Definition. The word factory eludes precise definition but describes a type of production facility sharing certain characteristics. In factories employer-owners assembled power machinery, raw materials, and large groups of wage workers under one roof and then coordinated this assembly to apply human and mechanical energy to raw materials in order to produce goods at low cost for market sale. Several of the largest flour mills in America and the federal armories at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and Springfield, Massachusetts, combined many of these characteristics even before the War of 1812. Yet the flour mills employed few wage workers, and the armories did not produce firearms for a mass retail market. In New England Samuel Slater had since the 1790s produced an immense amount of cotton thread and fabric by combining outwork and factory employment, but unlike the textile mills at Lowell, Massachusetts (which...