Bostitch

Founded by Thomas A. Briggs in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1896 as the Boston Wire Stitcher Company, and eventually coming to dominate the stapling industry as Bostitch, this company located at various places in New England before settling on East Greenwich in the mid-1950s. It is one of the state's earliest sprawling, one-story modern industrial plants of impressive size located on a large acreage. The Bostitch “park” minimizes planting to feature mowed lawn and pond, using the same ingredients as the proudest of its manicured predecessors in the nineteenth century to display the plant rather than screen it—in this instance, made particularly conspicuous by a sweep of field up to the hilltop site for the building. As a pioneer venture for large-scale manufacturing operations in the southern part of the state, Bostitch heralded an end to the agricultural economy of the area as tenuously epitomized in Fry's Hamlet.