Joy Homestead

(5)

Amey(7) lived to be fifty-five years old and died a spinster in 1847. Of the five and four girls which Samuel(6) and Freelove had strangely enough, only one, Rachel Joy married. The others, with the exception of Samuel Fenner Joy(7), made the Homestead their home until Thomas Joy(7), the last lineal descendant of that first Thomas Joy(1) of Boston down through this particular branch, died in 1854.


To go back to Samuel Joy(6), he seemed to have been far more successful than his father, Job(5). He was called upon to serve in the Town Council for several years and served his community in other civic capacities. He followed the trade of his father as a cordwainer but was listed as currier and tanner as well and in 1803 had attained the stature of gentleman. Over the years he added many acres to the homestead property until his holdings spread over an area from present Plainfield Pike to present Scituate Avenue, across that highway, taking in the homestead and the east to the present Phenix Avenue and across it, extending to the Reape's or Saw Mill Brook.


He owned a mill on the north side of the highway which passed by his house which stated as a grist and saw mill. His Uncle, Edward Edwards, was the miller there. One cold morning attempting to start the wheel, he found it frozen, went down into the pit to release it but as he did so he was caught by it, when it suddenly turned and he was killed. Patience Edwards, his wife, was said to have cursed the old mill when her husband died and many superstitious people believed in that curse, for the vicissitudes of the mill property were many and varied in the years that followed.


During a period of about seventy-five years the mill property changed hands some twenty or twenty one times. Deeds show that dams and ditches were built to control the water power of the brook which had come to be called Joy Brook and which furnished power for the various enterprises. Dwellings, barns and shed, a bleachery, dye house, and draping sheds were added. A steam engine augmented Joy Brook in running the printing machines and much capital was invested by the owners, so much, in fact, that in 1850 the property was carrying five mortgages. The heavy expenditures and the general depression of the 1870's finally closed the mill. It becomes the property of Mason Cornell and there in the great mill building he ran a cider mill for a time, powered by a lone hose on a tread mill. The cycle from grist and saw mill to cider mill had been completed, but at its peak, as the Rhode Island Print Works, it had been a fine and paying enterprise.


It bore many names during the cycle, the Samuel Joy Mill, Burlingame Fulling Mill, Holton's Patent Mill, the Yarn Mill, the Union Starch Works, Rhode Island Print Works, the Hunt Mill and the Dugaway Hill Mill. Many products were produced there, grist; lumber; dressed, bleached and printed cloth; yarn; felt hats; cider and that Prohibition drink, Vigorine, said to be the bicyclists' booster when taken at the foot of a steep hill. The Joys did not own all this mill property but enough of the brook, dams an ditches with their water privileges which they leased to the various concerns to make it a sound investment for them. Joytown, as the section came to be called made a name for itself in the 19th century as one of Cranston's industrial centers.


Besides the group of dwellings on Scituate Avenue which grew up around the homestead and industrial property, some of the Joys established a school, known as the Joy School at the foot of Dugaway Hill. It was probably Samuel Joy although the writer has never found the deed of the land, by the Joys to any group of proprietors, as was done in other instances of early schools. It was near the factory and one deed mentions the "Middle Road" as one of its boundaries. This could be Atwood Avenue, through the mention of Middle Road has never been found at any time by the writer.