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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 2021.

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Maine Peonage Law Sent Men to Jail for Quitting Their Jobs

In 1907, lumber barons persuaded politicians to pass the Maine peonage law to keep lumberjacks on the job. If they quit work, they went to jail.

Maine lawmakers copied from an Alabama law designed to tie workers to their employers . They employers put them into debt and the government put them in jail if they didn’t work it off.

In Maine, the lumbermen needed tens of thousands of men to work in their logging camps, sawmills and paper mills. They needed them to build mills and camps and to drive the logs down Maine’s rivers.

The work was hard and dangerous, even deadly. It required men to spend the long winter in the northern Maine woods.

Winter in a logging camp, 1895

Historian Charles Scontras concluded 342 men went to jail after employers tricked them into accepting lumber work they couldn’t do. Or employment brokers loaned train fare and dumped miles from the camps. Or the company store gave them credit to buy overpriced boots and clothes and other necessities.

“Hundreds of men have been thrown into jail because of this cruel and much abused law,” reported Maine Labor Commissioner Roscoe Eddy.

Maine Peonage Law

One August day in Bangor, Maine, Peter Poulskaw and Nicholas Eilandy took jobs at a logging camp. They had arrived from Poland, had no money and didn’t speak English.

They were among the tens of thousands of men, many immigrants, who came each year to Bangor and Lewiston, Maine. They’d spend a few days in cheap boardinghouses before shipping off to the north woods.

A Bangor employment agent told Poulskaw and Eilandy the logging camp was 3-1/2 miles from Kingman in northern Maine. He gave them cash for train fare to Kingman. When they reached the town, they found out the camp was really 35 miles away.

Maine lumber camp

The Bangor Daily News reported they ‘expected to walk the distance and not relishing the idea had vamoosed.’ Poulskaw and Eilandy were caught, arrested and sentenced to 15 days in jail.

The Maine peonage law stayed on the books for seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Alabama law as unconstitutional. Then in late 1916, the Maine labor commissioner’s report appeared in the Bangor Daily News, calling the law ‘obnoxious.’

“Under its provisions hundreds of men have been convicted and forced to serve a sentence in jail for no offense other than being in debt,” the report said.

The labor commissioner also criticized judges who are ‘anxious to make the sentence satisfactory to the influential lumbermen operating in the vicinity.’

Lumbermen Howl

Maine lumber camp and sawmill

The lumbermen’s reaction to the labor commissioner’s report was swift, sure and anonymous.

The newspaper quoted them calling the report a ‘false alarm.’ The lumber barons claimed only a half dozen men had been prosecuted. They complained the crews were made up of ‘foreigners and the scum of Boston,’ most of whom were unfit for hard work. They complained the men were taken into the woods ‘at much expense and after working two or three weeks have left.’

But they did actually concede they’d tricked the workers into taking the jobs.

The Maine peonage law became the object of national criticism. Labor unions attacked it. The U.S. Immigration Commission called it ‘the most complete system of peonage in the entire country.’

Finally, in 1917, the Legislature repealed the law.

With thanks to Remembering Bangor: The Queen City Before the Great Fire by Wayne E. Reilly. This story updated in 2022.

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A 27-year-old Woman Died in a 1913 Ipswich Mill Strike; She Never Did Get Justice

On June 10, 1913 a long simmering Ipswich mill strike ground onward. For weeks, 700 mostly Greek workers at the Ipswich Hosiery Mill picketed outside the mill while 200 replacement scabs kept the machinery turning inside.

In a five-minute flashover, a violent riot erupted. When the bullets and bottles stopped flying, a 27-year-old woman, Nicholetta Paudelopoulou, lay dead. She would never receive justice.

Ipswich, Mass. was not a hotbed of radical labor protest, but a company town. Its selectmen, police and newspaper editor supported the mill owners in the dispute with labor. Many at the factory were paid by the piece. Salaries ranged from $2.50 a week to $6.50 a week.

When the International Workers of the World (IWW) demanded an increase in pay, the mill refused.

IWW Poster from Paterson, N.J.

The Ipswich Mill Strike

When the workers struck, the mill managers went to the docks in Boston to find replacements. Police later acknowledged that the IWW had instructed its pickets to keep their hands in their pockets as they marched at the factory gates. Yet the exiting workers got jostled and bumped as they left the plant that day.

To keep order, Ipswich’s 30-man police force was supplemented by the state police and other towns, including Swampscott and Haverhill. The plant also hired private security. As the crowds seemed to be growing during a June 10 demonstration march, Selectman Charles Hull stepped forward to read a “riot act” to the strikers, ordering them to disburse. As most of the workers spoke only Greek, Hull’s message was likely lost on them.

How the riot erupted shortly before 6 p.m. was hotly debated. Initially, the police said they were fired on from tenement houses near the factory. No evidence ever materialized that the strikers had any guns. Selectman Hull would later estimate that perhaps six shots were fired at police.

Estimates of how many bullets police fired vary from 50 to 100. Police would later testify about two millworkers shot in the melee. George Kalvas was shot in the leg because he was holding a brick. Panagiova Paganus was shot through the cheek because she brandished a club. Archas Parskavas was shot above the knee, but no one knew why.

Ipswich riverfront, 1906

Casualties

In addition to the three workers, three bystanders were also shot. Flora Cornelius, described as a 36-year-old housewife, was shot above the knee. She was not involved in the strike.

Satffis Jorokopoulos, an 18-year-old fruit vendor, got a bullet in the ankle. When the violence broke out, he had been manning his stand.

Most seriously, Nicholetta Paudelopoulou was shot in the head and died nearly instantaneously. She was also not a striker. The young woman worked at the nearby Brown’s Essex Mill. She had left work and went to watch the crowds and commotion at the riot scene.

Initially police circulated a story that the young woman was shot from the second floor of a tenement. The angle of the bullet, which entered the front of her head, suggested otherwise.

The Case of the Ipswich Mill Strike

Judge Charles Sayward handled the court case against the strikers. Nineteen were charged, in all, with disturbing the peace. Sayward tried to build a murder case against three people: Mr. and Mrs. Carroll L. Pingree of Lowell and Nathan Hermann of Boston.

Carroll Pingree, an IWW member who had run for office as a Socialist and Hermann was an IWW strike coordinator. They were “outside agitators” that the local newspapers blamed for the strikes.

Judge Sayward’s son, Harry Sayward, represented the defendants.

John Baker of Rochester, N.H., had come to Massachusetts looking for work. He had witnessed what happened, and came forward to describe to the court what he had seen.

Baker saw two women arguing with a police officer. “The tall woman had a brick in her hand. I do not know whether she was going to throw it or not. While they were battling, another woman rushed over. The officer saw her, aimed at her, fired, and the woman fell.”

Sayward asked, “Have you seen the officer since?”

Baker replied. “Yes, I saw him on the street today.”

No Justice, No Peace

The officer was not in the courtroom, however. A lawyer for the town asked Judge Sayward to hold Baker on bail so he could testify further, as Baker had already said he planned to leave town in search of work in Lowell. The judge declined, and that was the last anyone heard from John Baker.

In the course of court hearings, the picture grew clearer. Police had fired on the rioters. They had been joined by plant managers who carried special police badges and guns. Yet no one could find any striker who had any weapon.

The murder charges that Judge Sayward had wanted to bring against Hermann and the Pingrees disappeared, though he declared them “morally responsible” for the death of Nicholetta Paudelopoulou.

Carroll Pingree eventually received a sentence of three months in jail. Nathan Hermann got a sentence of six months for disturbing the peace.

The town of Ipswich was mindful of the Bread and Roses Strike that had taken place in Lawrence just 18 months earlier. It had lasted for months and resulted in three deaths when militia arrived to suppress the strikers.

The company evicted workers from their homes, and the strike collapsed. The striking workers got no raise and returned to work later in the year.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Places Connected to Illicit Love Affairs

Illicit love affairs are as much a part of history as are war and elections, and the New England Historical Society doesn’t hesitate to publish stories about them. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we bring you six places connected to illicit love affairs. They include a movie star’s home, a racy monument, several historic houses and a watch tower. There is one for each New England state.

Hepburn House

Katharine Hepburn’s house

Katharine Hepburn had a 25-year love affair with her married co-star Spencer Tracy. It only ended with his death.

At their introduction on the set of Woman of the Year, Katharine famously said, “I fear I may be too tall for you, Mr. Tracy.” Film director George Stevens retorted, “Don’t worry, he’ll soon cut you down to size.”

Instead, he fell in love with her and she with him. “I loved Spencer Tracy. I would have done anything for him,” she said.

They starred in nine movies together, but lived apart and kept their affair private. Tracy and his wife were estranged, but neither sought a divorce.

Tracy and Hepburn did stay together at Hepburn’s summer home in the Fenwick beach colony in Old Saybrook, Conn. Her caddy remembers them having breakfast together.

When Tracy died in 1967, Hepburn didn’t attend his funeral service out of respect for his two children. She did follow his hearse on the six-mile trip through Los Angeles and, when it reached the church, whispered, “Goodbye, friend – this is where I leave you.”

The house, on Mohegan Ave., is privately owned, but you can visit the Katharine Hepburn Museum in Old Saybrook. It’s at 300 Main St. Click here for more information.

Cliff Walk Path and Many (Supposed) Illicit Love Affairs

Cliff Walk Path, York Harbor, Maine

What’s worse than not getting any Valentine’s Day cards or letters? How about getting a letter announcing that your wife has a heartthrob — just not you.

Allen Ryan received just such a jolt in 1922 about his wife Sarah and her “friend,” entertainment lawyer George Maxwell. Ryan, a one-time king of Wall Street, had so much money and clout he could move the stock market at will.

The shock of the poison pen letter received by Allen Ryan jolted society all the way from Philadelphia to Maine, where the Ryans summered at York Harbor. York Harbor in the Roaring 20s was a popular destination for wealthy summer travelers escaping the cities.

The ensuing scandal resulted in Maxwell being charged with sending the poison pen letter himself, along with letters to husbands of 40 other society women with whom he was supposedly having illicit love affairs. George proclaimed his innocence and blamed his enemies. Predictably, the affair ended in the Ryans’ divorce.

York Harbor has changed a lot since the Ryan-Maxwell scandal of the 1920s, but you can still get a flavor of the old days on the Cliff Path along York Harbor, where gracious cottages of long-ago York remain perched on the edge of the sea.

Emily Dickinson Museum

Emily Dickinson’s married brother Austin carried on an illicit love affair for 13 years with Mabel Loomis Todd, also married. The whole town of Amherst, Mass., including Todd’s husband, knew about the affair. He was okay with it. Austin’s wife was not.

On Sept. 10, 1882, Austin took Mabel to sing and play the piano for his two reclusive sisters and mother, who lived next door to him. Emily listened to her from the shadows of the hall, but never appeared. Only Emily’s sister Lavinia ,,met Mabel face-to-face.

The next night, Austin and Mabel paused on their way to a whist party and confessed their love for each other. “Rubicon,” Austin wrote in his diary afterward.

Their liaison was one of the better-chronicled of the illicit love affairs. Austin and Mabel kept diaries, in which they called their love ‘overwhelming,’ ‘God-inspired,’ ‘beyond any love that ever was.’

Mabel described their sex life in her diary: “Sweet communions. Oh joy! Oh! Bliss unutterable” and “A little Heaven just after dinner.”

Emily Dickinson died in 1886, and Lavinia asked Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson to publish her poems. They did, and Mabel embarked on a lecture tour that made famous the reclusive Emily.

Mabel’s affair with Austin ended with his death in 1895.

The Emily Dickinson Museum includes both Emily’s and Austin’s house at 280 Main St. in Amherst, Mass. Click here for more information.

John Parker Hale House Museum

The Woodman Institute Museum, Dover, N.H. , which includes the Hale House

In the 1860s, Valentine’s Day was the perfect opportunity for a young man to flirt with a girl from a different class. People then viewed a Valentine’s note as an acceptable way to express their affection without fear of giving offense.

In 1862, one of the South’s most notorious villains took the opportunity to express his affection for one of New Hampshire’s leading ladies. To his surprise, perhaps, John Wilkes Booth captured the eye of Lucy Lambert Hale.

Hale charmed a great many men in both Washington and New England. John Hay, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Todd Lincoln were all said to have expressed some interest. Her father was John Parker Hale, a U.S. senator, abolitionist leader and Lincoln supporter. But an anonymous Valentine in 1862 from Booth caught Lucy Hale’s fancy, and soon the two got better acquainted.

Hale was mad enough that his daughter was involved with an actor. Imagine his shock when his daughter’s beau turned out to be an assassin.

When Booth was captured after killing President Lincoln, he had Lucy Hale’s picture in his pocket. Senator Hale spread word far and wide that Lucy was not engaged to the actor-turned-murderer. Father and daughter then departed for an extended visit to Europe.

One of Lucy Hale’s gifts to New Hampshire is the house where she grew up. The Woodman Museum at 182 Central Ave. in Dover, N.H., acquired the Hale house in 1915, and it’s open to visitors.

Hannah Robinson Tower

The view from the Hannah Robinson Tower

Hannah Robinson fell for a poor French dancing teacher and set off one of the greatest scandals of colonial America. Her love affair was less illicit than unapproved and tragic.

Born in 1746, she was the daughter of a wealthy Narragansett planter. The family lived in a large stone house in Newport near Narragansett Bay. During the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette and Comte de Rochambeau visited the Robinson house.

Hannah wanted for nothing, and one of her favorite pastimes was to sit on a large rock and look out at Narragansett Bay. She was sent to finishing school in Newport, where she fell in love with her French dancing teacher, Peter Simons. Peter returned Hannah’s feelings, but the lovers knew her father wouldn’t consent to a marriage. He believed Peter wanted Hannah’s money.

They eloped one night and set up house in Providence.

Unfortunately for Hannah Robinson, her father was right – and he cut her off financially.

Peter abandoned Hannah after he realized he wouldn’t get any of her money. When her father learned his daughter was poor, ill and suffering in Providence, he finally relented and went to fetch her.

On their slow journey home, she asked them to stop when they reached the large rock where she had watched the bay. Unfortunate Hannah Robinson died soon afterward at home on Oct. 30, 1773.

In 1938, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built a new watch tower at the site where Hannah Robinson watched the Bay. The Hannah Robinson Tower, is now owned by Preserve Rhode Island and managed by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.

You can find it at the interchange between U.S. Route 1 (Tower Hill Road) and Route 138 (Bridgetown Road) in South Kingstown, R.I.

An Illicit Love Affair Revealed in Hope Cemetery

Louis Brusa gravestone

Most of the people buried in Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vt., carved their own memorials and tombstones. Barre calls itself the granite capital of the world, and skilled stonecutters flocked to it from Europe, especially Italy, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The 65-acre cemetery attracts tourists with its beautifully carved and sometimes unusual granite memorials. They include images of a soldier smoking a cigarette, a race car, a bored angel, a soccer ball and an 18-wheel truck.

Louis Brusa was an Italian-born master stonecutter. He practiced his craft in Barre with the new compressed air tools, which made his work go faster but sent granite dust into his lungs.

Louis, born Luigi Giovanni in 1886, became a partner with the Brusa Brothers. He developed silicosis from the granite dust and died at the age of 51.

As he was dying, Brusa decided to warn others about the disease. He then commissioned Don Colletti to carve a memorial of a man dying in the arms of a woman. When the monument was placed over his grave, it caused a local scandal. The woman looked not like Brusa’s wife Mary, but just like his mistress.

This story about illicit love affairs was updated in 2022.

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Pasta la Vista – F.P. Ventrone Sparks the Providence Macaroni Riots

The summer of 1914 was a flashpoint for the Italian immigrant families in Providence, R.I. Squeezed on one side by an economic depression, they also began encountering unexpected increases in prices at the markets. Those two forces set the stage for the macaroni riots of 1914.

Pasta made from durum wheat

Providence’s steadily growing Italian population provided tremendous opportunities for merchants with ties to the immigrants’ mother country. English-speaking Irish immigrants had managed to insert themselves into the city’s Yankee-dominated political structure. But Italian and French-Canadian immigrants had less influence on the city’s institutions.

More than 54,000 Italian immigrants arrived in Providence between 1898 and 1932. And that meant a boon to the city’s Federal Hill merchants. The Italian-Americans distrusted American retailers. They did not understand Italian tastes – and many did not want to.

Delivering bread in Providence’s Italian district by Lewis Wicks Hine

Scandalous Pasta

Italian merchants, meanwhile, thrived on the loyal customers they found among their neighbors. Questions about pasta had already been roiling Federal Hill, however. In 1908, F.P. Ventrone had been accused of selling inferior American-made pasta labelled as Italian.

Macaroni Savoia Brand Gragano pasta was produced in Long Island, but labelled to look as if it came from Italy. It was not made with semolina from durum wheat, but dyed yellow to make it appear that it was. The scandal would then play out for years.

Then in 1914, the Italian community experienced a second shock to its kitchens. Pasta prices increased – a lot. The price of this dietary staple skyrocketed by as much as 60 percent. Stores blamed the problem on shortages and price increases caused by World War I in Europe.

The war was an ominous and frequent topic of conversation in the homes of Providence’s Italian families. Some suspected stores played on that fear to raise prices.

Logo of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies

Providence’s mayor commissioned a study that found no price gouging. The Labor Advocate newspaper – aligned with the Socialist Industrial Workers of the World labor movement – declared the study a “whitewash.” The newspaper then made a not-so-subtle threat. It predicted the establishment of Frank P. Ventrone would soon “come to an abrupt end so far as Federal Hill is concerned.”

On August 29, protesters began putting action to the words. Italian-Americans had been protesting in prior years over their treatment by the Providence establishment. Encouraged then by the IWW (which figured in the famous 1912 Bread and Roses Strike in Massachusetts), Italians had marched through the streets of Little Italy supporting labor politicians and Italian pride.

An IWW demonstration in New York City in 1914.

The Macaroni Riots

Skirmishes with police were not unheard of at these events, but they were minor compared to the macaroni riots of 1914. On August 29, a rally at the corner of Atwells and Dean Streets turned raucous. The crowd began marching down Atwells Street toward Frank Ventrone’s store.

Ventrone had come to America from Italy in the 1880s and had prospered as the Italian population of the city surged. Dubbed the “Macaroni King,” he imported pasta, produced it and wholesaled it to other groceries. He was the most obvious target for the mob.

La Pigna under the Atwells Avenue arch in Providence’s Little Italy

Rioters smashed Ventrone’s storefront windows. Looters stole pasta and scattered it in the street. As the macaroni riot grew, neighboring stores received similar damage, Pearlman’s Dry Goods, People’s Pharmacy and Cardegna’s barbershop all suffered broken windows.

Police skirmished with the rioters through the next day. Both sides dodged bottles, bricks and bullets.

Frank Ventrone had been vacationing at his summer home in Warwick when the violence broke out. Returning to the city, he tried to explain his side of the story. Retail sellers of pasta were raising prices dramatically, not his company, he said.

Ventrone then met with the leaders of the macaroni riots and agreed to lower his prices. He dropped the cost of a box of pasta to $1.40 from $1.60. And, he promised to make all his pasta available at wholesale prices to any customers who came to his store — not just retailers.

An Italian grocery store on Atwells Avenue today

More Macaroni Riots

The macaroni riots then bubbled over again on September 7. They responded to a Labor Day rally that decried low wages and general inflation. Police, though, had prepared and moved quickly to defuse it.

Fourteen civilians received injuries in the macaroni riots. Ten police officers and firefighters also got hurt. The riots also caused more than $20,000 in damage.

Eventually an economic recovery grew out of the need for American goods in war-torn Europe. Prosperity quelled labor disturbances in New England. And F.P. Ventrone prospered through 1951.

Thanks to: Every Shout a Cannonball, The I.W.W. and Urban Disorders in Providence, Joseph W. Sullivan. This story about the macaroni riots was updated in 2022.

Images: By I, Infrogmation, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2287338. Pasta made from durum wheat By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35498497.

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The Mad Hatters of Danbury, Conn.

The 19^th-century hat factories of Danbury, Conn., made physical wrecks of thousands of workers. They turned them into mad hatters with symptoms known as the Danbury shakes.

A Danbury hatter binding a hat.

Hat makers used mercuric nitrate to make hats. Many developed mercury poisoning, manifested as drooling, pathological shyness, irritability and tremor. Mercury poisoning looked a lot like drunkenness, a handy misconception for employers to exploit.

Hat History

Danbury’s hat-making history goes back to the late 18^th century. According to local legend, a man named Zadoc Benedict plugged a hole in his shoe with fur. He found sweat and friction turned it into felt.

Benedict began making felted fur hats on his bedpost and eventually opened a hat shop on Main Street. Others followed, setting up small hat shops in Danbury. By 1800, Danbury made more hats than any other U.S. city.

By the 1880s, industrialization and consumer demand fueled the growth of Danbury’s hat factories, which produced 5 million hats a year. People called Danbury ‘Hat City’ and formed baseball teams called the Danbury Hatters. A lighted sign proclaimed ‘Danbury Crowns Them All,’ and the city put a derby hat on its seal.

Danbury Mad Hatters

Working in the factories was awful. By the outbreak of the Civil War, doctors knew the symptoms of mercury poisoning. But no one did anything about it for almost a century.

To make hats, workers matted together rabbit or beaver skins and smoothed them with an orange solution containing mercuric nitrate. Hatters then shaped the resulting felt into large cones, shrank them in boiling water and then dried them.

mad hatters city seal

In 1851, the workers formed the hatter’s union. That year they reported on working conditions in an effort to improve them. One worker said:

So much steam, you didn’t only want to wear a rubber apron in front of you, but also over your head; there wasn’t any ceiling; the steam rising to the rafters, condensed and came down like rain.

According to the report, “Unknown to the workers it was a rain of death from the fumes of nitrate of mercury.”

Another worker said hatters hid the Danbury shakes:

I suspect I had it too, but I wouldn’t go to the doctor. If a worker claimed compensation, he got on the blacklist of the manufacturers — he couldn’t get another job unless he’d sign a waiver against future claims.

Danbury hatters sizing a hat

Diagnosis

The first clinical description of the problem was published in 1860. However, the U.S. Public Health Service didn’t study it until 1937 after prodding by the hatters’ union.

A British Journal of Industrial Medicine article described the mad hatters’ symptoms in 1946:

The man affected is easily upset and embarrassed, loses all joy in life and lives in constant fear of being dismissed from his job. He has a sense of timidity and may lose self control before visitors. Thus, if one stops to watch such a man in a factory, he will sometimes throw down his tools and turn in anger on the intruder, saying he cannot work if watched. Occasionally a man is obliged to give up work because he can no longer take orders without losing his temper or, if he is a foreman, because he has no patience with men under him. Drowsiness, depression, loss of memory and insomnia may occur, but hallucinations, delusions and mania are rare.

The most characteristic symptom, though it is seldom the first to appear, is mercurial tremor…It may be interrupted every few minutes by coarse jerky movements. It usually begins in the fingers, but the eyelids, lips and tongue are affected early. As it progresses it passes to the arms and legs, so that it becomes very difficult for a man to walk about the workshop, and he may have to be guided to his bench.

View of a Danbury hat factory, 1911

Better a Mad Hatter…

Hatters in the 19^th century faced a more lethal health problem than mercury poisoning: tuberculosis, then the leading cause of death in the United States. In the close, steamy hat workrooms, hatters easily caught the disease.

The hatter’s union fought for safer working conditions. Employers dismissed their complaints. They said the mad hatter symptoms — tremors and hallucinations — resulted from drunkenness and tobacco use.

After the turn of the century, court decisions that favored anti-union employers weakened the hatters’ unions.

In 1901 the United Hatters of North America went on strike against the Danbury hatmaking factory of D.E. Loewe & Co. Dietrich Loewe brought in scabs, and the unions successfully boycotted his hats, damaging him financially. Loewe sued the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the officers of the local hatters’ union and 250 rank-and-file members of the hatters’ union who lived in Danbury and Norwalk.

The case twice went all the way to the Supreme Court, which held the union unlawfully restrained trade. Loewe was awarded about $250,000, and the individual defendants had to pay his judgment. The company attached their paychecks and they faced losing their homes.

The AFL held a Hatter’s Day, in which union members throughout the United States donated an hour’s pay to the hatters. The judgment was paid and the workers kept their houses.

Alice Hamilton

During the 15 years the Danbury Hatters case moved through the courts, a socially prominent doctor who lived in Hadlyme, Conn., took up the cause of workers who got sick on the job.

Alice Hamilton

Alice Hamilton with her sister Edith Hamilton, the classicist, had attended Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., about 50 miles from Danbury. She earned a medical degree and joined Jane Addams’ settlement house, Hull House, in Chicago. Living with poor workers, she got interested in the injuries and illnesses they suffered on the job.

Alice Hamilton pioneered the fields of industrial hygiene and occupational epidemiology. In 1919 Harvard Medical School appointed her an assistant professor in the new Department of Industrial Medicine– its first woman faculty member. Hamilton investigated mercury poisoning and in 1922 produced a report.

Three years later, the Workers’ Health Bureau of America and the United Hatters of America promoted Hamilton’s findings. They reported on the Danbury shakes:

…[of] 100 union hatters of Danbury, Conn., examined by experts, 43 had mercury poisoning… Boys 20 and 21 years old are already so badly poisoned that their hands shake continually, while many of the men who have served longer at the trade cannot even feed themselves.

The report also concluded the symptoms did not result from alcohol and tobacco use, as employers had claimed.

Dec. 1, 1941

Finally, on Dec. 1, 1941, Connecticut banned the use of mercury in hat making. Hat makers instead used hydrochloric acid, a safe alternative. For years thereafter, they celebrated the December 1 anniversary.

But it was almost too late. The hat industry had declined, and by 1923 only six hat factories remained in Danbury. The city’s last hat factory, Stetson, closed its doors in 1965.

Though the hat industry vanished from Danbury, the mercury hasn’t.

The Environmental Protection Agency declared the land on which the hat factories stood a Superfund clean-up site. The sediment of the Still and Housatonic Rivers contains traces of mercury to this day.

In 2003, the state of Connecticut planted on a hat factory site Eastern cottonwood trees genetically engineered to absorb mercury. The trees, however, emit mercury into the air.

This story was updated in 2022.

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