History of the Franklin Company and Related Enterprises

by Peter J. Parker

Chartered 1845 by the Maine Legislature, the Franklin Company is the successor company to at least three Lewiston enterprises, all of which attempted to take advantage of the enormous water power potential of the Great Falls at Lewiston-Auburn. In 1836 members of the Little family and other local entrepreneurs organized the Androscoggin Falls Milldam, Locks, and Canal Company. The company was short on capital and hurt by the Panic of 1837, but by 1845 its investors had sufficiently recovered to organize the Lewiston Falls Cotton Mill, which they hoped to operate on the model of mills in Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts.

It was not until the local investors joined with investors from Boston and, to a lesser extent, from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Lawrence to organize the Lewiston Water Power Company in late 1845 that they were able to command the resources to take full advantage of the river’s potential. This new company assumed the assets of the earlier companies, including the Cotton Mill, which became the Lincoln Mill, and the rights to the flow, or water power, of the river.

In short order the Lewiston Water Power Company acquired much of the land upon with Lewiston and Auburn are now built, constructed two textile mills, contracted to build a third for one their investors, built or expanded machine shops, saw mills, grist mills, boarding houses and tenements for workers, and turned Lewiston into what might be called a company town. Indeed, the LWPC, and later the Franklin Company, gave Lewiston its shape, including the lay-out of the canals along the river and the orientation of its streets. At the same time, the LWPC’s individual investors joined together in other corporate ventures which insured complete control over Lewiston’s affairs: they chartered the Androscoggin and Kennebec Rail Road Company in 1847 and the Lewiston Falls Bank the next year. In 1857 LWPC shareholders voted themselves an enormous dividend, leaving the company cash-starved when the financial panic of that year struck.

The details of how the Lewiston Water Power Company became the Franklin Company are not clear in the surviving operating records, but it is clear that all of LWPC’s assets, including its records, became Franklin Company property. The roll of investors as well as the day-to-day operations of the new company were much like its predecessor, at least through the Civil War, which brought the company enormous profits.

The way the Franklin Company organized its operations brought about inevitable changes in its scope and purpose. The company maintained its corporate offices in Boston where its treasurers made most of the routine executive decisions. Because the Franklin Company was a Maine corporation, however, stockholder affairs were run out of Lewiston. In Lewiston, the company maintained a hierarchial managerial structure with a single agent in charge of the company’s several enterprises, each of which in turn had its own manager. The reporting structure and financial accounting of the company reflected this arrangement. Each of the company’s ventures had its own ledger accounts, trial balances, inventories, and financial statements, maintained in Lewiston. The agent had his own accounts from which local bills and payrolls were met, but the surviving records indicate that a parallel set of books was kept in Boston because well into the 20th century financial communications between Lewiston and Boston occurred on almost a daily basis.

By the 1870s, however, the Franklin Company had become an investment holding company. In 1879, for example, a committee of its shareholders wrote:

  • The Franklin is not a manufacturing company. As a land and water power company it may properly build mills, or share in building them, when such action promises escape from loss, — and much more when profit is probable, — for the sure benefit of its other estates and income. Having built, it should sell them.

In 1866 shareholders sold the Porter Mill to the newly organized Continental Mill in which the company and individual investors retained a majority interest. In 1872 they divested themselves of the local Androscoggin water-power rights to the Union Water Power Company, but retained 2,600 of the 4,000 shares in the new company. Protracted wrangling with the City of Lewiston over private control of the City’s water supply culminated in 1898-1899 with the Franklin Company selling its share in Union Water Power. By 1900, well into its second generation of investors, the Franklin Company was simply a Lewiston-Auburn land management firm.

As a property management enterprise, the Franklin Company leased lots to others who put up their own buildings on the sites. The company donated, or sold at discount prices, much of the land used for public purposes in both Lewiston and Auburn: for example, Kennedy Park and the City Building block in Lewiston and the post office in Auburn are located on company-donated land. Over time, the company frequently sold the built-up land to their tenants, but to this day it retains several blocks of property in both communities.