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There were several advantageous physical conditions in Dover that made the goal of manufacturing cloth seem attainable. The company’s first organizational meeting took place on January 19, 1813. With Williams and Wendell as principals and the other eight as investors, the Dover Cotton Factory was incorporated on Decemwith $50,000 in capital stock. The "Fish and Potatoe Club", whose members included fellow businessmen William Hale, Andrew Peirce, Joseph Smith, John Wheeler, Robert Rogers, Jeremiah Stickney, Moses Clements, Walter Cooper, Stephen Patten Jr., and Isaac Wendell, met regularly at Dame Lydia Tebbetts’ tavern on Silver Street. It was John Williams who formed Dover’s first Board of Trade and who, in 1811, began talking at meetings of the "Fish and Potatoe Club" of building a cotton mill. His dry goods store, on Main Street just above Dover Landing, had been a profitable enterprise and made Williams a relatively wealthy man for those times, a man with a vision for even greater things.
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One of those merchants was a man named John Williams who came to Dover from Alfred, Maine in 1807. 2000) was a trading port with an active riverfront, an agricultural center with dozens of family-owned farms, and a mercantile hub whose shopkeepers dealt in East and West India imported goods. At the turn of the 18th century, factories were unknown.