Born: 9-Jun-1768
Birthplace: Belper, Derbyshire, England
Died: 21-Apr-1835
Location of death: Webster, MA
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Buried, Mount Zion Cemetery, Webster, MA

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Business

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Father of the American Industrial Revolution

American textile manufacturer, born in Belper, Derbyshire, England, on the 9th of June 1768. In 1783, the year after his father's death, he was apprenticed to Jedediah Strutt, his neighbor and a partner of Richard Arkwright in spinning cotton, and served under him six and a half years. Learning that the Pennsylvania legislature had granted £100 in 1789 to the inventor of a power carding machine, he relocated to the United States in that year, but British laws prevented the bringing of designs for cotton-spinning machinery. He wrote to Moses Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, who had made unsuccessful attempts to manufacture cotton cloth, and in January 1790 on Brown's invitation went to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he entered into a partnership with William Almy (Moses Brown's son-in-law) and Smith Brown, a kinsman of Moses Brown, designed from memory machines for cotton-spinning, and turned out some yarn in December of the same year. In 1799 he established in his mills one of the first Sunday Schools in America. In 1801 he built a factory in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and with his brother John, who joined him in 1804, established in 1806 the manufacturing village of Slatersville, in Smithfield township, Rhode Island. He began the manufacture of woollen cloth in 1815-16 at Oxford, now Webster, Massachusetts, where he had built cotton mills in 1812. In his later years he was interested in other textile mills and in iron foundries in Rhode Island. He died at Webster on the 21st of April 1835. He has been called the "father of American manufactures" and it is no exaggeration to call him the founder of American cotton manufacturing.

Father: William Slater
Mother: Elizabeth
Wife: Hannah Wilkinson Slater (m. 1791)
Son: William Slater (b. 1796, d. 1801)
Daughter: Elizabeth Slater (b. 1798, d. 1801)
Daughter: Mary Slater (b. 1801, d. 1803)
Son: Samuel Slater II (b. 1802, d. 1821)
Son: George Bassett Slater (b. 1804, d. 1843)
Son: John Slater (b. 1805, d. 1838)
Son: William Slater (b. 1809, d. 1826)
Son: (b. 1811, d. 1811 in infancy)
Son: Thomas Graham Slater (b. 1812, d. 1844)
Wife: Esther Slater (m. 1817)

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