Value of the Collection
As a research collection, the records have considerable value:
Students of economic history and technological innovation will be able to piece together how a mill town actually came into being. There are other collections that approach the Franklin Company records in wealth of detail — most notably those of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, now split between the Baker Library at Harvard University and the Manchester, New Hampshire, Historical Association, as well as several at the Museum of American Textile History in North Andover, Massachusetts — but the Franklin Company papers are unique for Maine. These researchers will find significant caches of letters from persons who played an important part in the development of mills, railroads, and canals in New England (for example, Benjamin Bates, Thomas Hill, Benjamin Leeds, Edward Little, Lyman Nichols, and George Ward). They will also obtain considerable information on early capital formation and investment practices in the mid-19th century.
Researchers in social history will be able to reconstruct the lives of those who worked in the mills and lived in the area with rent rolls, payrolls, and other records. Changes in the make-up of the working populations of the two cities will become apparent (first Yankee farm girls, then Irish immigrants, and finally French-speakers from Quebec and the Maritimes). The early histories of both the Roman Catholic and Baptist churches will also become clear since the company seems to have been instrumental in settling both denominations in Lewiston.
Those interested in family history will find both rent rolls and payrolls invaluable, especially to descendants of French-speaking immigrants.
Map collectors will find fine specimens of both printed and manuscript maps of Maine, the course of the Androscoggin River through Maine and New Hampshire, and the Lewiston-Auburn area.
The operating records of the Franklin company and its predecessors have been in the continuous possession of the company’s Lewiston agents until Stanley Sclar and his associate Donald Schair purchased the company in 1976. In 1965 some records and account books were removed by the Union Water Power Company, which is now a subsidiary of the Central Maine Power Company. Additional Franklin Company records may be donated to the City in the future.