The Wilkinsons were interested in other things as well as in the cotton industries. David established a shop and foundry in Pawtucket, where for one thing he made cannon which he bored by an improved method consisting of “making his drill and bore stationary and having the cannon revolve about the drill.” He built textile machinery for almost every part of the country, from northern New England to Louisiana, and made the machinery used at New Bedford and other whaling ports for pressing sperm oil.[135] About 1816 David and Daniel Wilkinson bought out a man named Dwight Fisher and manufactured nails until 1829, their output being about 4000 pounds daily.[136] In 1829 David Wilkinson moved to Cohoes, N. Y., and with DeWitt Clinton, Stephen Van Rensselaer and others, started the textile industries in that city.[137] In 1832 Zebulon White started up one of the abandoned Wilkinson furnaces, which three years later was known as the Pawtucket Cupola Furnace Company. This afterwards became the firm of J. S. White & Company.[138] [135] Goodrich, p. 69. [136] Field: “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” Vol. III, p. 373. [137] Van Slyck: “Representatives of New England Manufacturers,” p. 515. [138] Field, Vol. III, p. 372. [Illustration: FIGURE 26. SAMUEL SLATER] Oziel Wilkinson died in 1815, but the influence of the Wilkinson family continued for many years. Slater steadily widened his operations and was so influential in laying the foundations of the textile industry that he became known as “the father of the American cotton industry.” How rapidly the cotton industry spread is shown by a memorial to Congress in 1815, stating that there were 140 cotton manufactures within thirty miles of Providence, employing 26,000 hands and operating 130,000 spindles.[139] Only a few of the more important ramifications can be given. [139] Bishop, Vol. II, p. 214. In 1822 Samuel Slater, Larned Pitcher and three others bought a little two-story building at what was then Goffstown, on the Merrimac River, and founded the great Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, and the city of Manchester, N. H. It is now known as the greatest textile mill in the world, but the company’s original charter was very broad, and, in addition to its other interests, the company operated for many years one of the largest and most influential machine shops in the country, where were built locomotives, engines, boilers, all kinds of textile machinery, machine tools and mill machinery. Alfred Jenks, who learned his trade under Slater, moved to Holmesburg, near Philadelphia, in 1810, taking with him drawings of every variety of cotton machinery, as far as it had then advanced, and commenced its manufacture.[140] He furnished the machinery for the first cotton mill in that portion of Pennsylvania and for the first woolen mill in the entire state, and developed what was for many years one of the most important plants for the building of textile machinery in the United States.