My girlfriend was raised in Massachusetts; her parents are from New England and New York, so I have a more intimate and family-oriented view of this locale (as do most of the people who live and visit here, it seems).
I’ve spent a couple months living with her family near Framingham, during the COVID-19 epidemic in mid-2020. Otherwise, most of my experiences here stem from holiday trips made in the Fall and Winter.
If you have any comments to make or pointers to give to improve this section, hit me up!
Massachusetts is obviously the home of Boston: the biggest city in New England, and one of the most historically-significant cities in the entire United States. There’s a lot of post-colonial history here!
Most of this is derived from either wikipedia, books I’ve read over the years, or random plaques and museums I’ve visited in New England.
In post-revolutionary, industrial America, Massachusetts was highly representative of the industrial, bourgeois spirit that is so retrospectively characteristic of the period.
The 1800s saw the rise of an economic aristocracy , with several families extracting multi-generational fortunes from manufacturing, trade, and financial services. It also saw the rise to financial and social prominence of academic institutions that retain their reputations to this day (particularly Harvard).
It’s worth noting that these fortunes and academic institutions were mostly funded by the refinement and retail of raw goods and materials, which were profitably procured from the slavery-based economies of the American South and West Indies. Thus, it’s hard to draw a clear line separating the wealth of Massachusetts from the institution of American Slavery.
By the time of the Antebellum Period, the elites of Massachusetts had achieved runaway wealth: they were entrenched in the global economy, and were no longer dependent on the availability of slavery-subsidized goods. It is thus notable, that the earliest aristocratic family members to become involved in the abolitionist movement came of age in 1830s and 1840s.
There’s probably an interesting thesis in here, about how the invention of financial instruments like insurance, commodity markets, and stock exchanges created a layer of abstraction and indirection between the permanent-wealthy of the North and the material goods that initialized their wealth, how this layer of abstraction allowed them to financially-survive the abolition of slavery, and how this calculus impacted the abolition movement, itself.
During and after the Civil War, Massachusetts continued to be a singular powerhouse of American industry. Springfield, for example, grew into an innovation hub for manufacturing: producing railway and locomotive equipment, vulcanized rubber, and machining lathes for interchangeable parts (primarily used for the mass production of firearms).
Massachusetts was arguably the first center of US Manufacturing. The history of American Manufacturing rippled outward: to the rest of New England, then to the Midwest and South, as transportation networks improved and relative-wages rose. Boston competed with New York and Philadelphia for the title of the USA’s most vital port city.
Many, many factors contributed to the state’s relative industrial decline. I’ll focus on Transportation, Wages, and Power.
With the Eerie Canal, constructed in the 1830s, the cheapest path from the Atlantic to the Interior was now through the Big Apple. Boston and Philadelphia could no longer compete on this route.
The intricate system of railroads designed to connect the manufacturing capacity of Western Massachusetts to the Midwest and the Northeast gradually became less unique, as speculating railroad financiers spurred development of criss-crossing networks of rail throughout New England, the mid-Atlantic, and (during Reconstruction) the South.
However, railroads were a risky business, making commerce by rail more expensive. For example, see the Panic of 1873, driven by rampant speculative investment. (Railroads were the bitcoin of the day).
In practice, railroads are only as valuable as the goods they’re transporting. Speculation was based on the idea that New England would continue to be the manufacturing center of the New World. Technology evolved, and other areas became cheaper to work in.
Furthermore, a series of financial panics in the antebellum period had significant impacts on the New England economy, disproportionately impacting laborers, and giving them leverage to demand higher wages in the “normal times” in-between panics.
The industries most impacted by this shift were textiles and furniture manufacturing, where the decline in Massachusetts was proportional to the incline in NYC around this time period.
At first, they were replaced by machinery manufacturing (building the machines, for the rest of the country to use). Over time, this too moved outside the state, largely driven by wage pressure. As people and ideas became more mobile, the pressure to move to lower cost of labor areas could not be resisted.
Coal was first used in the mid-1800s, to power blast furnaces and steam boilers. This was a 10x improvement on the previous state-of-the-art, wood. This made iron cheaper, and for the first time enabled factories to be anywhere, whereas previously it was a strong requirement to be river/waterfall-adjacent (which benefited New England).
This made other parts of the country quite economical to build in. You just needed to be close to a railroad (to get in the coal and machine parts).
The eventual development of electric power grids amplified (zing) this trend. These days, there is no power advantage anywhere, and industry is largely driven by other factors.
Many of the towns and suburbs of Boston today were at one point founded on the basis of manufacturing or agriculture. Sara was raised in one such town, which was adjacent to a railroad, a granite mine, and the then-largest shoe manufacturing plants in the United States. Her house had at various points in time been a dairy farm and a cobbler’s shop.
These days, the most distinctive features of these towns are arguably their pasts: streets and villages named after long-gone mills, railroads, and families abound.
The primary characteristics that families distinguish their towns by are their distances from Boston by car or by train, the relative test scores of their public schools, and their relative proximities to various natural landmarks.
The presence of academic institutions has preserved Massachusetts’ value. Although, as online learning democratizes access, we should expect this dimension to decline in importance.