Perhaps due to the demands of his political life as a state senator (1876–1883) and governor (1883–1885), Bourn’s rubber interests failed. In 1887 his colleague in the state legislature Samuel Pomeroy Colt (1852–1921) was appointed receiver for the bankrupt company. Bourn’s only consolation was being appointed United States consul general to Italy by Benjamin Harrison from 1889 to 1893. He never recovered financially after returning to Bristol, although he began manufacturing again in Providence as the Bourn Rubber Company in 1902.19 In her final years, his impoverished daughter Bessie was forced to sell Seven Oaks and to work in the Bristol rubber factory once owned by her father.
Colt, Bourn’s successor at the National Rubber Company, was the nephew of Samuel Colt (1814–1862), the manufacturer of repeating revolvers. He had moved to Bristol as a youth in 1865 with his mother, Theodora Goujand DeWolf Colt (1824– 1901), George DeWolf ’s daughter, who had bought back her childhood home, Linden Place. After serving four one-year terms as state attorney general, Colt founded the Industrial Trust Company in 1886, a banking corporation that grew into the Fleet/Norstar Corporation.20 Then, as the new owner of National Rubber, he reorganized it into the National India Rubber Company, which manufactured boots and shoes. In 1892 he and nine other industry leaders consolidated their interests to form the United States Rubber Company, a conglomerate that became the world’s largest manufacturer of rubber goods. Its suppliers linked Bristol once again to slavery, if only indirectly.
During Colt’s tenure as a director and then president (1901–1918), United States Rubber obtained most of its crude rubber from Hevea brasiliensis trees in the Amazonian jungle of Brazil.21 The abuse of workers who extracted and processed the latex sap is extensively documented. Historian Jonathan D. Hill recorded that “accounts of Rubber Boom terror from regions as widely dispersed as the Madre de Dios River in southern Peru to the upper Rio Negro and Orinoco rivers in southern Venezuela offer a uniformly horrifying scenario of torture, enforced debt, and genocide.”22
Over the past three centuries, rubber manufacturing, textile production, privateering, rum distilling, shipping, and farming have shaped Bristol’s life and landscape. In the eighteenth century the town’s nexus of activity shifted west from the cultivated lands and town green to the east—to the wharves on Thames Street and to the shops and elegant residences of merchants and sea captains on Hope Street. Unlike most New England towns where church steeples prevailed, a forest of masts dominated Bristol’s skyline. Twenty wharves stretched like fingers toward the ports Bristol served: Havana, Bilbao, Charleston, Canton, Petropavlovsk, Cadiz, Montevideo, Liverpool, and Antwerp. As maritime trade declined in the nineteenth century, the wharves decayed or were torn down and were replaced by steam-powered textile mills. Today some of these massive structures have been converted into shops, offices, and condominiums, as tourism has become a major source of revenue.
Yet, despite all the changes to its townscape andeconomy over the centuries, Bristol remains as historianWilliam Jordy observed, “among the queen cities of colonial and nineteenth-century New England.”23
The author and photographer want to thank the owners of buildings to which we were given access.
Gemellion, Artist unknown, Limoges, France, 13th century Champlevé Enamel on Copper, 8 7/8” diameter Collection of The Walters’ Art
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