Last week we had the pleasure of welcoming Mary & Dick Kelly to the museum. Mary’s great-great grandparents Robert and Margaret Cumnock had lived and worked in Johnstone at one of the cotton mills before emigrating to America. The 1841 Census shows Robert as a cotton spinner with an address listed as Hagg in Johnstone. The family arrived in Boston in July 1849 where Robert found work in one of the Lowell textile mills as a spinner. The couple settled on a farm in New Hampshire a few years later and several of their sons would go on to hold important positions at textile mills in New England. In the 1880s, five Cumnock brothers, all cotton mill managers, held under charge, nine thousand operators, and eleven thousand looms; more operatives and looms, than were controlled by any other family of kinsmen in the U.S. or perhaps any other country.
Mary’s research had been thorough, but we were able to add a little local context to her story. In Johnstone, the cotton industry had peaked around 1830 with 20 mills employing 3000 people, more than half the population of the town. The factories act of 1833 regulating the use of child labour and the subsequent shift of manufacturing to the North of England signalled the beginning of the end of the cotton industry in Scotland. By 1850 the cotton industry had gone into a massive downward spiral so Margaret and Robert’s decision to emigrate in 1849 appears to have been a sound one.