Woonsocket Rubber Company
In 1864, the Woonsocket Rubber Company was incorporated by Simeon S. Cook, Lyman Cook and Joseph Banigan. The Cooks were important local industrialists who had interests in the Woonsocket Machine and Press Company and the Bailey Wringer Company. Banigan was an Irish immigrant who learned the rubber business at the Goodyear India Rubber Company in Boston.
Together, the men purchased a three story rubble-stone building on this site that had been constructed ten years earlier as a steam powered sash manufacturing mill.