Union Straw Works, Foxboro, Massachusetts — Geo. H. Plimpton

The Union Straw Works at Foxboro, Massachusetts, which in its day was called the largest straw-goods factory in the world. Plimpton set up across the lawn in leafless weather, with a board fence and a stone wall carrying the eye along the front. Behind them the whole plant stands in one long clapboard line: the gabled end and tall bracketed tower at left, the broad four-story main block with its skylights, the second square tower, and the lower wing running off to the right under its small cupola. A brick chimney rises out of the works behind the roofline.

The building identifies itself. A lithograph of the Union Straw Works published by B. W. Thayer & Co. of Boston, now in the Library of Congress, shows the same plan from almost the same angle: the same two towers, the same hipped main block, the same cupola-topped wing and smokestack, and even the same picket fence. The Carpenter family built the works in 1853, and the Foxborough Historical Commission’s marker records that at its height the company employed more than 6,000 people, counting the women who braided and sewed straw at home. The complex burned on May 28, 1900, and was never rebuilt.

The reverse carries the plain imprint “Photographed by Geo. H. Plimpton, American Hall Building, Foxboro’, Mass.,” so this was made by a local photographer working a few streets from the factory. The double red-ruled mount suggests the late 1860s or 1870s. The card is not dated.

Photographs of the Union Straw Works are uncommon, and a hometown view of the factory that made Foxboro the straw-hat capital of the country is a real piece of New England industrial history.