2021 Award Recipients

Hindley Manufacturing Company
&
Maxson Automatic Machinery

Est. 1897 in Cumberland, RI

The company, Cumberland’s oldest, has its roots in the 19th Century when the Hindley family arrived from England.
James Hindley settled in Valley Falls and was working for a horseshoe firm when his son, Walter, one day saw a price list for cotter pins that were made in blacksmith shops.
The Hindleys, together with a neighbor decided, they could devise a semi-automatic machine to make the pins and accomplishing that they started Hindley Manufacturing in 1897.
Shortly after the turn of the century, the Hindleys saw another manufacturing opportunity—indoor plumbing was becoming the rage and they started manufacturing the necessary hardware.
Making small wire devices found in every household became their forte.

Est. 1912 in Westerly, RI

For more than a century, the Maxson Automatic Machinery Co., has used high quality innovation to address one of the most difficult manufacturing tasks—handling thin paper mechanically.
Founded in 1912, the Westerly-based company developed a machine that helped eliminate a very dangerous and tedious manual process in the conversion of paper from huge webs to cut sheets.
At the turn of the 20th Century, converting rolls of paper into sheets suitable for printing machines involved a machine that would cut the paper into sheets of different dimensions.
Young boys and sometimes women were positioned at the end of the machine to catch the emerging sheets and lay them into stacks.
Workers who did this manual work were called “lay boys” and the process was not only tedious but dangerous.