We ascend the Seeconk River to Pawtucket, about five miles distant, a busy manufacturing town of thirty thousand people, noted as the place where Samuel Slater introduced the cotton manufacture into the United States in 1790, the original Slater mill still standing. The Pawtucket Falls of fifty feet give the valuable water-power which has made the place, and here are some of the greatest thread factories in the world. The town extends up into the villages of Central and Valley Falls, and the enormous power furnished by the river is drawn upon at different levels from several dams. All sorts of cotton textiles, muslins and calicoes are made, and the slopes running up from the valley, with the plateaus above, are covered with the operatives' houses. This town has the most attractive situation on the Blackstone River, which here changes its name to the Pawtucket, and finally to the Seeconk. Samuel Slater, who started it, was a native of Belper, in Derbyshire, England, having worked there for both Strutt and Arkwright, the fathers of the textile industries. Learning that American bounties had been offered for the introduction of Arkwright's patents in cotton-spinning, he crossed the ocean, landing at Newport in 1789. Here he heard that Moses Brown had attempted cotton-spinning by machinery in Rhode Island. He wrote Brown, telling what he could do, and received a reply in which Brown said his attempt had been unsuccessful, and added: "If thou canst do this thing, I invite thee to come to Rhode Island and have the credit and the profit of introducing cotton manufacture into America." Slater went to Pawtucket, and on December 21, 1790, he started three carding-machines and spinning-frames of seventy-two spindles. He afterwards became very prominent, building large mills at Pawtucket and elsewhere, and the impetus thus given the place made it the leading American manufacturing centre for a half-century. The Indian name of the falls was retained by the city.