The copper mill Paul Revere built on the banks of the Neponset River in Canton 225 years ago is gone. The company he founded there is not.

Revere Copper Products, Inc., now headquartered in Rome, New York, is marking its 225th anniversary in 2026, tracing its origins to the rolling mill Revere established in Canton in 1801. A feature published Monday, July 14, in Industry Week — excerpted from Jim Vinoski's new book "American Manufacturing: 22 Tales of Integrity, Ingenuity and the Modest Heroes Who Built a Nation" — tells the full arc of how a Canton riverside operation became what the company describes as the last remaining copper rolling mill with private U.S. ownership.

The Canton roots run deep. Revere, then 65, purchased the site from Kinsley Iron Works and invested $25,000 of his own money. The U.S. government loaned him $10,000 to get started. His first major contract came in 1802: 6,000 feet of copper sheathing for the dome of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. A year later, the mill supplied copper sheathing for the hull of the USS Constitution.

The mill also produced fittings for Robert Fulton's early steamboat boilers, according to the Industry Week feature.

Revere spent summers at the Canton property — which he called "Canton Dale" — until his death in 1818. His son Joseph Warren Revere ran the operation until 1868, followed by grandson John Revere and subsequent family members.

The Canton mill property was sold around 1900 after a merger created the Taunton-New Bedford Copper Company. The site sat idle until Plymouth Rubber Company purchased it in 1909. Another merger in 1928 formed Revere Copper and Brass, Inc., which moved to Rome, New York.

The company went bankrupt in the late 1980s. That's when Brian O'Shaughnessy, who had worked his way up from the copper mines, stepped in.

"Brian was asked to run the two plants for one year in the late '80s," Amy O'Shaughnessy, vice president of sales and marketing at Revere Copper Products, told Industry Week. "He did. And as he was on his journey, he said, 'I think I can make a go of this.' ... He borrowed $56 million, and he bought Revere out of bankruptcy."

In the mid-1990s, O'Shaughnessy converted the company into an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), making every employee a shareholder. No outside investors hold shares.

The company weathered severe pressure after China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, enduring multiple layoffs, pay freezes, and the closure of its New Bedford, Massachusetts, plant. In 2016, Revere dropped brass entirely to focus on copper.

The bet paid off. In 2021, Revere invested nearly $7 million in a new copper melting furnace at its Rome plant, adding 30 million pounds of annual melting capacity. It also opened a copper bar production facility in Mebane, North Carolina.

Back in Canton, the 40-acre Paul Revere Heritage Site along the Neponset River preserves the original Revere & Son copper-rolling mill building and the Joseph Warren Revere Draft Horse Barn. The Canton Historical Society and Canton Historical Commission rallied community support beginning in 2008 to save both structures from demolition, with Society members Wally Gibbs and George Comeau leading the effort.

The site now hosts the Museum of Discovery and Innovation, known as MODI. The Canton Historical Society has called MODI "a smashing success," and a Revere bell and Hunneman Fire Pumper are on loan to the site from the Society.

Visitors can walk along unobstructed views of the Neponset River and two dams at the Heritage Site, at the same spot where the river's flow once powered Revere's rolling machines.