Professor Kingston W. Heath, director of the UO Historic Preservation Program, will be keynote speaker at “The River and The Rail: A Symposium on Enterprise and Industry in New Bedford,” February 15-16 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
The conference addresses the historical evolution of the port of New Bedford as a manufacturing and commercial center. Heath’s talk is entitled “Whalers to Weavers: New Bedford’s Promoted and Neglected Legacies.”
Heath, a native of New Bedford, is author of The Patina of Place: The Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial Landscape (University of Tennessee Press, 2001), a study of the New Bedford architectural house style commonly called the “triple-decker.” The book explores how and why this iconic New England structure came to be and its links to immigration, industry, and urban landscapes.
Among the major topics addressed by the thirteen speakers at the conference will be oil and candle manufacture, banking history, New Bedford’s movers and shakers in the 19th century, textile mills and their physical and philosophical effects on the city and its population, the history of the glass industry, the past, present and future of New Bedford’s fresh water supply, the harbor and its issues, the fishing industry, and the future for manufacturing in a great American seaport.
From its famous origins as a whaling port to its equally famous rise as a center for the production of textiles, glass and silver wares, cordage, drill bits, toys, copper products, carriages and other manufactured products, New Bedford is renowned today as a fishing port. The city’s survival and growth through wars, depressions, fluctuating markets, and diverse labor demographics depended largely upon its financial acumen, natural resources, and the vision of its business leaders. It also depended upon immigrant labor, coal, the railroad, and flexibility in the uses of its harbor. Today, the port faces the combined challenges of managing ocean resources, cleaning up a century of pollution in the harbor and mapping a path forward for other maritime related industries bringing the port once again to its best advantages.