[Paterson, NJ]

In the days of the Early Republic, even John Adams predicted it would be a thousand years before the United States would be capable of meeting its own manufacturing needs. The primacy of agriculture was a given—utterly taken for granted by most everyone.

But not Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton would become committed to making the United States a power-player in the industrial world.

As he crisscrossed New Jersey during the Revolutionary War, Hamilton had encountered the Great Falls of the Passaic River. The potential of its water power—crucial in the days before electricity or even steam power had been harnessed—never left the first impression it made on him.

In the early 1790s, as Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton took bold moves to advocate that an American Industrial Metropolis be established. Not only could such a place provide plentiful jobs and economic activity, but also it would render the United States far less dependent on great manufacturing powers like Great Britain (and to lesser extents, the Netherlands and France).

A scrupulous public servant, Hamilton never invested a penny of his own money in the venture. But he helped establish what was initially called S.U.M.: the Society to Establish Useful Manufactures. After helping raise hundreds of thousands in capital, Hamilton unveiled the Great Falls as the planned site of his Industrial Metropolis.

The city built around the falls— it became Paterson, New Jersey—opened a few mills and began working to fulfill its wildly ambitious plans. By the 1830s, Paterson—and American industry in general—found its footing and took off at a sprint. Hamilton, unfortunately, did not live to see his vision come to fruition.