Definition of "factory"

We had here his curate, Mr. Furley, who had been nine years chaplain to the English factory at St. Petersburg […] .

1792, James Boswell, in Danziger & Brady (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer (Journals 1789–1795), Yale 1989, p. 184

[…] St. Bede's at this period of its history was perhaps the poorest and most miserable parish in the East End of London. Close-packed, crushed by the buttressed height of the railway viaduct, rendered airless by huge walls of factories, it at once banished lively interest from a stranger's mind and left only a dull oppression of the spirit.

1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter VII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company

The highway to the East Coast which ran through the borough of Ebbfield had always been a main road and even now, despite the vast garages, the pylons and the gaily painted factory glasshouses which had sprung up beside it, there still remained an occasional trace of past cultures.

1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 7, in The China Governess‎

The guys all knew each other and we were having a jolly old chinwag as we marched them out of the house in front of their stunned neighbours and into a van we had called to take them all to the Factory (police station).

2010, Harry Keeble, Kris Hollington, Crack House

Radio became a star factory for journalists.

2009, Sam Riley, Star Struck: An Encyclopedia of Celebrity Culture, page 200

The task factory […] is the object that is responsible for creating instances of those tasks dynamically.

2010, Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi, William Bartholomew, Inside the Microsoft Build Engine