How Reed & Barton and its Britannia ware helped make Taunton the Silver City

In 1824, in a rented room in a fulling mill on Spring Street in Taunton, Isaac Babbitt and his partner, William W. Crossman, began making inkstands, shaving boxes and looking glass frames out of Britannia metal. They were the first Britannia articles made in the United States, the 1883 History of Bristol County says, and the business those two men started became Reed & Barton, the silversmith whose factory on the Mill River, in the words of the Old Colony History Museum, helped earn Taunton the nickname Silver City. More Taunton news is on our Taunton page.

A teapot in a shop window

Britannia was a fine grade of pewter, as the company's National Register file describes it, an alloy the museum says could be polished to look more like silver than ordinary pewter, and in the 1820s it came from England. Babbitt, a young Taunton jeweler, began experimenting with block tin and other metals in a small shop behind his watchmaker's store, on a spot Hurd's 1883 history places in City Square, with the idea that household Britannia ware could be made in Taunton instead of imported from Europe. The 1924 History of Bristol County, edited by Frank Walcott Hutt, then secretary of the Old Colony Historical Society, adds that Babbitt, William W. Porter and William A. West rolled a small sheet of their mixture on a pair of jeweler's hand rolls, the first Britannia metal rolled in America.

The partners soon moved into a brick shop on School Street, and Hutt wrote that its rotary engine was the first steam power started in town. In 1827 they began making tea ware, and the first teapot they finished sat in their show window on Main Street, where it "attracted much attention as the first American manufacture of this sort," Hutt wrote. Two apprentices of about 17, as Hurd describes them, signed on: Charles E. Barton in 1827 and Henry G. Reed in the spring of 1828, by Hutt's account, though Hurd puts both in 1828. Hutt's pay list for 1829 shows Babbitt, the superintendent, at $2 a day, Porter, the foreman, at $1, and Barton at 31 cents.

The mill on the Mill River

In 1830 the firm, by then Crossman, West & Leonard, was incorporated as the Taunton Britannia Manufacturing Co. and started a new brick mill at Hopewell on the Mill River, 100 feet by 40 feet, Hutt wrote. By early 1831 about 30 hands worked there, soldering by whale oil lamps. The company could not compete in the big markets with skilled foreign makers, Hurd wrote. By Hutt's account it stopped work in 1833 and failed in 1834, the plant went to Horatio Leonard, who owned the water power, and nothing was made there for a season.

In 1835 the two former apprentices formed Reed & Barton and took over the plant, Reed at the lathe and Barton at the soldering, according to Hutt. In 1837 Gustavus Leonard joined them as financial agent, and by the end of that year about 12 people worked for the firm. The bearing metal that carries Babbitt's name came out of these years, too. Hurd's history calls Babbitt its inventor, while Hutt credits Porter with first making it and says Babbitt patented it about six years later.

The firm sent its ware to the American Institute exhibition in New York in 1838. Charles H. Delavan, a member of the institute, sent pieces of the Taunton ware and the same number of English pieces to its secretary with a note saying that "the Taunton ware will bear a favorable comparison with any in Europe for neatness and elegance of finish," Hurd records. By his figures the Taunton coffee pot, sugar and cream pots and teapot cost $6.83 against $9.16 for the English set, and the Taunton ware won a gold medal.

Silver over Britannia

In 1848 Reed & Barton began electroplating, bringing DeForest H. Peck from Connecticut to set up the plant, Hutt wrote. The museum's history says that by 1850 the company was the largest in the country making silver-plated tableware, with more than 100 employees and more than $100,000 in sales, and that by 1864 it was selling more than $340,000 a year and supplying most of the metal goods for the growing railroad and hotel trades. It started a design department in 1873 under W.C. Beattie, brought from England, and had 24 designers by 1889.

Barton died Sept. 13, 1867, but the firm kept the name. When Hurd's history went to press in 1883, the works filled 16 brick buildings and a dozen smaller ones inside a yard of 10 acres, with about six acres of floor space and steam engines of 300 and 100 horsepower besides its water power. The company was incorporated in 1888 with $600,000 in capital and began making sterling silver in 1889, Hutt wrote, and the National Register file says it opened sales offices in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

The people at the benches

Hutt printed the whole workforce of 1845 by job, from the clerk, Alfred Brabrook, who also did the packing, to the wrapper, Mrs. Mary W. Barker. The solderers included Rebecca Robinson and Patty White, and Josiah W. Strange was the designer. Skilled hands earned $1.50 to $1.75 a day and paid about $1.75 a week for board, working from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. There was no timekeeper, so each worker kept his or her own time, and payday came once every three months. Small stoves heated the mill so poorly that the burnishing suds would freeze on the lathes in cold weather.

By 1883 the works employed 800 to 900 people, Hurd wrote, and many had been on the rolls 20 or 30 years, a few more than 40. The museum puts the peak at 1,000 workers, most of them living in the Whittenton and Hopewell neighborhoods. The National Register file says the company built and owned a large number of houses for its immigrant workforce, many of them still standing on Cottage, Danforth and West Britannia streets when the file was prepared, and that company housing later reached along Broadway and Bay Street. By 1923, Hutt counted 650 hands at the plant.

The other silver shops

Reed & Barton was never Taunton's only silver shop: Eli Eldridge opened a Britannia manufactory on Britannia Street in 1848, Hurd wrote, and Hutt names several more. The F.B. Rogers Silver Co. was incorporated Feb. 11, 1883, with the Rogers Cutlery Co. of Shelburne Falls taking about a third of the stock and turning in its plant, and Taunton investors taking the rest. The West Silver Co., incorporated in 1899, was making silver-plated hollow ware with about 65 hands when Hutt's history appeared in 1924.

Hutt's own dates do not line up here: he has George Poole and Edward F. Roche leaving West Silver in 1892, seven years before he says it was incorporated, to start a Britannia works in a Court Street shop that Reed & Barton had vacated. They moved to Whittenton and in 1895 incorporated as the Poole Silver Co. The Cohannet Silver Co. started in 1903 as a Britannia and silver plating company, Hutt wrote.

A century in the family

Henry Reed died in 1901, and William B.H. Dowse, who had married Reed's daughter Fanny, became president, the museum's history says. Dowse wired the factory for electricity, opened the first Reed & Barton store at 32nd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York in 1905 and built a trade in ready-made trophies. Navy ships, the USS Arizona among them, carried Reed & Barton silver. Dowse retired in 1923 and his son-in-law, Sinclair Weeks, later secretary of commerce under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, took over. In 1928, the company bought the New Jersey silversmith Dominick & Haff.

During World War II, the museum says, the government worked with the plant on plating silver directly onto steel, and the company developed tougher dies and abrasives to make stainless flatware. Its output for the Army and Navy rose from 100,000 pieces a week to 210,000 by the end of the war. The Diamond pattern, from the Italian architect Gio Ponti, debuted in 1958. In the 1980s and 1990s the company shifted to product development and distribution and began outsourcing manufacturing to vendors in Asia. Reed & Barton made the medals for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, which the museum says marked the end of the company's design and manufacturing in Taunton. In a 2015 report, JCK, the jewelry trade magazine, gave a later date, 2009, saying the company had moved the last of its production out of Massachusetts that year and that subcontractors, mostly in Asia, did that work.

The closing

Reed and Barton Corp. filed for Chapter 11 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Massachusetts on Feb. 17, 2015, the case record shows. JCK reported that President and CEO Timothy K. Riddle blamed the company's pension plan, with liabilities of $9 million that the company believed could exceed $18 million, and that, according to his statement to the court, Lifetime Brands had offered $15 million for the company's assets other than real estate, with competing bids allowed within 90 days under the bankruptcy process.

On May 14, 2015, Lenox Corp. announced it had bought Reed & Barton's operating assets and certain liabilities, and that Riddle would head the Reed & Barton brand inside Lenox. "We're well positioned to grow the Reed & Barton brand while still honoring the heritage of this unique American brand," Lenox CEO Peter Cameron said in the release. The bankruptcy case, by then under the name RB Liquidation Inc., ended Nov. 29, 2016. The museum's history says Reed & Barton "finally closed its doors in 2015."

The mills and the museum

The Reed and Barton Complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 5, 1984, as part of the Taunton Multiple Resource Area. Its file describes more than 30 buildings on a 14-acre site in what was called Britanniaville, with two 600-foot rows of brick factories facing each other across the Mill River. The "Old Mill," the 100-by-40-foot building begun in 1830, heads the west row, and the file calls it the oldest surviving building in the complex. An 1881 factory with a corbeled cornice closes the row at the south end, and a mansard-roofed office and showroom building, built between 1871 and 1881, is entered from Danforth Street. Two brick Cape houses from about 1855, two of five built for workers on the mill grounds, still stood when the file was written.

The Old Colony History Museum, 66 Church Green, holds more than 200 pieces of Reed & Barton Britannia and silverware along with manufacturing tools, the company's 1877 and 1885 catalogs, Reed family portraits and the diaries of Clara White Reed from 1839 to 1847, according to its virtual archive, which also shows, among the museum's pieces, a Babbitt & Crossman teapot from about 1827 and links a 2022 virtual tour of the factory.

If you go

• The 1984 National Register file places the Reed and Barton Complex on the Mill River at West Britannia and Danforth streets, with company worker houses on Cottage, Danforth and West Britannia streets.
• Old Colony History Museum, 66 Church Green, Taunton, is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and can be reached at 508-822-1622, according to the museum's website.

Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.