had moved across the river to the West Side, where they concentrated in the area bounded by Richmond, Orange, Middle and Clifford Streets, south of the city's banking and commercial district. Here there began to appear the first multi-story factory buildings built by jewelers and real estate investors for multiple tenancies by the industry.

One of the first was the Richardson and Hicks or the Bowen Building (1850) at Page and Friendship Streets. It was the largest jewelry building in the city until the Fitzgerald Building was erected on Eddy Street between Friendship and Clifford Streets in the early 1870s. As the industry's growth accelerated in the 1880s, jewelry manufacturers began to look outside the immediate boundaries of the Jewelry District for new building sites, and it was at this juncture that the district began to spread south and west down Eddy and Chestnut Streets and along the side streets between them. This area to the south of Friendship Street was largely residential, except for the industrial corridor along Eddy Street and the riverfront. Development had begun here in the late eighteenth century when the Eddy family and others established shipyards and wharves on Cowpen Point at the end of Ship Street (the present Ship and Eddy Streets).

More intensive building followed in the early 19th century as a part of the general growth of Providence's West Side. Anthony's Map of Providence of 1823 shows that the present street pattern was largely in place by that date, and by the 1840s, this development was essentially complete. The neighborhood was home to a range of Providence society, from merchants and businessmen who worked in the business district to the North, to factory managers, artisans and skilled mechanics who were employed in neighboring factories or in the shipyards and on the wharves to the East.

For example, the house at 157 Chestnut Street was built and initially occupied by Samuel Lewis, a mason. In 1844 it became the residence of Thomas A. Doyle and his family. Doyle (1827-1886), was an auctioneer, stock and real estate broker who entered politics as a member of the Common Council in 1852 and almost continuously thereafter held office in the Providence city government. After filling several different posts in the city government, he was elected mayor of Providence in 1864, a post that he held for 18 years, serving from 1864-1869, 1870-1881, and from 1884 until his death in 1886. During his administrations, Providence more than doubled in size and wealth and the scope of city services expanded as well. The improvements included the establishment of regular drills and uniforms for the city police, the introduction of both a city water system and a sewage system and the creation of a city park and several other public buildings, including the present City Hall. Doyle moved to a new residence in 1870, but his sisters, Charlotte and Sarah E. Doyle, continued to live here until 1892.

From 1878 until she retired in 1892, she served as the principal of the girls' department. She was also a tireless volunteer on behalf of higher education for women and served as one of the leaders in the founding of the coeducational Rhode Island School of Design in 1877. At the request of the president of Brown University, she founded and chaired the Rhode Island Society for the Collegiate Education of Women, the organization that raised the funds for the establishment and construction of the Pembroke College for Women at Brown University in 1892. In 1895 she became one of the first recipients of an honorary A.M. from Pembroke College. She continued to exert a strong formative influence on Rhode Island society until her death in 1922.

The house at 155 Chestnut Street, originally the residence of Pardon Clarke, a painter, was for many years the home of Benjamin White, cashier of the Phenix Bank. A more modest house at 18 Bassett Street was a rental property that was probably the home of a mechanic or skilled worker.Two major exceptions to the predominantly residential land use in the area west of Eddy Street were: the machine shop on Elm Street at Butler (Imperial Place), built by the Phenix Iron Foundry and Elm Street Machine Shop at Eddy and Elm Streets; and the Elba Mill on Butler Street between Elm and Bassett Streets, one of the few textile factories in that part of the city.

This community had developed as a part of the walking city, but by the late 19th century, the development of streetcar lines had made it possible to live a greater distance from the workplace. As new residential neighborhoods were developed to the South and West of the central part of the city, industry's claims on this area were growing more imperative.

One of the last residential buildings erected in the neighborhood was at 29 Elbow Street. Built c. 1888 on a lot created by subdividing the 155 Chestnut Street parcel, 29 Elbow Street was a lodging house, with tenants who included, significantly, jewelers.

The first major landmark in the jewelry industry's expansion south of Friendship Street was the Champlin Building, erected in 1888 at the corner of Chestnut and Ship Streets. The S.B. Champlin Company had been founded in 1872 by Stanton B. Champlin and his son George to manufacture gold rings and gold-filled chains. Having outgrown its quarters at Eddy and Elm Streets, the Champlin Company built a five-story brick building large enough to house its own operations and to provide rental space for other manufacturers. The venture was such a success that the building was enlarged on the South in 1901. Among the other companies that occupied the building were: the E.M. Dart Company, manufacturers of pipe fittings and pumps, valves and regulators; the Edwin Lowe Company, successors to the plating business started by Thomas Lowe; and the Hedison Company, jewelry manufacturers.

The concentration of these multistory factories on Chestnut Street increased in 1907 when James Doran and Sons built the seven-story brick Doran Building at 150 Chestnut Street. The Dorans, who manufactured findings, occupied only one floor in their building and rented out the remainder.

A similar pattern of development but a different type of building technology produced the A.T. Wall Building at 162 Clifford Street in 1910. Ashbel T. Wall founded his company in 1888 for the production of gold-plated wire. In 1901, the company employed 60 workers, and by 1908, it had outgrown its rented quarters and had commissioned the Bowerman Brothers of Boston to design a new factory. The result, built by the Thomas F. Cullinan Company of Providence, was the first example in Rhode Island of mushroom-column, flat-slab reinforced-concrete construction. 

The mushroom-column system of flat-slab construction, developed by C.A.P. Turner in 1905-06, was one of the earliest successful flat-slab structural systems. The A.T. Wall Company occupied part of the building and rented the rest. One of the first tenants was the Clark and Coombs Manufacturing Company, makers of gold rings. Established in 1862, the Clark and Coombs firm is still in operation in the Wall Building.

The mushroom-column, flat-slab system was used again two years later when James Doran and Sons erected a second factory building purely devoted to jewelry-manufacturing rental units. This five-story building at 70 Ship Street became known as the Doran-Speidel Building.

In contrast to these large multiple-unit factories, the Manufacturers' Refining Company building, erected at 26 Ship Street in 1910, was a small two-story brick building, devoted entirely to that company's business, which was the refining of the precious metals contained in the floor sweeping collected from the neighboring jewelry workshops.

Not all of the building in this vicinity in the early 20th century was related to the jewelry industry. An interesting exception was the Providence Women's City Missionary Society Laundry, built at 155 Clifford Street in 1903. The Providence Women's City Missionary Society was a voluntary society founded in 1867 to aid the city's indigent women. A basic goal in their efforts was to create an "industrial home" where women might learn skills that would enable them to earn a living. A lack of finances delayed the creation of such an institution until 1897, when the Society, following the example of Trinity Church, Boston, established a laundry where needy women could find employment and learn the trade. The laundry's success enabled the Society to move it out of rented quarters and into this new building, designed specifically as a laundry.

For several years the laundry was able to support itself, but in 1908, a depression reduced the amount of business at the same time that large commercial laundries began to compete with hand-wash laundries. By 1912, both business and the number of applicants for positions in the laundry had decreased to the extent that the Society closed the laundry and sold the building. In the course of its existence, the laundry paid $42,000 to its employees, all of them needy women. The Society itself continued its other activities for many more years before publishing its final report in 1940. The laundry building was soon taken over by the J. & H. Electric Company, a firm that specialized in furnishing and servicing electrical motors and other apparatus for the jewelry industry and other manufacturers. After J. & H. Electric moved to anew building at 200 Richmond Street in 1929, the former laundry building was occupied by a succession of tenants, all involved in some aspect of the jewelry industry.

With the completion of the second Doran building in 1912, the building boom south of Friendship Street slowed down for a time. However, the jewelry industry continued to expand and diversify while Providence's other major industries, textiles and base metals, faltered. Because of the relative simplicity of machinery in the jewelry industry and the typical small capital investment in and personal ownership of jewelry companies, many new experimental companies continued to form. Though not all were successful, many made significant contributions in new products, processing and machinery.

Many products manufactured in the early 20th century, particularly after World War I, represented an imaginative entrepreneurial response by jewelry manufacturers to changing social customs and tastes. One such product was the cigarette lighter, which became popular with the increasing number of men and women smokers. Another was the wristwatch, which became a fashionable item after its widespread use by the armed forces in World War 1.

The Speidel Manufacturing Company, one of the first companies to manufacture the metal watchband, traced its originsto Albert Speidel, a German immigrant, who began as a manufacturer of gold watch chains at 70 Ship Street before World War 1. His brother Edwin designed an expandable metal watch bracelet in 1930 and went on to found the Speidel Corporation, which eventually acquired ownership of the building at 70 Ship Street.

New building in the southern end of the Jewelry District in the 1920s included a number of moderately-sized, steel-framed, factories, as well as some of the largest buildings yet erected by the industry. There was an increasing tendency to locate the new factories south of the existing concentration at Chestnut and Clifford Streets. The smaller buildings appeared for the most part on the cross streets like Ship Street, Elm and South Streets.

Among these smaller buildings were two built by manufacturers: the office and factory building of the W.H. Coe Company, manufacturers of gold leaf, at 89 Ship Street, and the N.H. Haronian Building at 60 Ship Street, built by Nazareth Haronian both to house his own small jewelry and novelty company and for rental use. An example of a similarly-sized factory built solely as an investment is the Alfred Company Building at 100 South Street, which housed tenants including the William C. Greene Company, a Providence jewelry firm that dated back to 1849. The two firms that built large factory buildings in the 1920s exemplified the general trend in the Providence jewelry industry toward high volume production of increasingly inexpensive jewelry.

The Little Nemo Manufacturing Company, founded in 1913 by Benjamin Brier, Charles Brier and Samuel Magid, specialized in imitation diamond jewelry, using stones imported from around the world that were cut, polished and in some cases, set by machinery. In 1928, the company moved from rented quarters at 70 Ship Street, to their new factory at 222 Richmond Street, where they remained for half a century.

The Coro Company, which started as the Cohen and Rosenburger jewelry firm in New York City, opened a Providence branch in 1911. In 1929, they moved into a new factory at 167 Point Street, built in the same flat-slab, reinforced concrete style of construction as the Little Nemo Building, which provided them with the largest factory in the jewelry business in Providence. Although the onset of the Great Depression made this expansion appear ill-timed, the Coro Company survived by becoming the leading manufacturer in the field of costume jewelry in the United States.

Paradoxically, the Depression of the 1930s stimulated the Providence jewelry industry, as precious jewelry craftsmen applied their skills to the design of cheaper, mass-produced jewelry. By introducing a quality approach, they raised the production standards of costume jewelry and stimulated its consumption. Coro had been one of the first firms to experiment in costume jewelry, and with its new plant, it was the best equipped to respond to the new demand. It consolidated its early lead and went on to become the biggest manufacturer of costume jewelry, on into the 1960s. The Little Nemo Company enjoyed similar success as a "syndicate plant", manufacturing costume jewelry for chain stores such as Woolworths. Costume jewelry has continued to be a mainstay for the Providence jewelry industry.

Before the success of the costume jewelry industry was apparent, the Depression had effectively put an end to new building in the Jewelry District until after World War II. Manufacturing had clearly become the dominant activity in the area though, and many of the existing houses were adapted for use by small jewelry firms. Perhaps the greatest losses to the old residential neighborhood came with urban renewal and the Interstate highway program in the late 1950s and 1960s. Complete blocks of houses were razed to create parking lots, while the older industrial area to the north, the original Jewelry District, largely disappeared with the construction of Route 195 and the subsequent completion of a court complex on Friendship Street.

In recent years, the jewelry industry has done most of its new building in Providence farther south along Eddy Street, as well in the industrial parks in the surrounding suburbs.Within the remaining portion old the Jewelry District today, a very few jewelry manufacturing and its associated industries are still an active presence, and many of the factory buildings have been adapted for reuse as office and commercial space, industrial and residential condominiums.