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amoskeag mills

How the French-Canadian Textile Worker Came to New England

The story of a French-Canadian textile worker named Phillippe Lemay is the story of thousands of Quebecois farmers who came to New England to work in the mills.

They had no money, large families, little education, a strong work ethic and a deep attachment to the Roman Catholic Church. As soon as they stepped off the train in their homespun clothes, they were identified as ‘frogs,’ ‘Canucks’ and ‘pea soup eaters.’ The Irish especially disliked them – and that dislike turned into murder at least once.

Phillippe Lemay survived it all. In late 1939 and early 1940, he told his story to Louis Pare, an interviewer with the Federal Writers Project for the Folklore Project.

“The picture of one French Canadian textile worker and the picture of another are just as much alike as deux gouttes d’eau, or, as we have learned to say in English, like two peas in a pod,” Lemay said.

Weaving room of an Amoskeag mill.

The Quebec Diaspora

Phillipe Lemay was born June 29, 1856, the fourth child in a family of 14 children, on a small farm in St. Ephrem d’Upton near Montreal. The farm couldn’t support the growing Lemay family, so when Phillippe was eight years old his father decided to take the family to Lowell, Mass., and look for work.

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Lowell textile mills

The trip alone cost them nearly everything they had. The Lemays had to faire encan – auction off all their household goods — to pay for railroad tickets, food and lodging.

The wood-burning trains of the era moved slowly during the day, not at all at night. And so Phillippe Lemay’s family took four days to go from St. Ephrem d’Upton to Lowell. Today the trip takes about 4-1/2 hours by car.

Lowell

The Lemays arrived in Lowell with little more than the clothes on their backs and a new baby born during the journey. They joined 20 or so French-Canadian families in the city.

But after the Civil War ended, many more French-Canadians moved to Lowell in a great wave of migration. Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 residents of Quebec moved to the United States. One-third of Quebec moved to New England to neighborhoods called Little Canadas.

They were attracted to New England’s textile factories, which paid a living wage, albeit barely. But at least they earned enough to survive, which they couldn’t do back home.

In the early years, French-Canadian textile workers earned 50 cents a day. Their board cost $2 a week, and they worked from 5 am to 8 pm with a half hour each for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Later, the mills shortened the workday from 6 am to 6 pm.

Most French-Canadian textile workers didn’t come to stay. They wanted to go back to their Canadian farms with the money earned in the mills.

Some took leaves of absence from their jobs, perhaps a month in the spring to plow and plant their farm, another month in the fall to harvest. A friend or neighbor would tend the farm during the summer.

Many feared becoming citizens. They couldn’t speak English, a big handicap. They still paid taxes in Quebec and felt they couldn’t pay taxes in the United States.

In the end, about half the Quebecois – including Phllippe Lemay’s parents — returned to Canada.

A French-Canadian Textile Worker

As soon as he arrived in Lowell, eight-year-old Phillippe Lemay became a French-Canadian textile worker. He went to work in Lawrence Mill No. 5 as a bagboy and doffer, replacing full bobbins with empty ones. His father, who worked in a saw mill, wanted him to go to school. But Phillippe saw that his parents needed every penny he could earn. His disobedience earned him frequent spankings.

Doffer boys in a South Carolina textile mill, by Lewis Hine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

“The only ones who had a chance to get an education were the youngest of the children, because older brothers and sisters worked in the mills, helping their parents,” Lemay explained.

At first the newcomers from Quebec boarded with relatives. Then, when they could afford it, they rented tenements, usually owned by the company. The windows had no curtains, just paper shades that had to be rolled by hand. A braided rag rug covered the floor, scrubbed with lye once a week.

Life revolved around the mill and the church. Priests commanded enormous respect. In French-Canadian Old Town, Maine, for example, a popular superstition claimed a priest could cure any disease if he wished to.

Every night after dinner, but before the dishes were washed, the Lemay family prayed together and recited the rosary beads. Saturday nights they had fun during old-fashioned social gatherings in their homes, singing and square dancing. Phillippe Lemay remembered a fiddler who knew one tune and an accordionist who knew another, so they didn’t play together.

French vs. Irish

Lowell’s large Irish community feared the French had come to take their jobs. The Irish began a campaign of petty persecution. Irish boys put dirt in French children’s pails when they tried to get water from the public pumps. They stuck French worshippers with needles and pins during Mass, so much so that the French began to stay home. Phillippe Lemay’s father worked outside at night, when Irish boys threw rocks at him.

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The Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H.

In 1872, when Phillippe was 16, the Lemays moved to Manchester, where the giant Amoskeag mills offered plenty of employment to a French-Canadian textile worker. But they fared no better with the Irish. Before the first French church was built in 1873, the French had to walk through the Irish neighborhood to attend Mass. Irish boys threw swill at them, beat them with sticks and threw rocks.

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A young French-Canadian textile worker leaving work at Amoskeag Mills, Manchester, N.H.

The completion of that first French church, St. Augustine, caused an immediate increase in French immigration from Quebec. Five or six families arrived every day on the train from Canada. The French Canadians began to open businesses — bakeries, beer parlors and grocery stores. They built a rectory for their pastor, then a school for French children, then a cemetery. They started to form fraternal organizations like the St. Jean Baptiste Society and to publish their own French-language newspapers.

Murder of a French-Canadian textile-worker

A marching band called the Fanfare Canadienne started at St. Augustine Church. Made up of French-Canadian textile workers, it played popular tunes for fraternal organizations.

One night in 1880, a 23-year-old band member named Jean Blanchette was talking in French with several bandmates near Victory Park in downtown Manchester. Three intoxicated Irishmen came out of a beer parlor and heard the French spoken. They attacked the French-Canadian textile workers, who fought back.

One of the Irishmen fell on a bottle of hard liquor in his pocket, and it broke. He threw the broken bottle at Jean Blanchette, severing his jugular vein. Blanchette died 20 minutes later. A thousand people marched in his funeral procession through the streets of Manchester, which were lined with French onlookers.

Sixty years later, Phillippe Lemay said the French-Canadian textile workers didn’t exact revenge from the Irish who killed their friend. Blanchette’s assailant went to prison for five years and died shortly after his release.

Lemay worked hard at his trade and rose through the mill’s ranks. In 1901, he asked for a promotion as an overseer of a spinning mill. His request shocked his superintendent. “What! A Frenchman had the crust to think he could be an overseer!” recalled Lemay.

He got the promotion to the dismay of the American and Irish workers, who stopped talking to him. Eventually more French-Canadian textile workers got promotions to management positions.

By 1906, Manchester had a French-Canadian bishop and in 1918, the first of many French-Canadian mayors. French-Canadians became distinguished doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, architects and bankers.

“To what do we owe our success?” said Phillippe Lemay.

I believe we owe it to the self-sacrificing French Canadian immigrants from old Quebec, to the courage that made them refuse to accept defeat and quit when that would have seemed the natural thing to do; to the cheerfulness that carried us through our trials and tribulation and helps us old-timers to wait happily for the final bell calling us home to rest after our long, hard life in the textile mills. And perhaps the bloody death of Jean-Baptiste Blanchette, a martyr in the true sense of the word, had its share in bringing about the conditions we are enjoying today.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also like to read about Lewis Hine, the photographer who exposed child labor, here. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Places Workers Were Killed in New England

Over the course of New England history many thousands of workers were killed on the job.

Some, like Vermont quarry workers, died a slow death from silicosis. Others like Connecticut munitions workers died suddenly in explosions.

Carelessness killed some. Nature killed others. Sometimes law enforcement officers killed workers because they challenged the bosses over working conditions and pay.

Here are six places in and around New England where workers were killed because of their jobs. If you know of other historic places where workers were killed, please add them in the comments section.

Remington Arms

Workers were killed at the now-abandoned Remington Arms plant in Bridgeport, Conn.

The New York Times called the enormous Remington Arms plant in Bridgeport, Conn., ‘the greatest small arms and ammunition plant in the world.’ It may also have ranked as the deadliest.

At its height, Remington Arms employed more than 17,000 workers. Some of them died on the job. On April 4, 1905, three workers lost their lives in an explosion that blew up an entire building. In 1914, Bridgeport police killed an 18-year-old striking worker, Frank Monte.

On March 28, 1942, an explosion killed four women and three men and hurt 80 others. The blast shook the enormous munitions plant about 2 p.m. It “sent bullets whizzing dangerously through the vicinity, touched off a general fire alarm and brought a rush of ambulances,” reported the Boston Globe.

Investigators blamed the explosion on a nail that fell into a box of cartridge primers.

Today the abandoned Remington Arms plant still sits at 812 Barnum Ave. in Bridgeport. Since workers were killed there, it is said to be haunted.

The Penobscot River

The Penobscot River, where logging workers were killed on log drives.

Joe Attien, a Penobscot Indian chief, worked for seasonal wages as a logger and a Maine guide. Logging work carried many dangers and cost many workers their lives.

Joe Attien first appeared in print when Henry David Thoreau wrote about him in his 1864 book, The Maine Woods. Thoreau wrote, somewhat condescendingly:

He was a good looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours.

On July 4, 1870, Joe Attien led a team of log drivers down the Penobscot River in a bateau. River drives usually ended by Independence Day, when the men went into Bangor and celebrated with a vengeance.

In 1870, though, rough water delayed the West Branch drive. On July 4, the rivermen tried to break up a logjam. They launched a bateau with seven men, captained by Joe Attien from the stern.

The churning water shot the boat across the channel and smashed it against the rocks. The collision sheared off a hole in the bateau, which quickly filled with water. The unmanageable craft hurtled over a waterfall among the rocks and logs. Some of the men couldn’t swim, and Joe Attien died trying to save them.

When the river drivers found his body, they cut a cross into a tree by the side of the pond, and hung his boots in the tree. The boots then stayed there until they rotted away, a sincere memorial of a good man.

Today you can learn more about Maine’s logging history by visiting the Maine Forestry Museum in Rangeley, Maine.

Georges Banks

An obelisk to the 57 fishermen killed in the 1841 storm. First Congregational Parish of Truro.

Fishing has long ranked as one of the deadliest occupations in the United States. In 1841, so many Cape Cod fishermen perished in an October storm that the peninsula’s young women wouldn’t court men who went to sea.

On Saturday, Oct. 2, 1841, most of the Truro fishing fleet on the Georges Banks left off fishing and made for home. Only two of the nine ships that set out made it.

The wind kicked up that afternoon and reached gale force by midnight. “The ocean roared as though with an unbridled madness,” wrote Sidney Perley in Historic Storms of New England. “Its waves ran mountain high, throwing their spray far into the sky, and forming a majestic yet fearful sight.”

Cape Cod suffered the most from the storm. Parts of 50 shipwrecks washed onto the beach from Chatham to the highlands. In one day, searchers took up 100 bodies and buried them. The Truro Insurance Company failed for a lack of men to take charge of its vessels.

In the seven fishing vessels out of Truro, 57 men and boys died at sea, and only a few of their bodies were recovered. All 57 lived within two miles of each other. They had relatives throughout the town. Eight Snows and eight Paines died. So did three boys not yet 13 years old.

An obelisk in Truro’s First Congregational Parish Church yard commemorates the 57 storm victims at 26 Bridge St. in Truro.

Amoskeag Mills

Three workers were killed when a steam engine exploded at the Amoskeag Millyard.

Ida Cram and Mary Kane worked at the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, N.H., on the morning of October 15, 1891. On that day all hell broke loose at the facility’s Number 7 mill.

The Amoskeag, the largest cotton textile plant in the world, had installed a mammoth Corliss steam engine to deliver power to four of its plants. But steam engines in the 1800s were risky machines. They powered the industrial revolution, but maintaining and operating required a new skill that many had not mastered.

That morning in 1891, Amoskeag management had concerns about the steam engine, which seemed erratic. An engineer, Samuel Bunker, was dispatched to the engine room to see if he could find the source of the problem. No one knows if Bunker ever found exactly what went wrong because debris from the giant Corliss engine killed him when its flywheel flew apart.

Ida Cram and Mary Kane also dieed in the explosion, which showered the mills with debris and sent raging blasts of steam from the broken machinery. Dozens were injured. Investigators never conclusively figured out the reason for the blast that sent three people to the grave.

Today, visitors can tour parts of the historic Amoskeag mills that are home to the Manchester Millyard Museum.

Sayles Finishing Plants

The Sayles Finishing Plant. Workers were killed during a strike at the plant in 1934.

William Sayles started a bleachery in Lincoln, R.I., which grew into the enormous Sayles Finishing Plants in the 1920s. By then, mill owners tried to squeeze more and more work out of their employees because demand for textiles had slackened while competition stiffened from foreign mills.

In the fall of 1934, unions organized a general strike throughout the textile industry – the largest in U.S. labor history. From New England to the South, 400,000 textile workers walked off the job. The strike lasted 22 days.

Strikers stopped work at Sayles, but the company hired strikebreakers to continue production. Several thousand strikers shut down the factory. Rhode Island Gov. T.F. Green ordered state troopers and deputy sheriffs to police the strikers. They arrived wielding machine guns and tear gas bombs against the unarmed workers. They fired on strikers hiding in the Moshassuck Cemetery, killing Charles Gorczynski, a 17-year-old textile worker from Central Falls. Workers carried his body through Pawtucket in an enormous funeral procession.

Police later shot and killed William Blackwood, a 44-year-old onlooker. In the end, eight strike sympathizers and four striking workers were killed, and 132 people were injured in what became known as the Saylesville Massacre.

Today, you can visit the Moshassuck Cemetery at 978 Lonsdale Ave. in Central Falls. You can also see the Sayles’ mills and workers housing in the Saylesville Historic District in Lincoln, R.I.

Proctor Marble Factory

Quarry workers were killed most often by silicosis, a lung disease.

On May 22, 1903, Janos Szlaby, a Hungarian immigrant, worked the graveyard shift at the Vermont Marble Company at Proctor, Vt.

A belt that turned the stone-finishing machinery in one of the plants snagged. The supervisor sent Szlaby to free the belt with the factory machinery whirring below. Szlaby slipped and tumbled into the factory’s balance wheel, which crushed him to death.

Countless other workers were killed in Vermont’s quarrying and stone-finishing industries.

More pernicious than the sudden deaths in the quarries and plants, however, were the lung ailments that stone workers suffered from years of exposure to stone dust. Pneumatic tools that replaced hand tools threw off great clouds of dust in enclosed work spaces. Workers worried about their lungs confronted company managers who wanted the more efficient modern equipment.

In 1909 a group of stonecutters walked off the job in Northfield, Vt. They did it because the company bought handheld surfacing tools that threw off too much dust. In the early 1900s labor agreements included language about tamping down dust on the job. But the methods didn’t work. One study of how stonecutting workers were killed in the 1920s and 1930s found silicosis cost them 11 years of their lives.

You can visit one of Vermont’s marble quarries at the Proctor Marble Museum.

Images: First Congregational Parish of Truro By Judy Moehle – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35518602. This story about where workers were killed was updated in 2023.

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Six New England Presidential Visits and the Stories Behind Them

New England is full of sites that hosted past presidential visits as the country’s leaders came north in search of votes, campaign cash or just a vacation. Here are six of them:

Providence, 1843

Market Square, Providence, 1844.

In 1843, President John Tyler’s presidency was reeling. Tyler was the first vice president to ascend to the presidency because the incumbent died. His detractors let him know it. They dubbed him the ‘Accidental President’ or ‘His Accidency.’

By 1843, Tyler was facing dramatic turnover in his cabinet. His efforts to negotiate the annexation of Texas into the United States was causing an uproar, since Taylor wanted it to join the United States as a slave-holding state.

Buffeted by Washington, Tyler decided to take his program to the people. He headed north, and the wildly popular response encouraged him to mount a third-party bid for office in 1844.

Tyler arrived before dawn on June 15 at Stonington, Conn., where a crowd of 2,000 greeted him.

Travelling north toward Rhode Island, the crowds began swelling around North Kingstown. The New York Herald noted that Providence was unprepared for the huge outpouring of people eager to see the president:

The curiosity to see him was immense. The Common Council of Providence mismanaged everything most horribly; a mob surrounded the cars, and set all order at defiance. An old man cried out, “Here, I’ve had my pocket picked of my pocket book.”

Tyler traveled the streets to Brown University and back to Market Square, where he ate at the Franklin House, an inn that used to stand across from the Market House.

Across the river he did some handshaking at the first indoor mall in America, the Westminster Arcade: “The president then went into a queer looking place called Westminster, and shook hands with 5,000 people,” reported the Herald.

A delegation from Lowell, Mass. buttonholed Tyler and persuaded him to visit that city, as well. He traveled there after the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument. There he learned of a new disaster brewing for his administration – his attorney general had died. The president decided to return to Washington rather than continue his tour, but his spirits were greatly improved.

Tyler finally dropped out of the 1844 race when the Whigs approved his plan to annex Texas.

The Westminster Arcade remains open to this day in Providence. Today it’s a shopping destination with two stories of apartments.

Sargent’s Purchase, N.H., 1869

Stereo-graph photo of Ulysses Grant atop Mount Washington in 1869.

In the summer of 1869, Washington’s heat drove the new president, Ulysses S. Grant, to visit New England with his wife and children.

On Aug. 27, 1869, the Grant family climbed Mount Washington. They took the three-year-old cog railway, the first cog railway in the world. Sylvester Marsh designed the railway for the mountain’s steep grade. The train has cog wheels that mesh with a toothed rail in the center of the track.

It wasn’t the first train the Grants took on that vacation. They rode from Newport, R.I., to Boston, where a large crowd greeted them. They took another train to Nashua, N.H., where they were again greeted by thousands of well-wishers. On they went to Manchester, where Grant toured the printing department of the Amoskeag Mills and greeted some 3,000 millworkers lined up to see him.

In Concord, Grant told the welcoming crowd that it was his first visit to New Hampshire and he was sorry an injury prevented him from shaking hands.

At 9 a.m. the next day, the presidential party left the Crawford House in Crawford Notch, N.H., for what was then called the Sky Railroad. According to news reports, the president was particularly struck with the simplicity and safety of the air brake.

The Grants seated themselves in the car and moved skyward. A cannon was fired when they reached the summit and the president was told the Harvards had lost the boat race. “Well I am very sorry to hear it,” Grant said.

After lunch, the presidential party headed to Littleton and then Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

The Cog Railway to the top of Mount Washington has never stopped operating.

Brattleboro, Vt., 1877

Brooks House, Brattleboro, Vt.

Until 2000, history counted the election of 1876 the closest contest for the White House ever. Rutherford B. Hayes, an Ohio Republican, won the Electoral College. Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, won the popular vote.

The two parties hammered out the compromise of 1877, in which Hayes got the White House and the Democrats got everything else. They won an end to the Reconstruction period of federal control of the South.

Without federal troops to intervene when African-Americans were harassed, Democrats soon took control of the southern statehouses. Their anti-black policies that survived for decades.

As a longtime supporter of Reconstruction, Hayes wanted to “wipe out the color line.” His efforts at promoting racial harmony failed. Perhaps no one could have succeeded.

In his first months in office, Hayes had to authorize the military to repulse Mexican criminal bandits terrorizing the border and put down the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

He needed an escape, and Vermont was the tonic. Hayes’ grandfather, Rutherford, built a home at West Brattleboro in 1780. His son, also Rutherford, built at Dummerston before moving to Delaware, Ohio, where the president Rutherford Hayes was born in 1822.

On his 1877 return visit, Hayes stayed with his cousin William Bigelow in West Brattleboro. Bigelow was said to be the wealthiest man in Vermont at one time. A large reception was held at the Brooks House in Brattleboro, and the time spent in Vermont restored Hayes’ outlook.

Vermont would retain a special place in Hayes’ life. After leaving office, he was a regular visitor. Some reports held that he had become engaged to Mary Ann Hayes Bigelow, who had been host to Hayes in 1877 with her husband William. The wedding had been delayed because of the death of Mary Ann’s son Russell, and Rutherford died before it could take place.

Hayes ordered Dummerston Granite shipped to Ohio from the family’s Vermont homestead and used it as the base for the stone that marks his and his wife’s grave.

Today Brattleboro’s Hotel Brooks is still open and operating as a shopping and dining destination.

Adams, Mass., 1897

Postcard showing statue of William McKinley at Adams, Mass.

Adams and North Adams, Mass., never had a better friend than William McKinley. His trade policies strengthened the textile industry and helped the Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company grow to be a world leader in textile manufacturing.

The Plunkett family, who owned the mills, invited McKinley to stay with them twice. In 1897 he was given the honor of laying the cornerstone for the Adams Free Library. To this day the library contains a chair that was especially constructed for McKinley for the occasion.

The Plunketts also arranged for him to give a speech to the thousands of attendees at the Hoosac Valley Agricultural Fair on Sept. 22, 1897.

McKinley would return to Adams for a week stay beginning June 21, 1899, during which he was treated more like royalty. He traveled through Holyoke, Westfield, Pittsfield and Springfield, encountering huge crowds at each.

It was North Adams that pulled out all the stops. The city erected a viewing stand for McKinley to watch a special parade that featured bands, school children, military units and mounted police. Pressed to give an impromptu speech, McKinley marveled at the prosperity manufacturing had brought to the area:

I know something about North Adams from my visit two years ago, but as I rode through the beautiful streets of your city today I must confess I was wholly unprepared to witness its splendid progress and prosperity.

When McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, no town mourned the loss more than Adams. The town erected a statue in his honor that stands to this day in front of the library he dedicated. It was rededicated in 1903.

Poland Springs, Maine, 1921

The summer of 1921 was especially gay at the Poland Springs resort, which the Ricker family had been running in one form or another since 1793. Motor traffic had never been heavier, and the first week in August was filled with dancing, tennis and golf.

Poland Spring House

That week came to a climax with a visit from President and Mrs. Warren G. Harding, who had driven from Lancaster, N.H. There they had been staying with Harding’s secretary of war, John Wingate Weeks.

On Aug. 4, 1921, the Hardings arrived in Poland Springs for lunch after driving 200 miles from Lancaster and stopping at a sanitarium in Oxford, Maine. There the president promised World War I veterans, mostly suffering from gas attacks, that the government would do everything it could to help them.

He had asked that Poland Springs do nothing special for his visit, but the caddies were noticeably excited. The president and his wife ate lunch and then he played a round of golf. That night, Harding left from Portland for Washington on the presidential yacht Mayflower.

The Poland Springs resort is still open and still offering a challenging course for golfers.

Groton, Conn., 1952

President Harry Truman laying the keel for the USS Nautilus.

On Saturday June 14, 1952, President Harry Truman visited the shipyard at Groton, Conn., to celebrate laying the keel for the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine ever built.

Truman, who ordered the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, said he hoped it would begin an age where the discoveries that fueled development of the atom bomb would be applied to industry in ways that would benefit society.

Truman envisioned planes and ships powered by atomic energy, as well as power plants driven by this inexpensive new generating process:

Such a possibility would revolutionize the technological basis of our civilization. It could provide the answer to the crying need for sources of power in the underdeveloped areas of the world. It could mean industrial development for areas now held back because they have no supply of coal, or oil, or waterpower.

Truman said he prayed the submarine would never have an enemy and be tied up someday as an historic relic of a threat of war long passed.”

While all Truman’s projections didn’t come to pass, the Nautilus is in fact tied up and open for tourists as a museum and library.

Of course Truman didn’t forget politics in his speech, praising Sen. William Bento for standing up to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his red-baiting tactics.

Truman’s private journal hints at a more curmudgeonly president behind the hoopla. He wrote:

“Well here I am, Sunday evening all alone. Margaret came to the Great White Prison for the week end on Friday 13th. I went by train to Groton (rhymes with rotten) to speak on atomic energy for peace time use. Should have flown both ways but my staff decided that it would be bad weather going up. It wasn’t.”

And of the frustrations of the White House life that was coming to a close, he said, “Lesson: Don’t raise your boy to be President of the United States.”

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The Amoskeag Mill Disaster of 1891

At about 9:30 in the morning on October 15, 1891, Marcellus Gould, a superintendent at the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, N.H., went hunting for engineer Samuel Bunker. What was going on with the steam power at the mill, Gould wanted to know? The delivery of power from the great shaft that ran mills 4, 5, 7 and 8 had been erratic all morning.

Bunker replied: “There is nothing that I know of, but I’ll see.” With that he headed for the pit that housed the Amoskeag’s power plant on the ground floor of mill No. 7. He never uttered any other words to another soul. Moments later the mill exploded.

The Corliss Engine

The Amoskeag Mills Nos. 4, 5, 7 and 8 were powered by a Corliss steam engine. The Corliss had starred in the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Pennsylvania 15 years earlier.

The exhibition kicked off when U.S. President Ulysses Grant and Brazilian Emperor Pedro II jointly started a massive Corliss built expressly for the event. The engine delivered power to virtually the whole exhibition, using shafts of more than a mile long.

The aftermath of the Amoskeag mill disaster in 1891 (Library of Congress)

The exhibition made the Corliss engine virtually a household name and cemented its status as the leading industrial engine design in America. The Corliss got its name from Frank Corliss of Providence, R.I., who patented several of its features.

The Amoskeag

The Amoskeag naturally ordered one. Installed in 1883, Amoskeag’s Corliss was the largest in the state, and probably New England. It could deliver 2,000 horsepower to the mills.

A Corliss engine like the one that blew apart and caused the Amoskeag mill disaster.

At Manchester, the factories were powered by water from the Merrimack River diverted to turn the shafts that drove the equipment. The river worked in conjunction with the Corliss engine. Lift gates closed or opened to keep the right amount of river power flowing so the Corliss didn’t run too fast. And at low water, the engine could run exclusively on fuel.

The belts on the flywheel on the engine could be slackened or tightened to keep the engine from spinning out of control or overheating.

Following Marcellus Gould’s inquiry, engineer Samuel Bunker descended into the pit in the bottom of mill 7 to see what went wrong. Both Gould and Bunker realized the belts were overheating, but they didn’t know why.

Amoskeag Mill Disaster

Marcellus Gould, a troubleshooting mill manager, had worked at facilities from New Hampshire to Connecticut before the Amoskeag mill disaster. A one-time state senator, Gould had an eye for constructing facilities and a knack for making mills profitable. He worked to generate sales of the latest fabrics while managing the revenue streams from worker housing and keeping wages in check.

After asking Bunker to check out the power plant, Gould stepped into a tunnel that ran between the mills to return to mill 5, where the inconsistency of the power had been slowing the work of carders. He had gone halfway along the tunnel when the Corliss blew apart.

Seconds before the failure, an assistant engineer had looked through a window into the Corliss engine room and noticed the flywheel turning at an excessive speed. Sparks flew from the 42-inch-wide main belt around the wheel. The assistant was cutting power to the Corliss when it failed.

In the moments before the Amoskeag mill disaster, the power supply was getting more and more unstable. Carding machines to the south of the power plant were stopping from inadequate power. At the same time, looms operating on the northern side of the Corliss were operating too fast. The looms shut down as they reached dangerous velocity. The shutoff mechanism on one loom failed, and it sped along at a frantic pace that no one ever recreated – either before or after the failure.

Impact

The impact of the disaster could be felt throughout the mills. First came what sounded like an enormous explosion as the flywheel on the Corliss flew apart. That was followed by several seconds of cacophony as timbers fell, parts of the mill buildings collapsed and steam jetted out of the failed engine.

Pieces of steel were flung hundreds of feet. One enormous piece of metal debris was shot 200 feet into the air and crashed back down through the roof of the number 7. At neighboring buildings, metal shot through windows, showering workers with glass.

A crew of 11 was at work on the second floor of the number 7 mill. When the flywheel gave way it threw pieces of metal upward. The second floor collapsed, dropping the workers to the ground story amid falling beams and equipment.

Death in the Debris

Inspectors examine the Amoskeag mill disaster (Scientific American)

The noise of the Amoskeag mill disaster immediately drew workers running to the number 7 from nearby mills. Many workers had family members and friends working in other parts of the Amoskeag, and the workers were frantic to know who was hurt.

The 1891 Amoskeag mill disaster was not the first for the Corliss. In 1888 William Venable, another engineer, got caught between the flywheel and the pit in which it sat. He was mangled to death. This time when searchers got to the pit that housed the massive, 64-ton flywheel, they found that engineer Bunker’s demise was far quicker. His head had been pulverized, and he died instantly.

More Casualties

Lewis Hine took this photo on May 25, 1909. 18 years after the Amoskeag mill disaster. His caption said, “Little girl (48 inches high) work in Amoskeag Mfg. Co., Manchester, N.H. She seemed to be 11 or 12 yrs. old.”

Two other workers died in the disaster. Ida Cram suffered numerous injuries and broken bones. A head injury would kill her after she reached Elliot Hospital. Mary Kane, just 21, died from a gruesome injury to her scalp.

Other injuries included cuts to a 12-year-old boy. (Eighteen years later, Lewis Hine would photograph child laborers at the Amoskeag mills.)

In all, eight other workers were treated for broken bones and serious injuries resulting from the Amoskeag mill disaster.

Lemuel Levick told of a miraculous escape from death. He had been working on the second story of No. 7 when the floor gave way. He dropped straight down, and the cupboard he worked next to dropped beside him. As beams and debris rained down, the cupboard provided shelter, forming a cave in the debris that kept him safe.

Outside his safe haven, steam spewed into the air. Levick spotted steam scalding a mill girl and drew her to safety in his cave until rescuers extricated them.

Cause of the Amoskeag Mill Disaster?

No one ever figured out exactly what caused the Corliss engine to fail. The engineers on the scene never had time to assess what caused the irregular flow of power to the plant – unless Bunker spotted the problem before he died.

A coroner’s jury heard testimony about the Amoskeag mill disaster. It found no wrongdoing on the part of the mill or the engineers operating the machinery.

A panel of engineers reviewed the incident. They examined the remnants of the 64-ton flywheel. They found it contained irregularities in the metal – gaps left behind from its casting that would have unbalanced it slightly. Since the Corliss had operated for eight years without trouble, they doubted the irregularities could have caused the Amoskeag mill disaster. The flaws, however, did weaken the flywheel and made it easier for it to fly apart.

Conclusion

The engineers concluded that the failure was likely caused by the mechanism that connected the belts from the flywheel to the shaft that delivered power to the mill buildings. If that mechanism failed gradually, it might result in the belts slacking off – resulting in a heat buildup. As more power was applied to speed up the belts, the mechanism could grab once again resulting in a speeding up of the wheel, requiring the men managing the engine to slow it down.

A cycle of increasing and decreasing power from the shafts resulted, noted on the factory floor. The shaft delivered power to buildings both to the north and the south, with separate belts on both sides. With the mechanism failing on only one side, the result could explain the decreasing speed of machinery to the south and increasing power to the north.

As the mechanism continued to wear, it could finally lock up with greater force and add so much pressure to the belts that something had to give. In this case, the enormous flywheel shattered.

Lacking full evidence, the engineers concluded this was the most likely cause of the Amoskeag mill disaster of 1891.

This story about the Amoskeag mill disaster was updated in 2023.

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