East Cambridge’s American Net and Twine Co. reflects a history entangled with enslaved labor
By Beth Folsom, 2025
Before the founding of the American Net and Twine Co. in 1844, fishing and other kinds of nets were either made locally using hemp fibers or were made of cotton but imported from England. American Net and Twine was the first manufacturer to use domestic cotton to craft its nets – a shift made possible by the growth of U.S. cotton production and by the widespread national railroad networks that were in place by the mid-19th century. By 1875, the demand for its products had grown so much that the company bought a tract of land at 155 Second St. in East Cambridge to build a new factory.
In 1793, a half-century before American Net and Twine was founded, Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin, a machine that separated cotton fibers from the plant’s seeds much faster than could be accomplished by hand. Whitney had maintained that his goal in creating the cotton gin was to allow the same amount of cotton to be processed by many fewer workers, but the result was quite the opposite. Cotton production, which had been limited in the U.S. South because of the labor-intensive harvesting process, now became a vast plantation system unto itself. White landowners turned their fields over to cotton, and used the labor of enslaved Black workers to pick cotton and process it using cotton gins, leading to an explosion of the crop in the South. The massive increase in raw material was then transported to Northern mills and factories to be turned into fabric, fishing nets and other finished products and sold across the country as well as internationally. Instead of leading to a reduction in the perceived need for enslaved labor, the cotton gin resulted in a vast expansion of plantation slavery as the demand for domestic cotton grew.
Once legal enslavement ended after the Civil War, many formerly enslaved individuals and families – “free” in name but without resources or means of subsistence – continued to work on the plantations of their former enslavers under the sharecropping system. Black laborers would go into debt to the white landowner (often the person who had enslaved them) to buy seeds, farm tools, food and clothing, promising a share of their crop in return. Landowners often charged exorbitant rates of return for these purchases, and one bad crop could wipe out any headway the farmer had made the previous year, leaving farmers and their families to fall further and further into debt with each passing year. Prevented from leaving the land while still indebted to their white landlords, these Black farmers found themselves in much the same position as when they had been formally enslaved.
By the time American Net and Twine built its East Cambridge factory in the mid-1870s, many Southern Blacks were caught in the sharecropping system and cotton was being shipped in bulk to the various manufactories in New England where it was processed into finished products and shipped to a wide variety of domestic and international markets. The fishing and other nets made in East Cambridge were also sent back to the Southern states to be bought and used by the very communities that had produced the raw cotton for their creation.
American Net and Twine enjoyed a prosperous half-century at its East Cambridge location before closing its doors in the late 1920s. A Cambridge Chronicle article from May 1880 reported that the factory “is employing two hundred and fifty girls night and day. Business is rushing, and orders are taxing the utmost capacity of the manufactory.” The company experienced the labor fluctuations common to many sectors of the economy in the 1880s and 1890s, with occasional reductions in wages and hours and short-term strikes by workers, but overall its production history was successful, and it expanded its facilities in 1886 and again in 1916. It maintained a strong presence in the city’s industrial sector until it relocated to Baltimore in 1928, citing better access to transportation networks to the South and West, where by then it was selling most of its products.
Although legal enslavement ended in Cambridge (and all of Massachusetts) in 1783, the area’s heavy involvement in textile production throughout the 19th and into the 20th century meant that Cambridge’s economy was linked inextricably to the Southern systems of plantation slavery and sharecropping. As we delve deeper into the rich history of the East Cambridge neighborhood, particularly its industrial past, it is important to acknowledge that these companies were operating within vast national and international trade networks that ignored – or even fostered – systems of enslavement and inequality, even as they offered increased opportunities to their workers in East Cambridge.
This article originally appeared in Cambridge Day.
