A third cause contributed to rapid development at this time. An enormous production of cotton followed Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1792, and the South, which had never been a manufacturing community, furnished both a source of supply and a rich market, easily accessible by coastwise trade. The beginnings of New England’s manufacturing industries are closely identified with the rise of the American cotton crop, and most of the first machine shops were developed to manufacture textile machinery. England, who seems to have blundered whenever she legislated on early American trade, made one more serious mistake. In 1785 Parliament passed a stringent law, with severe penalties, to stop the emigration of all mechanics and workmen in iron and steel manufactures, and to prevent not only the exportation of every description of tool, engine or machine, or parts of a machine used in making and working up iron and other materials, but even the models and plans of such machinery.[113] England was then the most advanced of all countries in the production of engines, tools and textile machinery, and it was hoped by this act that manufacturing might be kept there. It had the opposite effect so far as America was concerned. It was inevitable that mechanics, such as Samuel Slater and William Crompton, should get away, and with them, ideas. The act only stimulated a race of skillful mechanics in America to independent development of machine tools, textile machinery, and the like. America, instead of buying her machinery from England as she would naturally have done, proceeded to make it herself. [113] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 630. One of the earliest American mechanics was Joseph Jenks, who came from Hammersmith, England, to Lynn, Mass., about 1642, and died in 1683. With the backing of Governor Winthrop, he set up an iron foundry and forge near a bog-iron mine. The very first attempt in America to start an iron works had been made in Virginia more than twenty years before, at the settlement of Jamestown. It was hardly started, however, before it was destroyed in the general sack of the settlement, and for one hundred years there was no further attempt at producing iron in Virginia.[114] [114] Beverley: “History of Virginia.” Bishop: “History of American Manufactures,” Vol. I, pp. 469, 595. From the little forge and foundry started at Lynn, there is no break in the spread of iron manufacturing in this country. The forge was located on the lands of Thomas Hudson, of the same family as Hendrick Hudson, the explorer. Jenks was “the first founder who worked in brass and iron on the western continent. By his hands, the first models were made and the first castings taken of many domestic implements and iron tools.”[115] The very first casting is said to have been an iron quart pot. [115] Lewis: “History of Lynn.”