Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures

)[1] or Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures was a private state-sponsored corporation founded in 1791 to promote industrial development along the Passaic River in New Jersey in the United States.

[2] The company's management of the Great Falls of the Passaic River as a powersource for grist mills resulted in the growth of Paterson as one of the first industrial centers in the United States.

Under the society's long-term management of the falls, the industrialization of the area passed through three great waves, centered first on cotton, then steel, and finally silk, over the course of over 150 years.

Hamilton, who had visited the Great Falls of the Passaic River in 1778, envisioned it as a planned industrial site, using the waterfall as source of mechanical power.

Hamilton commissioned civil engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant, responsible for the layout of the new capital at Washington, D.C. to design the system of canals known as raceways supplying the power for the watermills in the new town.

The Morris Canal Company had placed a dam on the Rockaway River and diverted water for its own purposes, thus reducing the volume of flow over the falls and threatening the society's ventures.