Banners across Waltham celebrate the city’s innovators

Innovators have thrived in Waltham since the nation’s founding, and the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation is celebrating that history with a dozen banners in various city locations.

Photos courtesy of the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation.

The banners feature brief biographies of significant innovators as well as accompanying graphics. Some names will sound familiar to many Waltham residents — Paul Moody, Charles Metz and Francis Cabot Lowell, for instance. Others may be less familiar, such as Marshal Walter “Major” Taylor, a record-breaking Black bicyclist racing in the late 1800s.

The banners have been placed at locations including Gore Place, City Hall, the Lyman Estate, the Waltham Public Library, the Waltham Museum, the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation and elsewhere, according to Stephen Guerriero, director of education at CRMII.

The project is titled “250 Years of Revolutionary Industrial Innovation” and was developed by Maya Colman, a former education intern at CRMII, Guerriero said. A Tufts University graduate student at the time, she selected the individuals to be featured and researched their histories.

The project is part of the state’s 250th celebration and is funded by a $25,000 grant from the Massachusetts Office of Tourism and Travel.

The banners may be viewed online, and an interactive map shows their locations. Promotions are planned on Boston public radio stations.

The innovators featured include:  

• Michael Brewster Folsom — teacher, scholar, and industrial historian who was the driving force behind the creation of the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation

• Paul Moody — who perfected the power loom, which allowed the Boston Manufacturing Co. to become the first fully integrated factory in the world

• Charles Metz — producer of innovative bikes, automobiles and motorcycles in Waltham

• The Apollo 11 Weavers — a group of women who had worked at Waltham Watch Co. and helped build the guidance computer that directed Apollo 11 to the moon

• Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor — a famous cyclist who made waves during the 1890s bicycle craze using Waltham-made bikes

• Francis Cabot Lowell — creator of The Boston Manufacturing Co., the first fully integrated factory in the world, which helped the U.S. gain economic independence from Britain

• Charles Vander Woerd — inventor of the automatic screw machine, which greatly increased the speed at which watches could be made in Waltham

• Jodi Rosenbaum — founder and CEO of More Than Words, a nonprofit that empowers youth who are court-involved, in foster care, out-of-school and/or experiencing homelessness to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business

• Isaac Ebenezer Markham — an employee of the Boston Manufacturing Co. who wrote a letter that serves as the only known record of the 1821 strike at the company, the first industrialized labor strike in the history of the United States

• Katherine (Kittie) Knox — a biracial woman who defied gender norms as an accomplished cyclist and in 1895 raced at Waltham’s famed velodrome, though she was relegated to the “costume contest” category, where she won first place.   

• Mary Hannah Dudley Melvin — a brilliant machine analyst and “mill girl” who became the highest paid employee on the payroll of the Boston Manufacturing Co.
  
• Students and Leaders of the Charles River Collaboratory — Waltham High School and Middle School students who represent the next generation of innovators at this youth-led innovation space headquartered at CRMII in partnership with the Boston College Lynch School of Education and Department of Engineering.

Asked if he has a favorite innovator, Guerriero named Mary Melvin at the Boston Manufacturing Co. “It’s possible that she was the first woman to be in charge of a mill room in America,” he said. “She was absolutely the most important employee.” 

“She was able to see through the course of her life what she started working on in Waltham become this behemoth of New England’s industrial revolution, and we have no primary source material about her. It’s amazing,” he said.