Tag:

Easthampton

Six Sears Houses

In the early part of the 20^th century, you could buy Sears houses for the price of a good pair of shoes today.

Times certainly changed. In 2005, a high-end Sears home sold for $900,000.

Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold about 100,000 kit houses from catalogs between 1908 and 1942. They were shipped by rail, with pre-cut lumber stamped for assembly. The company promised a man of average abilities that he could finish the house within 90 days — if he followed the 75-page instruction book.

Sears Houses

Sears got into the business of catalog homes because its building products division was losing money. Frank W. Kushel, who managed the company’s china department, was given the task of turning around building products. He suggested the company sell entire houses in 22 styles and ship them from the factory.

Sears copied the popular housing styles of the day, which included colonial revival features taken from historic New England homes. There’s even one model called The Puritan.

Sears marketed the houses as ‘machine made’ with already cut lumber. “No waste, no mistakes, no big labor bills,” read the catalog copy.

The kits came with nails, shingles, shellac, windows, doors, trim hardware, paint and downspouts. They did not include cement, bricks or plaster. Materials for indoor plumbing, electricity and central heating had to be bought separately.

By 1920, Sears was shipping an average of 125 houses a month. Nine years later, Sears sent 250 houses each month from just one of its four plants. The company boasted it was the world’s largest home builder.

Sears also financed home purchases, and half its homes were tied up in mortgage loans by the time of the Great Depression. The company lost $11 million on defaulted mortgages in 1934, and by 1940 it was out of the house business.

Hamden, Conn.

The C225

Realtors say a Sears house can sell for more because of the enduring quality of the materials and construction.

Sears homes were built throughout Connecticut. In Hartford alone there are dozens, but they are also in Putnam, Hamden, Canton, Shelton, Bethel, Plainville and Torrington.

The 1916 Sears catalog featured testimonials from two men who bought Sears houses in Connecticut.

D.G. Arnold wrote he was ‘well pleased’ with his home, Modern Home No. 119, in Putnam, Conn.

“All the rough lumber, doors, windows, clapboards, flooring, moldings and stairs, in fact everything required to finish a first class house, came from Sears, Roebuck and Co. at a savings of about $500, as compared with local prices,” he wrote. “My builder says he never used better finish and he has had fifty years’ experience.”

L.S. Chapman from Shelton wrote to say he saved several hundred dollars and found the materials better than expected. “Our house, No. C225, is beautiful.

The cottage at Lockwood Farm in Hamden is a Sears house. So are the Cello House, the Viola House and the Second Fiddle House at the Music Mountain in Falls Village, Canaan.

Sears didn’t make all pre-cut houses. There were actually six large companies that made kit houses, but none had the marketing clout of Sears and its famous catalog. Another company, Aladdin, sold enough homes to the Bristol Brass. Co. in 1916 to fill four blocks near the factory in Bristol, Conn.

Bucksport, Maine

The entrance to the Sears Belfast was modeled on the doorway of the Perkins House in Castine, Maine.

Identifying Sears houses has become a cottage industry for fanatics who produce books, blogs, documentaries and even bus tours by the Smithsonian Associates.

Sears enthusiasts argue whether Bucksport, Maine, has a neighborhood full of identical Sears houses – Belfasts, to be precise. Writer Scott Sowers says yes. Rose Thornton, who has made a career of identifying Sears houses, says no.

“The Sears Belfast and the Bucksport Houses are wildly different from one another,” wrote Thornton after examining a photo of a Bucksport house.

(Tangentially, the front doorway of the real Belfast was modeled on the doorway of the historic Perkins House, built in 1769 in Castine, Maine.)

People authenticate Sears houses by comparing them to the models in the Sears archives. That’s usually not enough, since houses are often altered over the years. They must also look for stamped lumber in the basement or attic, shipping labels on moldings or the characteristic ‘SR’ stamped on bathroom fixtures. (For other clues, click here.)

We did track down a Sears house on Lindsay Road in York, Maine.

A Sears house in York, Maine

Longmeadow, Mass.

A Sears Verona, catalog illustration

Sears houses arrived in two railroad box cars in a variety of styles and prices. At the high end was the Magnolia, a four-bedroom, high-ceilinged colonial modeled after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, Mass. It sold for $5,972. (See featured image.)

At the low end was the Natoma, a three-room house that sold for $191. It had no bathroom, but you could buy the outhouse separately.

The Natoma

The Verona was another ‘high-class home,’ according to the catalog, ‘of the Dutch type of colonial architecture.’ An authenticated Sears Verona has been identified at 115 Belleclaire Ave., in Longmeadow, Mass.

A house on Medway St. in Norfolk, Mass., is in contention for being a Sears house. Authentic Sears houses were also assembled in Newton, Easthampton, Boston, Woburn, Springfield, Wrentham, Cohasset and Pittsfield.

Claremont, N.H.

The Castleton, catalog illustration

Two small New England companies also sold kit houses.

The Thayer Portable House Co. operated in Keene, N.H., from about 1920 to 1940. It had grown from the Springfield Portable House Co. in Massachusetts. There was also the Robinson’s-Money-Saving-Mill-Made Cut-to-Fit Houses of Providence, R.I.

Still, Sears was king in New England, shipping homes from its factory in Philadelphia.

Two Sears houses have been identified on Mulberry Street in Claremont, N.H. One was a Castleton; the other, a Lorain. (Click here to read more about these houses.)

The Castleton was promoted as ‘dignified and substantial,’ ‘a well-designed house that will make a pleasant home.’ The Lorain was marketed as a charming six-room colonial with dark shutters, snowy walls and window boxes. You can watch a documentary about restoring a Lorain here.

Middletown, R.I.

The Parkside, an economical Sears house

The Parkside was a cute, economical four-room house sold from 1934 to 1940. There’s an authenticated Parkside at 43 Beacon St. in Middletown, R.I. The current owner did considerable research into the house’s history and put up a website about it. (Check it out here.)

In 1938, the Middletown Parkside sold for $1,372. In 2006, it sold for $222,000. Bob Wolfenden, a military veteran, built the house in 1940 and lived in it for the rest of his life. He was a professional carpenter who became superintendent of the Newport, R.I., Water Department. He and his wife Mildred had no children.

John Little bought the house and enlarged it after his friend Bob died. The Parkside then changed hands several times, became a rental and went into foreclosure. It needed repair by the time the current owner bought it in 2006. You can see pictures of the house over the years here.

Burlington, Vt.

An Alhambra, from the catalog

Burlington, Vt., has so many catalog houses there’s a field guide to them called A Guide to the Catalog Houses of Burlington, Vermont.

Burlington was an ideal market for kits of Sears houses as well as for those of its competitors, Aladdin and Gordon Van Tine. The city’s population grew by 10 percent every decade while growing richer. The expansion of the streetcar network opened up cheap empty land. Burlington could also be reached by two major railroads, making it easy to ship kit houses.

Kit houses cluster in Burlington’s South End, the Five Sisters neighborhood, south of the University of Vermont campus, the New North End and Lakeview Terrace. Of the 30 kit houses identified in the Burlington field guide, 14 came from Sears.

A cluster of Sears houses in Burlington shows the range of styles: A four-square Fullerton and a Westly bungalow were identified on N. Prospect Street. Also:

- A Dutch colonial Lucerne on Catherine Street,
- A colonial revival bungalow called a Crescent on St. Paul Street
- A Spanish Colonial Alhambra on South Winooski Avenue
- A Tudor Revival Barrington at Marian Street.

Images: Perkins House By S437885 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35346344; Sears Catalog House, by InAweofGod’s Creation, Creative Commons license. This story about Sears houses was updated in 2022.

12 comments 4.2k views

A Fulfilling Story: New England Pie History

In the annals of pie history, New England holds a special place.

Pumpkin pies and Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Mr. Timothy Levy Crouch, a Rogerine Quaker living in Ledyard, Connecticut. Photo by Jack Delano, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

A moment in pie history: Pumpkin pies and Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Mr. Timothy Levy Crouch, a Rogerine Quaker living in Ledyard, Connecticut. Photo by Jack Delano, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Pumpkin pie might not have happened without New England, where rhubarb pie is revered in the springtime. In New England’s Little Canadas, Franco-Americans celebrate the Christmas holidays with spiced meat pies called tourtiere. Vermonters favor maple pie, and Boston is the birthplace of the Boston Cream Pie — which really isn’t a pie, but then again neither is Maine’s official state treat, the Whoopie Pie.

The late Robert Cox, head of Special Collections at UMass-Amherst, delved into New England’s pie history in his book, New England Pie: History Under a Crust.

The New England Historical Society interviewed Cox in 2015 about his book on pie history. He has also written about New England chowder and cranberry culture.

Why Pie History?

Cox told us he explores food history because it is one of the most enduring cultural traits. Food preferences will linger for three or four generations as a central part of family ritual and family life.

“It can be more revealing about our attitudes, our hopes and fears, than anything we ever write,” Cox said.

As a historian, Cox said he hesitates to claim New Englanders eat more pie than people in other regions of the United States. But pie culture is definitely deeper in certain parts of the country, he said, and, ‘pie is quite deep here.’

New England’s pie culture does differ from the rest of the United States because it has more of a balance between the savory – the chicken, the turkey or the clam pie – and the sweet – the apple, the pumpkin, the squash, the blueberry or the cream pies.

Cox found it hard to pin down regional pie-eating differences within New England. An apple pie on Cape Cod isn’t that different from an apple pie elsewhere, with the exception of Central Massachusetts. There, Cox said, apple pie is more likely to have raisins in it, something he considers an abomination. And Northern New Englanders are more apt to eat apple pie with cheese.

There are some ethnic variations – Franco-Americans have their tourtiere, Italian-Americans have their ricotta pie and Portuguese-Americans have their custard tarts. Clam pie is stronger on Cape Cod than elsewhere.

In his quest to record pie history, Cox only found maple pie in Vermont.

French Pie History

A tourtiere ready for the oven

French meat pies are special, a celebratory food eaten in the shortest days of winter, Cox said. Cooks make them to show how much they care about their family and to show off cooking skills.

Cox’s home town of Easthampton, Mass., has a strong Franco-American presence. There, stores sell French meat pies, traditionally made with ground meat, potato and spices like cloves and allspice.

In New England Pie: History Under a Crust, Cox recounted how he ate a French meat pie with his in-laws – and learned it was made with Bell’s Seasoning. The cook had gotten away from her mother’s recipe. Her daughters didn’t like cloves and allspice, so she substituted the Bell’s. She was mortally embarrassed when Cox found out. But he was okay with it.

“Bell’s is kind of traditional,” he said. “Taking what’s available and meeting the needs of your family is traditional.”

Rhubarb Pie History

Rhubarb

People know about rhubarb pie in other parts of the country, but New Englanders eat more of it then they do anywhere else.

Rhubarb originally had a medicinal use as a purgative and laxative. Not until the American Revolution ended was it used in pies. Then in the early 19^th century an unnamed genius renamed it ‘pie-plant,’ and rhubarb took off.

Cox was convinced New Englanders love rhubarb because it’s the first fresh produce in the market – a bright presence of the New England spring.

“For two or three months, you would have had older fruits and vegetables and preserves,” he said. “Since the 1790s, it’s really been a New England pie.”

Revolutionary Roots of the Boston Cream Pie

Boston Cream Pie

A French chef brought to the Parker House in 1855 invented the Boston Cream Pie. The hotel owner wanted his hotel to be the finest in the country, and needed a good restaurant to earn that reputation. The chef came up with a signature treat, a cake with cream in the middle and a ganache top with chocolate – the distinctive Boston Cream Pie that became a regional favorite.

“It’s very close to pies that weren’t pies floating around New England at the time,” said Cox. People called those false pies Washington Pies, light cakes with a cream or fruit filling. Lafayette Pies resembled the Washington Pies.

“There was an immense nostalgia for the simplicity of that generation,” Cox said. “Naming a dessert after Washington and Lafayette was a way of commemorating the independence and history of the country.”

The Parker House presented the Boston Cream Pie as a high-class, high-status dessert that echoed the Washington and Lafayette pies.

In a note of historical irony, Vietnam’s own revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, worked in the Parker House bakery and probably made Boston Cream Pie. Another revolutionary, Malcolm X, worked as a waiter in the Parker House and probably served Boston Cream Pie.

This story about New England pie history was updated in 2023.

3 comments 1.8k views

Teddy Roosevelt Humiliates Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss lived much of his life in California and New York, but never really left Springfield, Mass., where he was born on March 2, 1904.

The timeless children’s books of Theodor Seuss Geisel originated from his boyhood in the western Massachusetts city. Themes and images from his 46 imaginative children’s books can be traced to Springfield: Mulberry Street, the McElligot family, his father’s Rube Goldberg inventions, the haunted house next door, colorful Victorian homes, the wild animals in the Springfield Zoo he could hear at night. In How the Grinch Stole Christmas , the town of Whoville is based on Easthampton, Mass., just north of Springfield, and the Grinch’s mountain is based on Mount Tom nearby.

Something happened to him in Springfield, too, that would remain with him for the rest of his life.

Geisel’s family belonged to Springfield’s prosperous German community in Springfield, which became the object of suspicion when World War I broke out. German frankfurters became hot dogs and sauerkraut became liberty cabbage.

Boy Scouts

Dr. Seuss hated making public appearances.

Young Ted Geisel belonged to Boy Scout Troop 13, which undertook a war bond drive. He walked from house to house selling war bonds. His grandfather, a well-to-do brewer, bought $1,000 worth of bonds from his grandson. That made Ted one of the top-selling Scouts in Springfield.

Ted and nine other Scouts were to receive an award from former President Theodore Roosevelt in May 1918. They lined up on the state of Springfield’s Municipal Auditorium awaiting their award. Ted was last.

Roosevelt handed each boy an award – and then he got to Ted. Someone had made a mistake and given the former president only nine awards. It was an embarrassing situation, and Roosevelt made it worse. “What’s this boy doing here?” he said loudly. Ted, mortified, was hustled off the stage.

From then on, fear of appearing before an audience became a phobia with Ted Geisel. His biographer Thomas Fensch suggests he moved to a lonely mountaintop in La Jolla, Calif., to avoid crowds and the possibility of a neighbor asking “What’s he doing here?”

(One also wonders if the incident didn’t inspire his comment, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”)

Dr. Seuss Grows Up

Dr. Seuss would succeed as a commercial illustrator and as a children’s book author. In 1954, Life magazine published a study on childhood illiteracy, concluding that children weren’t learning to read because their books were so boring. A publisher at Houghton Mifflin compiled a list of 348 words it was important for children to recognize. He cut it down to 250 and challenged Geisel to write a book using just those words – a book children couldn’t put down. Dr. Seuss rose to the challenge and wrote The Cat in the Hat. It is still, of course, in print.

Dr. Seuss died on Sept. 24, 1991. His birthday has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day.

With thanks to The Man Who Was Dr. Seuss: The Life and Work of Theodor Geisel by Thomas Fensch. Dr. Seuss cartoon by By Greg Williams – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2265954. This story was updated in 2023. Springfield Public School By Leepaxton at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16996541.

30 comments 5.5k views

How the Grinch Became a Star of Stage and Screen

When the much-loved television special How the Grinch Stole Christmas first aired on Dec. 18, 1966, optimists thought it might run for 10 years. More than half a century later, television networks still broadcast the Grinch during the holiday season. And in 2018 a second feature-length film was released nationally.

47 years ago today, How the Grinch Stole Christmas first aired on television.

In 1966, How the Grinch Stole Christmas first aired on television.

The show developed with difficulty and at great expense. It was conceived in 1966, when animator Chuck Jones of Bugs Bunny fame called up his old Army buddy Theodor Geisel – aka Dr. Seuss.

Jones suggested they adapt one of his books for TV. Geisel said no. Geisel’s wife Helen urged him to at least listen to Jones, so Geisel invited him to come to his house in La Jolla, Calif.

By the end of the visit Geisel gave in. They would work together on How the Grinch Stole Christmas, published in 1957 as a book and in an issue of Redbook magazine.

Dr. Seuss

Geisel grew up in Springfield, Mass., the son of well-to-do German parents. Born in 1904, he experienced anti-German prejudice during World War I. Though he had moved to New York City at 23, he never really left Springfield.

Dr. Seuss’s art originated from his boyhood in the western Massachusetts city. In Grinch, for example, the town of Whoville looks like Easthampton, Mass., just north of Springfield, and the Grinch’s mountain resembles Mount Tom nearby.

No one thought How the Grinch Stole Christmas would become one of the most successful Christmas shows in history. MGM had lukewarm interest in producing it and had a hard time finding sponsors. After 20 rejections, the Foundation for Commercial Banks finally agreed to do it.

The next challenge: Fill a half-hour show with a narrative that took 12 minutes to read as a book. Geisel had to add dialogue and songs to lengthen situations and enhance characters. He added a comical scene where the Grinch climbs up the mountain to Whoville to stretch out the plot.

The Grinch

Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) works on the Grinch for TV

Jones and Geisel fought throughout the arduous creative process. Jones, for example, wanted the Grinch to have green eyes, Geisel wanted them to be pink. But Jones prevailed.

Jones also wanted to make the Grinch seem even meaner than he was in the book. He decided to lengthen and deepen his frown.

Boris Karloff, an inspired choice for the voice of the Grinch, went a long way toward making the Grinch nasty. Geisel especially liked the song: ‘You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch’ and the lyrics, “You’re cuddly as a cactus, you’re as charming as an eel.”

Jones used the full animation technique, which meant 25,000 drawings rather than the 2,000 more typical of the era. Two-hundred-fifty backgrounds were used. The musical numbers were produced by a 34-piece orchestra and a 12-voice chorus. Variety reported it may have been the most expensive show ever made for television.

Obvious

When he first wrote The Grinch Who Stole Christmas in 1957, Geisel found it easy to name his character. “I just drew him and looked at him, and it was obvious to me who he was,” Geisel later said.

But he had a hard time coming up with the right ending for the book. He faced the same problem nine years later for the television show. Finally he wrote the Whoville song, which ends: “Christmas day will always be Just so long as we have we.”

For millions of viewers, he struck the perfect note.

You can get a Dr. Seuss fix in Springfield at the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden. Or you can watch two movie versions, The Grinch (2000) and Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch (2018).

* * *

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

With thanks to Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel – A Biography, by Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan. This story was updated in 2022.

19 comments 1.4k views

Girl Power: The 1933 New Haven Garment Workers Strike

In 1933, a poor Italian-American teenager led the dramatic New Haven garment workers strike that lifted thousands of women into the middle class.

Jennie Aiello wasn’t the only leader of the New Haven garment workers strike of 1933. But she was certainly a key to its success.

On a cold day in April, Jennie slid down the clothing chute from the second-floor cutting room of the huge Lesnow Brothers shirt factory to rally the stitchers on the first floor to strike.

The month-long Lesnow Brothers strike that followed climaxed a series of successful job actions during 1933.

The wave of strikes resulted from cooperation between two labor unions, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. From 1933 on, the unions’ two New Haven locals were central to their members’ political and social lives until the garment industry’s demise in the early 1990s.

New Haven

New Haven by 1933 had a long and storied labor history. In 1884, women shoemakers struck the L. Candee Rubber Boot Company. In 1886, strikes engulfed the city at 29 businesses. That year, The New York Times reported, “This town has picked up the reputation lately of having more strikes than an (sic) other city of its size in the country.”

New York City was the center of the garment industry, but in the 1920s so-called “runaways” moved to Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania so they could pay workers less. New Haven attracted clothing manufacturers because of its cheap factory space. The city also had a large pool of poor African Americans and Polish and Italian immigrants. Employers could get away with paying low wages because hardware and weapons makers had floundered after World War I.

The Great Depression

By 1933, workers grew increasingly desperate as the Depression sent mainstay employers reeling. Sargent Brothers Manufacturing laid off workers and L. Candee Rubber Co. went under. In 1931, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company went into receivership.

Jennie Aiello’s family suffered through the hard times. Her parents had emigrated from Italy and periodically relied on relief to support their seven sons and seven daughters. Jennie’s older brothers got work through the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the garment factories.

Jennie and her six sisters quit school at 13 or 14 to work in the Wooster Square shirt shops. Only the youngest sibling, Nick, would graduate from high school.

Thousands of men and women then worked in New Haven’s needle trades centered on Wooster Square. During the early years of the Depression, New Haven led the state in the number of work certificates issued to young women, 20 percent of whom were under the age of 16.

new-haven-garment-workers-wooster-square

Welcome to New Haven’s Little Italy, Wooster Square

Sweat Shop

Jennie Aiello and her sister Lucy went to work for Lesnow Brothers, the largest garment employer in Connecticut. The company employed 550 mostly very young women in the heart of New Haven’s garment district.

It was a sweat shop: dangerous, unsanitary, unventilated and unheated.

Wages were low and hours were long. Spreaders in the cutting rooms, where Jennie worked, earned $4.50 for a 54-hour week ($80.63 in today’s equivalent). Cuff turners earned $4 for a 60-hour week (today’s equivalent of $71.68). The work was seasonal and employees had to take long layoffs.

One worker remembered Harry Lesnow as “cruel, very ugly.” He’d come around the shop floor and yell “Get the hell!” if a worker went to get a drink of water.

Jennie was one of the eight or 10 girls at Lesnow Brothers who led the drive to form a union. They would quietly ask workers to join them outside the building to talk. They met secretly in Waterside Park on Saturdays.

Before the Strike

A great deal of preparation preceded the New Haven garment workers strike.

Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), had begun a campaign in 1932 to organize the runaway clothing manufacturers in neighboring states. He sent his wife Bessie to help organize New Haven, where she had family ties. Young Italian women came from nearby cities to help organize.

By 1933, the ACWA and the ILGWU had already organized four small contract shirtmakers in New Haven.

But the Lesnow workers faced daunting obstacles in their union drive. Even talking about a union cost workers their jobs. Parents feared letting their daughters strike because they so desperately needed their meager income.

Italian-speaking union officials went to the parents’ homes to persuade them to support the action.

Lena Riccio was a 15-year-old who earned a few dollars a week at Lesnow Brothers and handed over her entire pay envelope to the family.

“We were afraid,” she said. “You didn’t know who to listen to.”

The male organizers’ high pressure tactics frightened her, while the boss threatened to fire them. Some of the girls pretended to go to meetings to talk about the union, but instead hid out in a candy store, she said.

One organizer, Jennie Formichelli from Bridgeport, talked nicely to the girls. After weeks of indecision, Lena finally decided to join the union effort.

Sidney Hillman planned the New Haven garment workers strike.

New Haven Garment Workers Strike

The Lesnow Brothers provoked the New Haven garment workers strike at the beginning of April. The company demanded additional piecework from the workers without paying them more.

Jennie Aiello was working on the second floor as a cutter when she decided to walk off the job. Workers who sided with the company tried to block her. She dodged them, sliding down the chute with bales of unfinished shirts. She then rallied her friends on the first-floor stitchery to join her.

That began a month of police intimidation while picketing in the cold. If any strikers marched out of the line, the police hit them with billy clubs. They targeted the male leaders, but didn’t spare the women.

The anti-union New Haven Register barely covered the New Haven garment workers’ strike. The school district wouldn’t allow strikers to meet in the school auditoriums. They couldn’t get permits to assemble in a park for a rally. Male workers and some of the women stayed on the job.

Jennie Aiello walked the line along with the union organizers and other workers during that cold spring. The Saint Trofemina and Saint Andrew social clubs let them come in and get warm, drink coffee and eat a sandwich before going back out on the line.

Momentum

The strikers held together, and momentum began to turn in their favor. On April 18, the ACWA called for a nationwide strike of unorganized shirtmakers. By Monday, April 24, striking workers closed nearly all of the New Haven shirt companies.

The Connecticut State Board of Education sided with the strikers, notifying the labor commissioner that school-age children were working in factories. A letter from the school board described a “little girl” working for the LeRoy Shirt Company who earned 37 cents for working 24 hours.

The most dramatic confrontation of the strike probably happened on May 1, when Yale Divinity students joined the striking Lesnow workers on the picket line. Strikers from other shirt companies swelled their ranks.

That day, the height of the New Haven garment workers strike, Lesnow’s male employees decided to join the revolt and walked off the floor. Lesnow Brothers then had to shut its doors.

By May 3, Lesnow’s signed a contract with Sidney Hillman and Jacob Potofsky, another ACWA official. The workers got a 10 percent wage increase, health insurance and a pension. A year later, a new garment industry code shortened their days to 35 hours a week in the dress industry and 40 hours in the shirtmaking business.

Within six weeks of the Lesnow strike, virtually all of New Haven’s shirt companies were union.

Later that year, the ILGWU called for a general strike. According to the Greater New Haven Labor History Archives, there were strikes in all of the city’s dress shops. After two weeks of rallies, pickets and a shutdown of the industry in New Haven, the ILGWU represented all the dressmaking workers in the city.

What Happened Next

Jennie Aiello got married. Her younger brother Nick became the business agent for ACWA Local 151, a pillar of the Connecticut labor movement. He spearheaded the Greater New Haven Labor History Project, which included the story of the New Haven garment workers strike.

In 1939, Lesnow’s moved to Easthampton, Mass.

During the 1970s and ’80s, garment makers ran away to the South. Later, they moved to the Pacific Rim and South Asia for extremely low wages and dangerous working conditions. In 2013, more than 1,000 factory workers were killed in Bangladesh when their building collapsed.

The ACWA merged with the Textile Workers Union of America, which then merged to form UNITE, which since merged with the hotel workers’ union to become UNITE HERE.

With thanks to “Learning To Forget Schooling and Life in New Haven’s Working Class,” by Stephen Lassonde, Karen Pastorello in The Power Among Them and Anthony Riccio’s The Italian American Experience in New Haven.. This story about the New Haven garment workers strike was updated in 2022. Image of ILGWU label By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41361646.

6 comments 632 views