under the name of C. Read & Company. Later it was moved back to Providence, where it developed into the American Screw Company. Worcester mechanics have made many things besides machine tools; in small tools and in gun work they have long been successful. The Coes Wrench Company was started in 1836 by Loring and A. G. Coes, and began to make the present form of screw wrench in 1841. Asa Waters, in Millbury near by, was one of the early American gun makers. After Waters came other gun makers, Ethan Allen, Forehand & Wadsworth, Harrington & Richardson, and Iver Johnson, who later moved to Fitchburg. Much of Worcester’s prominence as a manufacturing center is due to the unusual facilities it offered to mechanics to begin business in a small way. Nearly every manufacturing enterprise in the city began in small, rented quarters. There were a number of large buildings which rented space with power to these small enterprises; one of them, Merrifield’s, was three stories high, 1100 feet long, and had fifty tenants, employing two to eight hundred men. Coes, Flagg, Daniels, Wood, Light & Company, Coombs, Lathe & Morse, Whitcomb, Pond and J. A. Fay, all began, or at some time operated, in this way. One is struck, in looking over the old records, with the constant recurrence of certain names, as the Earles, Goddards, Washburns, and realizes that he is among a race of mechanics which was certain sooner or later to build up a successful manufacturing community. Fitchburg, while not so large or so influential, is almost as old a tool building community as Worcester. Its history centers about the Putnam Machine Company which was started by John and Salmon W. Putnam, who came from a family of mechanics. The latter’s portrait appears in Fig. 47. They, too, began in cotton manufacturing, John as a contractor making cotton machine parts, and Salmon as a bobbin boy and later as an overseer at New Ipswich and Lowell. In 1836 they went to Trenton, N. J., intending to start a machine shop there, but the panic of 1837 intervened and made it impossible. They had themselves built most of the machines required; they stored these and found employment until business conditions improved. Finally, they started in a hired basement in Ashburnham, Mass., under the name of J. & S. W. Putnam.