The following figures, giving production in the equivalent of 500 pound bales for the year at the close of each ten-year period, give some idea of the tremendous expansion which ensued. _500 Pound _Year_ Bales_ 1790 3,138 1800 73,222 1810 177,824 1820 334,728 1830 732,218 1840 1,347,640 1850 2,136,083 1860 3,841,416 1870 4,024,527 1880 6,356,998 1890 8,562,089 1900 10,123,027 1910 11,608,616 1917 11,302,375 By this table it will be seen that the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves held up production only temporarily. In 1914, the banner year, the crop reached the tremendous total of 16,134,930 bales of five hundred pounds each. Some little spinning had been done in the seventeenth century, but in 1787-88 the first permanent factory, built of brick, and located in Beverly, Massachusetts, on the Bass river, was put into operation by a group headed by John Cabot and Joshua Fisher. This factory failed to justify itself economically, chiefly because of the crudeness of its machinery. But Samuel Slater, newly come from England with models of the Arkwright machinery in his brain, set up a factory in Pawtucket in 1790. From that time forth the growth was steady and sure, if not always extremely rapid. The following table,[A] which covers the whole country, relates particularly to New England in the years before 1880, because the cotton manufacturing industry until then was largely concentrated there. It shows how the manufacturing interests of the country profited by the discovery that brought wealth to the agricultural South: