As a depository of source material relating to a wide variety of subjects, the Essex Institute holds a unique position. For many years it has been natural to turn to Salem for material on ocean shipping. In decades past, Salem wharves were lined with vessels which Salem merchants had built and manned, and which brought rich products from every civilized and barbaric land. There were Eastern ports where the names of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore were scarcely known, but where Salem was supposed to be the great emporium of the West. Letters addressed “Salem, U. S. A.” reached their destinations without delay. In 1825, there were one hundred ninety-eight vessels flying Salem signals, and Salem ships were the first to display the American flag in many foreign ports, as well as to open trade with St. Petersburg, Zanzibar, Sumatra, Calcutta, Bombay, Batavia, Arabia, Madagascar and Australia.

Any attempt to describe the beginnings of the Machine Age in the United States leads the investigator back to the early records of the New England textile mills, for machine building in this country — using the term machinery in its modern meaning — had its origin in the workshops of the first cotton factories. Among the heroes of the period of beginnings are David Wilkinson, — the Pawtucket blacksmith, who, in 1790, assisted Samuel Slater to build the first Arkwright machinery to be successfully operated in the United States, and who, twenty years later, set up one of the earliest independent machine shops in New England, — and Francis Cabot Lowell, who, in 1814, introduced power weaving at the factory in Waltham, thus setting in motion the chain of events that led to the establishment of the great machine shops at Lowell.