profits were said to have reached £17,000; and the other year is probably 1790, as the sales recorded for January amount to £6,010 as compared with £4,453 in January 1787.
It was in these two prosperous years that Oldknow's long-meditated plans for the adoption of the factory system took actual shape, though the work was not completed for two years more. In the spring of 1789 the records show him to be employing some forty spinners, mainly children, in a factory at The Carrs in Stockport, about ten minutes' walk from his Hillgate premises. This was probably a transformed silk-mill rented for the purpose, and the machines water-frames. There is a record of the cotton delivered there in 1789–91, of the rovings and low counts of yarn produced in 1790–1, and of the stock-taking of 1 September 1791, and there the story ends. Oldknow perhaps regarded this small venture as an experiment in mill management to be relinquished as soon as his own factories were at work. His plan was to carry on winding and fine spinning by steam at Stockport, and to spin low and medium counts by water-power at Mellor. The Stockport factory was the first to be completed. A Boulton and Watt engine was installed during the winter of 1790–1, and there is a record of the operation of ten machines, each winding 2,000 to 4,000 hanks per week from April 1791. There is a Stockport tradition that the London stage coaches stopped as they passed Oldknow's factory so that the passengers might see at work the first steam engine to be erected in the town.[1] By December 1791 fine counts of weft as high as no. 140, and of twist as high as no. 120, were being spun in a new five-storied mill for use in the muslin manufacture.
But it is the larger mill at Mellor with which we are mainly concerned. The estate at Bottoms, where Oldknow later on built his Apprentice House, was in his possession in the autumn of 1787, when neighbouring farmers were ploughing the land for him. Larger bills for labour in 1789 show that preliminary operations for the provision of water-power were in progress. The inscription 1790 underneath the initials S.O., and the representation of a weaver's shuttle on a large oval stone tablet which lies on the greensward near the ruins of the mill, would seem to commemorate the laying of the foundations, as the earliest building recorded is in May 1791, and the work was still incomplete at the end of 1792. Upwards of a score of weekly or fortnightly accounts of 'Wages paid at Mellor' supplemented by long and detailed bills of master-painters, plasterers, machinists, saddlers, &c., covering long periods provide materials for reconstructing the progress of the undertaking. Sixty men were employed for several days at the end
- ↑ Heginbotham, History of Stockport, ii. 323.
