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George Scigliano, Lost Leader of Boston’s Italian Community

George Scigliano won the reverence of Boston’s North End for vanquishing the money lenders, criminals and labor bosses who preyed on poor Italian immigrants. Perhaps his greatest achievement was dismantling the padrone system, which made debt slaves of Italian immigrants.

George Scigliano

Yes, debt slaves. During the late 19^th century, criminals exploited the hapless new arrivals from southern Italy and Sicily. They offered to find them jobs and shelter, and if they got into trouble they helped them get out of it. For a fee, of course, a fee that turned into debt bondage.

The corrupt system of feeding powerless immigrants to industrial America was called the padrone system. Even children suffered from it. Poor, starving parents in Italy sold their children to the padrones, who put them out as peanut vendors or street musicians.

Some people defended the padrones, calling them labor contractors who found jobs, saloonkeepers who gave them a refuge from hostile natives and as translators who helped them navigate the U.S. court system. Gunther Peck argued they “acquired success by providing vital cultural, economic, and political services.”

George Scigliano began to dismantle the padrone system. He called, “perhaps the greatest evil which has beset the Italian immigrant in this country.” He died at a tragically young age of 32 before he could finish his work.

George Scigliano

He was born on Aug. 26, 1874, the son of Italian immigrants. His mother came from Tuscany, his father from a Neapolitan family with a Calabrian name. They arrived earlier than the great wave of Italian immigrants from the south, and George’s father built a modestly successful business. He ran a food-and-wine shop and then added a saloon, at 140 North Street (since demolished).

George Scigliano’s father is in white, to the left. He’s in front of his business with his family and employees. Courtesy Boston City Archives.

George attended the Eliot School and then the Boston University School of Law. In 1900, he won election at the age of 26 to Boston’s Common Council. Three years later, he ran for and won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

He labored on behalf of his Italian constituents. Scigliano helped organize the first Italian labor union, founded the Italian Benevolent League and established October 12 as Columbus Day in Massachusetts.

He also earned the admiration of the city’s Italian immigrants by defending them from verbal attack. In 1901, Sen. George Frisbie Hoar called Portuguese and Italian immigrants ‘absolutely unfit’ for U.S. citizenship.

Italian immigrants arriving in Boston.

Scigliano then replied with a stinging rebuke. He characterized ‘The Italian’ as ‘a people descended from the ancient Roman dynasty which conquered all of the then known world and educated it.’ He noted the Italians ‘entered and conquered England at a time when the ancestors of our able senator were roaming savages, opened up their country and taught them the meaning of citizenship.’

Facing Down the Padrone

Just before Scigliano filed his bill to ban the padrone system, one brazen boss stood in North Square and announced he needed a thousand Italians to work on a huge construction project in Providence. The job would last nine years, the workers would have nine-hour days and they’d get paid as much as $2 a day. All they had to do was to pay a $1 registration fee to get hired and $1.05 for transportation to Rhode Island.

North Square (Paul Revere’s house to the far left)

Word spread quickly and within a day several hundred workers deposited several hundred dollars. State Rep. Scigliano, then president of the Italian Protective League, smelled a rat. He asked his friends in Providence to find out if the construction project actually existed. He didn’t. So he called the police and went with them to Washington Street downtown and arrested the padrone. He then made sure the padrone returned the money to his victims.

Debt Slaves

Horatio Alger exposed the padrone system to a wide audience with the publication of his novel Phil the Fiddler in 1872. It told the story of padrones who forced Italian boy slaves to beg in the New York streets. The local papers did a series of exposes in the following year, which forced some of the padrones to move north to Boston.

Italian laborers. Courtesy Global Boston.

They’d been in Boston already, meeting immigrant ships at the dock with promises of employment in exchange for a dollar or two. The padrone then hustled them onto trains bound for logging camps in the north woods. Or to farms and mines in the south and west, or to construction projects building canals, railroads, bridges, sewers and skyscrapers. When the immigrant arrived at the job site, he found he owed the padrone for transportation.

Isolated, unable to speak English and unfamiliar with their surroundings, they became debt slaves to the padrone. They then had to give him part of their paychecks and shop at the company stores. The stores charged exorbitant rates and gave the padrone a kickback.

George Scigliano to the Rescue

Scigliano filed a bill to abolish those practices. He told legislators:

In almost all cases, where payment is held back, the money is not paid to laborers, and so, at the end of the season, late in the fall, after the first frost sets in, the laborer returns to the city, and is to house himself for the winter without funds.

He won the enthusiastic support of the local newspapers. The Boston Post editorialized,

These men, bound by contract to the padrone, must buy the necessaries of life from the contractor’s store, live in the miserable shanties which he puts up, and often submit to the withholding of the greater part of their pay until the end of the season.

The bill passed. Then Scigliano took aim at another common swindle: the immigrant banks. Italian immigrants who managed to keep some money often deposited their savings in immigrant banks. The banks were notorious for cheating their customers—by simply not giving them their money back.

Cut Short

Scigliano filed a bill to regulate the immigrant banks. But it didn’t pass until after he died of a mysterious ailment at the age of 31.

St. Leonard’s

His funeral was the largest in North End history, with 1,500 people marching in the procession that carried his coffin to St. Leonard’s Church. Hundreds, if not thousands, watched from the street.

With thanks to Eric Scigliano, What Would Uncle George Do? My Heroic Immigrant Great-Uncle And His Message For Today in Post Alley and to Stephen Puleo, The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day.

Images: Immigrants arriving, courtesy trustees of the Boston Public Library. St. Leonard’s By yeowatzup – Saint Leonard's Church, North End, Boston, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24521830. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Canals That Built New England

In 1803, one of the first New England canals made Boston the undisputed commercial center of New England.

Called ‘the Incredible Ditch,’ the Middlesex Canal allowed a barge to haul 30 tons of goods back and forth between Chelmsford (now Lowell) and Charlestown (now Boston). A horse and wagon could haul perhaps three tons over the rough roads of the era.

Canal fever broke out in New England during the early 19^th century with the opening of the Erie Canal, finished in 1825. The Erie Canal gave New York City an unbeatable advantage over other port cities, and a frenzy of canal-building broke out throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic States.

New England states built dozens of canals, first to transport goods to seaports and then to power mills and factories. By 1840, there were 3,300 miles of canals in the United States.

Today the canals are mostly gone, filled in, paved over or maybe declared a Superfund site. Some still function as recreational trails, waterways for pleasure boats or even sources of hydroelectric power.

Here are six canals built in New England before the Civil War. If you know of other interesting canals, please mention them in the comments section below.

Farmington Canal

An old lock along the Farmington Canal.

The Connecticut Legislature granted six canal charters to private companies, but only two – the Enfield and Farmington – were actually built.

Beginning in 1825, Irish immigrants and farmers along the route dug the canal, four feet deep and 20 feet wide using handmade shovels, wheelbarrows and wagons. The private investors got no state help and struggled financially. It took 10 years to dig the canal, which began at New Haven, snaked through Granby and ended at the Connecticut River in Northampton, Mass. The laborers also built 60 stone locks along the 80-mile waterway.

When the New Haven-to-Farmington leg of the canal opened in 1828, four African American boys rode gray horses that pulled a boat carrying 200 dignitaries sipping refreshments. For a while the towns along the canal prospered, as apples, butter, cider, and wood flowed south to New Haven; coffee, flour, hides, molasses, salt, and sugar headed north.

In Plainville, Edna Whiting built a general store with doors opening onto the canal for dropoffs, which included the original Eli Terry clock weights.

But heavy rains damaged the canal, which required repairs, and toll revenue covered only 20 percent of expenses. The Farmington Canal turned a profit in just one of its first 10 years, and canal operations were slowly phased out. Eventually the Farmington Canal owners sold the land to the New Haven and Northampton Company, which built a railroad that became the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.

The railroad was turned into a rail trail in the 1990s, and today the Farmington Canal Trail runs from downtown New Haven to Northampton, Mass.

Cumberland and Oxford Canal

A steamboat like the ones that used the Cumberland and Oxford Canal between Sebago and Long Lakes about 1910.

Unlike Connecticut, Maine lawmakers decided the state should support a new canal from inland lakes to the Portland seaport. A state lottery raised $50,000 and a bank was chartered to provide the funds for the $206,000 project.

The Cumberland and Oxford Canal, opened in 1832, connected the large lakes of southern Maine with Portland along the Presumpscot River. The 38-mile canal required 27 locks to reach Sebago Lake, 267 feet above sea level. Passengers paid a half cent to go through each lock.

Barges carried lumber, firewood, masts, barrel hoops and apples from Maine’s forests and farms to the sea. From Windham, the Oriental Powder Company mills sent down the canal a quarter of the gunpowder used in the Civil War.

When the railroad that became the Maine Central opened a station in Sebago Lake, the canal started its decline. A steamboat company continued to carry tourists between Portland and the Lake Region until the last steamboat Goodrich burned at its dock in 1932. Songo Lock is still in service for pleasure boats.

Tours have been held along the old canal in Portland.

Lowell Power Canals

The Pawtucket Gatehouse, which controls power from the canals.

Lowell, Mass., contains the world’s largest system of canals that generate hydro-electric power, but they began as a modest transportation waterway in 1796.

The Pawtucket Canal was built so New Hampshire logs could be hauled around the Pawtucket Falls in East Chelmsford, Mass., to shipyards in Newburyport, Mass.

By 1806, the Middlesex Canal made the Pawtucket Canal irrelevant.

In the early 1820s, associates of Francis Cabot Lowell (who had just died) gave new life to the Pawtucket Canal: They saw it could power textile mills instead of hauling canal boats. The subsequent canals that fed off he widened and deepened Pawtucket Canal created the City of Lowell.

First the Merrimack Canal powered the Merrimack Manufacturing Co. Then waterpower from the Hamilton Canal was sold to other companies. Then the Northern Canal and the Moody Street Feeder increased the waterpower to the system. The canal owners finally built the Pawtucket Gatehouse to control flow from the Pawtucket Dam into the Northern Canal.

Lowell’s six-mile canals are still there and working. They are part of the Lowell National Historical Park, established in 1978. For a map of walks along Lowell’s canals, click here.

Amoskeag Canals

One of the canals along the Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H.

Manchester, N.H., was a tiny town called Derryfield when industrialist Samuel Blodget declared, “For as the country increases in population, we must have manufactories, and here at my canal will be a manufacturing town, the Manchester of America!”

It was 1807, and Blodget was as good as his word. He had gotten money from state lotteries in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In 1798, he broke ground on the canal, which ran parallel to the Merrimack River. Ten years later, the granite-lined canal was ready for business.

Why a canal? It was nearly impossible to travel up the Merrimack River in New Hampshire. Between Chelmsford, Mass., and Concord, N.H., the river falls 135 feet, including a 54-foot drop at the Amoskeag Falls. The canal bypassed the falls through a series of locks.

In 1810, the first textile mills were built along Blodget’s canal, then renamed the Amoskeag Canal. They used secondhand machinery bought from Samuel Slater, but it didn’t work well. In 1831 the Amoskeag Manufacturing Co. bought the land and water rights along the canal and built the enormous brick Millyard, which became a manufacturing powerhouse until the 1920s.

A second canal was built one block east of the Amoskeag Canal along the length of the Millyard and parallel to the river. The two canals powered the mills. By the 1880s the mill owners switched to electricity and steam power (with disastrous results in 1891).

The canals were paved over in the 1970s. One became Commercial Street, the other a railroad track.

Today, the remains of two small canals sit at the top of Manchester’s Millyard near PSNH’s Energy Park.

Blackstone Canal

The Moshashuck River portion of the canal in Providence, ca 1968. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

During the canal mania of the 1820, Providence merchants wanted to profit from trade with the farming communities near Worcester County and the Blackstone Valley. Until then, farmers sent their products by wagon to Boston.

In 1823, shortly before the Erie Canal opened, Massachusetts gave a charter to the Blackstone Canal Co. Rhode Island soon followed. Irish immigrants dug the canal, a ditch next to the Blackstone River. In Providence, the Moshassuck River became the lower part of the canal.

Benjamin Wright, the chief engineer, had supervised work on the Erie Canal and applied lessons learned to the Blackstone Canal.

The 45-mile canal opened on Oct. 7, 1828, when the canal boat Lady Carrington arrived in Worcester. For the next 20 years, the canal brought prosperity to farmers, sparked the construction of textile mills along its banks and sustained the growth of Providence and Worcester.

In 1847, the Providence and Worcester Railroad opened, putting the Blackstone Canal out of business the next year.

Today, long sections of the canal belong to the Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park in Massachusetts and the Blackstone River State Park in Rhode Island.

The WaterFire Festival in Providence.

Every summer in Providence, the Moshassuck and Providence rivers attract tourists to the WaterFire Festival. People light 86 fires in braziers anchored just above the waterline to the sound of world music.

Pine Street Barge Canal

Aerial view of the Pine Street Barge Canal and Lake Champlain.

In the 1860s, Burlington, Vt., ranked one of the busiest lumber ports in the United States, and the Lake Champlain waterfront near Battery Street ran out of room. City planners dreamed up the Pine Street Canal to expand the waterfront and allow the loading and unloading of canal boats. A breakwater was also built near the shore of Lake Champlain.

The plan worked. Commerce flourished and factories sprang up along the Pine Street Barge Canal. Unfortunately, the factories also dumped toxic waste into the water.

The U.S. government has designated the Pine Street canal, now a 38-acre polluted swamp, as a Superfund site – perhaps the only superfund site with four shipwrecks in it. At the canal entrance, surveyors found three construction barges from the mid-20th century and the mid-19th century schooner Excelsior.

The brick factories that grew up around the Pine Street Barge Canal are now restaurants, an antiques mall and yoga studios.

Images of canals: Farmington Canal By Staib (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22646095; Pawtucket Gatehouse By Emw – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21042220. This story updated in 2022.

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Mother Brook Canal: Still Useful After All These Years

On March 25, 1639, Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop approved the first manmade canal in the British colonies.

Fish sculpture at Mill Pond Park in Dedham. Mother Brook is in the background.

The colonists dug a 4,000-foot ditch connecting the Neponset River with the Charles River. The mills built along the canal fueled Dedham’s growth as an industrial center. They also provided water power to the town until the early 20^th century.

English colonists settled the Town of Dedham 1635 and incorporated it a year later. The settlers wanted to name it Contentment, but the General Court overruled them. They ended up calling it Dedham after the town in England from which some of them had come.

Mother Brook Canal

It didn’t take long for the colonists to get tired of grinding corn using hand mills imported by Winthrop. So in 1637, the settlers decided to grant 60 acres to Abraham Shawe, who agreed to build a corn mill along the Charles River.

But Shawe died before he could build the mill. The town’s then founders realized the Charles River moved too slowly to power a mill.

But a small stream called East Brook fell 40 feet from a spot near the Dedham settlement to the Neponset River. A survey persuaded Dedham’s founders that diverting water from the Charles to the Neponset would power a mill.

Every landowner was ordered to go to Watertown Mill and haul millstones back to Dedham.

The ditch to be dug would connect the East Brook (behind the present-day Brookdale Cemetery) and the Charles, diverting enough water to power a water wheel. From 1639 to 1640, the settlers dug the canal. Today it is called Mother Brook.

Mill Town

The town awarded Shawe’s 60 acres to John Elderkin. He built the mill in 1641 near the present-day Bussey Street. Elderkin later sold a half interest to Nathaniel Whiting, who later bought the entire property.

The mill ran for 250 years, with the Whiting family running it for 174 of those. Other mills were built to make cotton, wool, paper, wire and carpets. In 1932, the Boston Envelope Company took over the second mill to make drinking cups. The building is still in use today. Another, the Stone Mill on Milton Street, is part of the Stone Mill condominium complex.

Today the Mother Brook is maintained to control floodwater from the Charles River.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image of fish sculpture By Briancua – I shot this with a Nikon D3000 at Mill Pond Park in Dedham, MA., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28326380.

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Ezekiel Straw, The Good Boss of the Amoskeag Millyard

Ezekiel Straw was an unusual mill agent – unusual in a good way. He led the growth of the Amoskeag Millyard and gave Manchester, N.H., the look it still has today. His workers even seemed to like him.

Straw had begun working for the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company when it was a small, but prosperous, textile maker. During his lifetime he developed Amoskeag into a manufacturing powerhouse and Manchester into a city. He influenced the design of the city’s broad avenues and squares, its workers’ row houses and parks. A contemporary called him, “the ablest man in New Hampshire.”

As mill agent, Straw practiced a benevolent paternalism that won him loyalty and respect. When he retired in 1879, William Amory, company treasurer, paid him a tribute accepted by the directors:

[H]is sanguine, sunny temperament and hopeful nature…inspired confidence and infused a healthful spirit of encouragement amongst all of his subordinates.

Ezekiel Straw

He was born on Dec. 30, 1819, in Salisbury, N.H. Straw’s family moved to Lowell, Mass., when he was a young boy, as his father went to work for the Appleton Manufacturing Co. After studying mathematics at Phillips Andover Academy, Ezekiel Straw got a temporary job as a substitute for an ill civil engineer in the fledgling Amoskeag Manufacturing Co.

It was the summer of 1838, the year Manchester was founded. Straw was 18 years old. Not only would the job become permanent, but Ezekiel, his son and grandson would become much-admired agents, or general managers, of the Amoskeag mills. Amoskeag had only six mill agents during its entire history.

In the early days, the New England mill owners cared about the well-being of their work force, young men and women from the farms of New Hampshire and Vermont. So did Straw, their employee.

“He set the pattern for corporate paternalism,” wrote Tamara K. Hareven in her book Amoskeag. He laid out lots and streets for the new mill city. Straw placed Elm Street, Manchester’s main thoroughfare, above the mills and away from their noise and racket.

Straw also helped build Manchester’s dams and canals along the Merrimack River. He established the New Hampshire Fire Insurance Co. and the Unitarian Society. Straw’s leadership sent Amoskeag on a trajectory toward becoming the largest cotton textile manufacturer in the world.

The Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H.

Crediting Others

He was named agent of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Co. in 1851 at the age of 32. He won credit for the company’s enormous success. Straw generously credited others.

When the Civil War broke out, most of Manchester’s textile mills shut down because of the lack of cotton. Ezekiel Straw kept the Machine Shop running so at least some of the employees had money coming in. He replaced mechanics who went to war with older workers who wouldn’t be called up.

After the war he traveled to England and Scotland to figure out the machinery and methods to make gingham fabric, which Amoskeag introduced to the United States. Previously, Amoskeag made coarse cloth like denim and flannel, but Straw wanted to produce a more profitable textile. He was aided by expert Scottish dyer masters and weavers, who he brought to Manchester.

By the turn of the century, gingham was the Amoskeag’s biggest selling product, providing employment for thousands of people. The company had recruited weavers and dyers in Scotland with fliers bragging about the “Wonderful conditions at Amoskeag.” A drawing showed a man coming out of the millyard carrying a wallet full of money.

Straw would later say that bringing James Reid from Glasgow to oversee dye operations was the reason for Amoskeag’s success in producing gingham.

Gov. Ezekiel Straw

Ezekiel Straw would run for state representative as a Republican in 1859 and then go on to become a two-term governor of New Hampshire. He was considered a first citizen of Manchester and even left his mark on the Seacoast. In 1872, he built the first summer house on an outcropping of land north of Rye Beach known as Lock Point, according to Cow Hampshire. Straw held a “Great Clambake” in honor of his sister-in-law in September 1871, and it was called ‘Straw’s Point’ forever afterward.

Employees liked to tell stories about Ezekiel Straw, and this one was a favorite: During the 1860 presidential campaign, Straw gave Abraham Lincoln a tour of an Amoskeag mill.

He then introduced the candidate to the workers. One of the mill workers hesitated to shake his hand, saying it was dirty from his work. “Young man,” said Lincoln, ““the “the hand of honest toil is never too grimy for Abe Lincoln to grasp.”

This story last updated in 2021.

Images: Gingham By Kent Wang – Flickr: Kent Wang pocket square, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7312843.

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