The words "immigration" and "industrialization" in American history often conjure up images of teeming masses of impoverished workers from Southern and Eastern Europe filling low-paying unskilled factory jobs in turn-of-the-century cities. Occasionally, when the clock is moved back, historians may speak of the first great wave of Irish immigrants who escaped the potato famine and entered the New England mills around 1850. But, if attention is focused even further back on the first immigrant workers to labor in the earliest factories of antebellum New England, the simple association of foreigners with unskilled labor just does not hold true for many of these workers.