Nursery school and kindergarten, medical care for workers, pensions, co-op stores, and company housing. These are all things we take for granted now, but they were the revolutionary ideas first put into practice in the late 1700s and early 1800s in the mill town of New Lanark, Scotland. Celebrated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site today, New Lanark’s white sandstone buildings and cobblestone streets attract some 400,000 visitors a year, including the Bartons. While the site boasted more than a thousand employees in 1793 (almost two-thirds of them children) now a couple hundred people run the giant textile looms producing vibrantly colored wool (which, incidentally, was used to make the “jumpers” in the Harry Potter films) and tending to the tourist trade. Some of the worker housing has been rehabbed into modern flats and condos, a hotel, and offices while other buildings house displays recognizing the Utopian ideals of David Dale and Robert Owen, who married Dale’s daughter and took over the operation. Unlike other mill owners, Owen refused to employ children under the age of 10 and reduced working time to 10 hours a day. He built nursery and primary schools and offered classes after work for the older children. He also provided free medical care, hot meals, school uniforms, music lessons, a savings fund, and a grocery store with affordable food. Owen took his reformist ideas to the U.S., founding the New Harmony community in Indiana. While he left America after only a few years, his three sons stayed on. One son became a U.S. Congressman who founded the Smithsonian Institution…a case of the apple not falling far from the tree.
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