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Mario Buda, The Other Boston Bomber

On Sept. 16, 1920, an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon across from J.P. Morgan and Co. and down the street from the New York Stock Exchange.

Few noticed as the balding little man left his old horse and rusty wagon amid the lunchtime street bustle. Then the bells of Trinity Church chimed noon, and a deafening blast sent scores of people to the pavement. Windows shattered, shrapnel flew and a ball of flame and smoke rose to the sky.

Aftermath of the Wall Street bombing.

As victims lay bleeding in the street, Mario Buda melted into the crowd.

At least that’s what law enforcement officers – and since then, historians — surmised. Mario Buda made a likely suspect after four years of anarchist terror bombings eventually linked to him. He probably blew up Wall Street because his closest friends, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been charged with murder just five days earlier.

Anarchist Terror

World War I had ended nearly two years before the Wall Street bombings, but the anarchist violence it spawned didn’t stop with the Armistice.

Well before the war, anarchists had allied themselves with the radical labor unions, the Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies.

Inflation ate into workers’ earnings as war approached, and tens of thousands walked off the job for higher pay and shorter hours. Some of the biggest strikes in history had taken place just before the United States intervened in World War I, including the 1914 Ludlow massacre in Colorado and the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass.

Labor unrest had spread throughout New England in such actions as the 1912 American Woolen Mill strike in Willimantic, Conn., the 1913 Ipswich Hosiery Mill strike and the 1915 Bridgeport munitions workers strike.

As the United States edged closer to World War I, anarchists battled the capitalists who, they believed, made huge wartime profits off their downtrodden workers. Anarchists rejected all authority and embraced violence in the war against capitalism.

Beginning in 1912, an Italian immigrant named Luigi Galleani led the anarchists from his newspaper office in Lynn, Mass. The Justice Department called his newspaper, the Subversive Chronicle, the ‘most rabid, seditious and anarchistic sheet ever published in this country.’ Though small, the newspaper had subscribers all over the world.

Galleani found a receptive audience in some of the 30,000 Italians who lived in Boston—including a 30-something immigrant named Mario Buda.

Mario Buda

He was born in Sicily on Oct. 13, 1884, the son of a gardener. In 1907, then in his early 20s, he immigrated to the United States and worked as a gardener, in construction and in factories He returned to Italy in 1911, then came back to Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood two years later.

People described him as quiet, serious and proud; friends gave him the nickname Nasone, or Big Nose. Police considered him elusive and dangerous.

At first he commuted to his job in a Framingham hat factory. Then he and his brother started a cleaning store selling to Wellesley College students. All the while he went to anarchist meetings and anarchist picnics, took part in anarchist theater recitals and started an anarchist school.

As an anarchist, he supported labor strikes, and he met Nicola Sacco during the 1913 Hopedale, Mass., textile strike. Police shot and killed a worker during the 12-week strike, which failed in the end.

Three years later, in 1916, he met Bartolomeo Vanzetti at the Cordage strike in Plymouth, Mass.

Violence Begins in 1916

By 1916, the United States began to prepare for the war then raging in Europe. On New Year’s Day, a security guard discovered a wicker suitcase filled with dynamite in the Massachusetts Statehouse. It failed to go off.

But the next day, a bomb went off in Woburn, Mass., ripping apart a New England Manufacturing Co. factory. Rumor had it the company received threatening letters telling it to stop shipping goods to Europe.

Across the country, communities began to hold Preparedness Days to celebrate the military buildup for the U.S. entry into war. On July 22, 1916, an anarchist bomb went off in San Francisco during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 and wounding 40. Police suspected Mario Buda of setting off the bomb, but they never closed the case.

Luigi Galleani

Then in early December of 1916, an antiwar riot turned violent in Boston’s North End. Police arrested 10 people, including Mario Buda. In the courtroom he refused to take an oath on the Bible, and he received a five-month prison sentence.

A few weeks after the riot, a bomb rocked the North End, blowing up the Salutation Street police station. It didn’t hurt anyone, as it exploded on a quiet Sunday morning. But the bomb blew a hole through the three-foot brick wall and broke every window for blocks.

Mario Buda Bombs Milwaukee

When Mario Buda left prison, he went to Monterrey, Mexico, with Sacco, Vanzetti and another Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoci. Monterrey had an active community of Italian anarchists, and some historians suspect Buda and his friends honed their bomb making techniques while there.

On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. Boston’s district attorney warned of more anarchist violence. Though most of the city’s 30,000 Italians supported the war, police described the North End as ‘anarchist headquarters.’

Two months later, police arrested the three leading anarchists in the United States. In New York, they arrested Emma Goldman, who’d once run an ice cream parlor in Worcester, Mass., and her lover Alexander Berkman. They arrested Luigi Galleani at his home in Wrentham, Mass., for an editorial he’d written opposing the draft.

Some Italian community leaders tried to distance themselves from the anarchists. In November, the pastor of the Italian Evangelical Church in Milwaukee held a loyalty rally in front of local anarchist headquarters. A riot broke out, and police shot and killed two anarchists and arrested 11.

An anti-anarchist cartoon

The Milwaukee killings propelled Mario Buda out of Mexico. Shortly after police shot the anarchists, someone discovered a package in the evangelical church basement. The janitor took it to the police station, where it exploded, killing nine police officers and a civilian.

Police never caught the culprit. Years later, though, anarchists revealed who made the bomb: Mario Buda.

The 1919 Anarchist Bombings

The year 1919 brought a wave of anarchist bombings. They started when Luigi Galleani delivered an inflammatory speech in Taunton, Mass., just prior to his deportation. The next day, four anarchists blew themselves up trying to plant a bomb in the American Woolen Co. in Franklin, Mass

The new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, vowed to crack down on ‘aliens and Bolsheviks, radicals, and anarchists.’

On April 28, mail bombs arrived at the homes and offices of 36 prominent men, including John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Jr., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,– and A. Mitchell Palmer. Only one exploded, blowing off the hands of a housekeeper.

Then in June 1919, large bombs went off within 90 minutes of each other in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, D.C., and Paterson, N.J. A night watchman died in the New York explosion.

The bomb in Washington, D.C. blew up on the front porch of A. Mitchell Palmer. It exploded in the hands of the Italian anarchist who’d carried it, Carlo Valdinoci – one of Buda’s traveling companions in Mexico. Valdinoci was picked up in little pieces on the front lawn of Palmer’s neighbors, Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor.

Did Mario Buda have anything to do with the 1919 bombings? Probably.

Palmer Raids

Palmer immediately blamed anarchists and radicals for the bombings he termed ‘terrorism.’ Beginning on Nov. 7, 1919, the FBI started rounding up suspects in what became known as the Palmer raids. Led by J. Edgar Hoover, they were notorious for violating people’s rights. The FBI threw suspects into filthy, crowded prisons without telling them why. They arrested people just for visiting prisoners in Hartford’s notorious Seyms Street Jail.

All in all, the FBI caught up 10,000 people in its dragnet, many of them Italian or Jewish from Eastern Europe. In Connecticut they raided Ansonia, Bridgeport, Hartford, Meriden, New Haven, New London, South Manchester and Waterbury. In Massachusetts they raided Boston, Chelsea, Brockton, Bridgewater, Norwood, Worcester, Springfield, Chicopee Falls, Holyoke, Gardner, Fitchburg, Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill. And in New Hampshire, they rounded up people in Clarement, Derry, Lincoln, Manchester, Nashua and Portsmouth.

Francis Fisher Kane, U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania, resigned in protest. By such methods, he said, “we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” His words proved prophetic.

Mario Buda Bombs Wall Street

Mario Buda called Sacco and Vanzetti ‘the best friends I had in America.’ Police arrested them in connection with the murder of two men during a robbery of the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company. Police had also questioned Buda, who escaped.

Prosecutors charged Sacco and Vanzetti with murder on Sept. 11, 1920. Five days later, a dilapidated wagon carrying 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of sash weights blew up on Wall Street.

The Associated Press reported,

Office workers were just hurrying into the street for their noonday meal when a jet of black smoke and flame rose from the center of the world’s greatest street of finance.

Then came a blast and a moment later scores of men, women and children were lying, blood covered, on the pavement.

The explosion killed 38 people and injured 143, including J.P. Morgan’s son Junius. Joseph P. Kennedy, who’d been walking by, was badly shaken but unhurt. Most of the victims were clerks, stenographers and office boys.

American Anarchist Fighters

A letter carrier discovered several leaflets in a nearby mailbox. In crude letters, it read,

Free the Political Prisoners or it Will Be Sure Death for All of You! American Anarchist Fighters.

Federal investigators settled on Mario Buda as the perpetrator, as he had rented the horse that pulled the wagon bomb. But they never questioned him, and Buda slipped out of the country. The Wall Street Bombing case was never closed.

Mike Buda would resurface in Italy as Mike Boda and carry on his anarchist activities. He died in Italy on June 1, 1963.

The limestone walls at 23 Wall Street still bear the pockmarks of the 1920 bombing.

With thanks to The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day by Steve Puleo and Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background By Paul Avrich. This story was updated in 2024.

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Alfred Winslow Jones, The Unlikely Inventor of the Hedge Fund

Alfred Winslow Jones had been a spy, a sociologist, a magazine writer and a Communist before he invented the modern hedge fund in 1949.

He began investing $100,000 from a shabby office on Broad Street near the New York Stock Exchange. When he died at his home in Redding, Conn., he was worth many, many, many times that.

People who caught on to his methods and adopted them also made king’s ransoms. And after wresting their profit from their lightly regulated activities, they paid lower taxes than their secretaries did – another Alfred Winslow Jones innovation.

Financial journalist Sebastian Mallaby called him an ‘unlikely Wall Street patriarch.”

Alfred Winslow Jones

He was, noted Mallaby, “an erudite dandy, a onetime Marxist who hiked to the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War with the writer Dorothy Parker—where they shared a bottle of Scotch whisky with Ernest Hemingway.”

Alfred Winslow Jones was born Sept. 9, 1900, in Australia, the son of a General Electric executive. At four his family moved to Schenectady, N.Y., the home of a large GE manufacturing facility.

Like his father, he graduated from Harvard, but unlike his father he didn’t go into business. He got a job as a purser on a tramp steamer. He worked as a statistician for an investment house for a little while, but tired of it. Then he took the Foreign Service exam, and got posted to Berlin.

Alfred Winslow Jones, from his Harvard yearbook

From Berlin he reported to the State Department on the rise of Hitler, but he secretly married a left-wing Jewish socialite named Anna Block. Jones then quit the State Department, stayed in Germany under an assumed name and studied at the Marxist Workers School. He also spied for a left-wing group called the Leninist Organization. His clandestine activities may have trained him to operate under the radar on Wall Street.

Back in the USA

Alfred Winslow Jones’ marriage lasted only a few months. He returned to the United States and enrolled in Columbia University, where he studied for his PhD in sociology. He married again, this time to Mary Carter. The newlyweds took their honeymoon in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and Jones reported on civilian relief for representatives of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker peace group.

They hitchhiked across Spain, met up with Parker and Hemingway and, according to some sources, worked for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

They returned home so he could write his thesis, an analysis of labor unrest in an Akron, Ohio, rubber plant. Jones wanted to figure out if fascism could take hold in the United States. He had assistants conduct 1,700 field interviews, which he analyzed statistically. His thesis, Life, Liberty and Property, A Story of Conflict and a Measurement of Conflicting Rights, concluded it could not.

Fortune, a fledgling business magazine, printed part of the thesis and hired him as a staff writer. Eventually he wrote an essay for Fortune on forecasting the stock market, arguing that investor psychology drives the market’s rise and fall.

The article gave him an idea.

Wall Street

In 1949, the names ‘Fidelity’ and ‘Prudential’ embodied the virtues associated with money managers: sober, prim, formal and conservative. Certainly not a 48-year-old ex-communist who used to drink whiskey in a war zone with Ernest Hemingway.

But Alfred Winslow Jones founded A.W. Jones with $40,000 of his own money and $60,000 from friends. His investor friends included Louis Fischer, a former Communist who wrote a biography of Vladimir Lenin, and Sam Stayman, a textile executive and famous bridge player.

Jones described his fourth career choice as managing a ‘hedged fund.’ His big idea was to reduce risk by buying stocks he believed would rise and short selling stocks he believed would fall.

Alfred Winslow Jones had some other ideas as well.

Clandestine Operation

Drawing, perhaps, on his experience as a spy he created his firm as a partnership to avoid regulation. He didn’t register his fund, nor did he advertise it.

In his obituary, the New York Times wrote,

Mr. Jones preferred to remain almost invisible. ‘Hedging,’ he once said, ‘is a speculative tool used to conservative ends,’ but he did not as a rule discuss what he did, let alone how he did it.

He also borrowed money to leverage his bets that certain stocks would rise. And he invented the 20 percent plus two percent performance fee, in which fund managers received a share of profit rather than salary.

Jones claimed his fee structure had to do with the way Phoenician merchant ships kept 20 percent of profits from a successful voyage. The real reason: so the IRS would tax their profit at the capital gains rate of 25 percent, rather than at the top marginal rate (at the time) of 91 percent.

The New York Stock Exchange

Big Daddy

By 1966, a number of hedge funds imitated Jones’ methods on a small scale, according to Fortune. New York magazine in 1968 called him the “big daddy” of the hedge fund business in a story, The Jones Nobody Keeps Up With.

In 20 years he had a cumulative return of 5000 percent, and over 34 years his investors lost money in only three.

He had several homes, on tony Sutton Place in Manhattan and in Redding, Conn., where he liked to garden. International affairs lured him away from the office; at times he would take leave to work on summer projects for the Peace Corps.

Alfred Winslow Jones eventually untangled himself from the business and devoted himself to the Peace Corps. He tried to create a reverse Peace Corps in which people from poor countries would come to aid the poor in the United States. It would be a hedge against creating a sense of inferiority among poor nations.

Alfred Winslow Jones died at his home on Poverty Hollow Road in Redding on June 2, 1989. A.W. Jones is still in business.

With thanks to More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, by Sebastian Mallaby. This story was updated in 2022.

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Hartford’s Sex Workers of 1913: An Intimate Portrait

In 1913, a juicy report on Hartford’s 200 sex workers came into such demand that the city quickly ran out of copies. When city officials refused to print more, Katharine Hepburn’s mother helped pay to publish another 500 copies.

Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn.

Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn and her physician husband Tom wanted to end the exploitation of women and the spread of venereal disease. Typical of the era’s social activists, they believed they could end poverty and prostitution through political reform.

They learned just how hard it was to reform the city government. And the salacious report of the vice commission exposed just how many sex workers plied their trade in Hartford — and how hard it would be to drive them out.

Hartford Sex Workers

During the late 19th century, Hartford’s social reformers starting pressuring city officials to do something about the sex workers.

In 1898, Hartford razed Gold Street tenements, which housed Irish and black families, to try to rid the street of prostitutes.

By 1907, the Hartford clergy shamed the police into storming bordellos in well-publicized raids. The police judge also changed the policy of fining sex workers and their pimps. Instead of fining them, he sentenced them to jail time.

But the police stopped raiding the bordellos once they learned the inmates would go to jail. So the judge resumed fining them, and the bawdy houses opened the next day.

Then in December 1911, Hartford Mayor Edward Hooker took the unusual step of ordering the police to close the city’s known whorehouses – about a dozen of them with about 200 sex workers.

A year later, three brothels were torn down, five became homes for law-abiding people and the remaining three were waiting for the ‘cops to let up.’ Thirty-five sex workers left Hartford.

Critics argued that closing the bawdy houses simply spread the so-called social evil beyond the red light district. Much better to tolerate and contain the problem, they said.

And so Mayor Edward Hooker appointed the vice commission to investigate and report on Hartford’s sex workers.

Vice Commission Report

The vice commission went to work exploring Hartford’s demimonde. In one salacious section, the report described a ‘carnival of fornication.’

On a rainy afternoon one of our investigators entered the wine room of this hotel, where a veritable “carnival of fornication” was in progress. Eight men and five women were smoking, singing and indulging in very, suggestive dances. Couples frequently left the room and returned in about half an hour, and the remarks made upon such occasions plainly indicated the nature of their occupation while they were away. None of the girls in this room were over twenty. The “fun” continued from 4 until 11 p. m.

The commission explored small apartments, private rented rooms, road houses, cafes, restaurants, private dining rooms or booths, hotels both great and small.

Hartford’s sex workers plied their trade in high-backed benches facing the bowling alley in a café. Some of the city’s saloons advertised ‘the joys to be found within.’

Hartford’s sex workers plied their trade in saloons. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

The so-called 50-cent houses took 25 cents from the sex workers for each trick and let them keep 25 cents. The first six dollars went for board, one dollar for the doctor and twenty-five cents for gas. The sex workers in such houses averaged 15 customers a night.

‘Go Ahead’

In one of Hartford’s respectable restaurants, detectives found a large room on the second floor with booths separated by curtains hung over iron poles. Each booth had a heavy table and four chairs. According to the report,

“Seeking advice from the waiter, one of our detectives was told to ‘Go ahead; nobody will come near this booth while the curtains are drawn’.”

The detectives noted drily that three booths were occupied and the conversation he overheard ‘corroborated the reputation of the place.’

White Slavers

New York City had long exported sex workers to Connecticut’s small cities. Since Hartford police tolerated the bawdy houses, sex traffickers came to the city during conventions.

According to the report, Hartford probably ranked third as a top destination for New York prostitutes.

A maritime tragedy in 1866 had exposed the scope of the human trafficking from New York. When the steamship Evening Star sank about a hundred sex workers died on their way to New Orleans from New York.

The vice commission report included a woman detective’s dealings with two white slavers from the Big Apple, 65-year-old Morris Cohen and his 32-year-old wife Lena. The detective pretended to be a madam interested in buying a brothel. The Cohens showed her around.

“We passed a saloon and a restaurant, and then opened what appeared to have been a stable door; up a flight of stairs into a low ceilinged room,” she wrote. “There was an oilcloth on the floor and a cylinder stove in the center of the room; at one side was an opening in the wall not as high as a table, supposed to be a ‘get-away’ into the next house. A young man sat there, a typical tough…

“There were two bedrooms divided by a wooden partition. The two beds had no linen on them, just a piece of dark, dirty oilcloth; there was a pillow on each with a case on, which was the only piece of white on the bed. There were three girls there. They appeared to be not more than seventeen.”

Police arrested the Cohens and the court convicted them.

Why Sex Work?

But what led the sex workers to their profession? Anarchist Emma Goldman wrote that exploitation by men forced women to sell themselves.

Emma Goldman in 1901

Others blamed low wages. In 1911, a U.S. Department of Labor study found that nearly half the prostitutes surveyed had previously worked in factories and shops before turning tricks.

The Hartford vice commissioners noted that most working women did not earn a living wage, estimated at $10 a week. But they concluded low wages didn’t explain why women turned to prostitution. Poverty did.

“It is not so much the insufficiency of the wage of the girl at the time she takes the first step towards prostitution as the environment of poverty in which she has grown up that gradually leads to the state of mind and to the situation which make that step possible,” the report concluded.

A 1913 slum interior.

Case Studies

The vice commissioners reported on an undercover detectives’ interviews with 66 of sex workers. They concluded the sex workers may have started out as respectably employed women who occasionally prostituted themselves for presents and tips. Then they joined the majority of sex workers and relied on prostitution to support themselves. Finally they ended up in brothels.

“Various factors in their lives, especially age, mental deficiency, alcohol, disappointment, and the venereal diseases hasten to unfit them for their particular business until, at the end, they either marry, die, become keepers themselves or land in jails and workhouses as common bums,” concluded the report.

A Hartford slum in the 1940s

Most – 61 of 66 – hadn’t yet reached 30 years old. Nearly all had hard luck stories. Many, like No. 52, said they were ruined by men.

“After the baby was born she was so ill that she never left her bed for ten months,” the report said. “He married a doctor’s daughter here. Since then she has been reckless. Her family cast it up continually until she had to leave home. This was eight years ago. Now she is careless in her appearance, rough in her manners and thoroughly hardened. She appears rather ignorant and claims she is in the life only for the money. She shows indications of being a drug fiend.”

No. 32 married the fellow who ruined her. He only stayed with her for six months after the baby was born. “When he found out I would not hustle for him he shook me,” she said. “I tried working in a factory but it was too hard.”

No. 33, another ‘low-type girl,’ started working in a brothel at age 16. She once serviced 23 men in one night. “She referred to it as the hoodoo number,” the report said. “That night she refers to as a banner night because she made $15 for herself.”

Nice Guys

No. 44 married when she was fifteen years old. Until the baby died her husband was all right. “After that he blamed me for its getting cold. We live in the same house but do not occupy the same room. He has a girl on Main Street whom he goes to see. She hustles the streets too.” Her husband knows of her going out. “I won’t divorce him and he could never save the money.”

No. 57 was married. Her husband forced her out to meet men. She was afraid to tell anyone.

No. 27, once a church girl, went to work in a factory. “Believe me, what I did not learn,” she said. She left home because her mother beat her so much. She and her beau left town and came to Hartford. But, she said, “We are going to beat it in three weeks. He is going to Washington, D. C, and I am going there to work during the big time.” (Inauguration week).

No. 64 uses heroin. She worked as a waitress in a cheap restaurant in Hartford, “I grew tired of the continual drudge in a restaurant; and too many chances were given me.” She married about eight months ago and supports her husband with her earnings as a prostitute. He has been out of work for some time.’ She has low ideas and is ignorant, but is a very fair looking girl.

Ain’t Safe

The report also maintained that closing the brothels reduced prostitution. “People are afraid to rent to women since the houses were closed,’ one anonymous person told the commission. “I have lived here all my life and I never saw things as they are now; a woman ain’t safe on the street after seven o’clock if she is straight.”

The vice commission recommended 15 ways to further raise the city’s moral standard. They included including keeping the brothels closed, repressing sex workers anywhere else they did business and paying for more detectives.

When the report came out, people snapped up 500 copies in two days. Suffragists printed up another 500 and sold them for 25 cents.

Hartford City Council did nothing. Suffragists like Kate Hepburn’s mother then passed out fliers attacking the majority of councilors for ‘tolerating commercialized vice.’ But 17 of the councilors who didn’t back up the vice commission ran for re-election, and 15 won.

According to the Hartford Courant, Hartford’s red light district stayed closed, but prostitution spread out. Sex workers found new ways to attract and service customers. They made assignations by telephone and met their customers in cars.

To read the whole report, click here.

Image of 1913 Slum: By Creator:Arthur S. Goss via Toronto History from Toronto, Canada – Slum interior, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24335179. This story was updated in 2024.

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The Dover Mill Girls Walk Out in America’s 1st Women’s Strike

When Dover mill girls went on strike against the Cocheco Manufacturing Co., they said their bosses secretly ‘abused and insulted’ them by calling them ‘slaves.’

19th-century mill girls

It was 1828, and women had never organized and walked off the job before in New Hampshire. It was the first all-women strike in the United States. Four years earlier, women had led a widespread textile workers’ strike in Pawtucket, R.I.

The Dover mill girls viewed their cause in the spirit of the American Revolution. They marched to martial music outside the mill and fired artillery.

But they faced a tougher opponent than the British military: Boston bosses with a financial investment to protect.

Cocheco Manufacturing Co.

Manufacturing textiles by machine was relatively new when the Dover mill girls stopped work. Sam Slater’s water-powered cotton spinning mill, the country’s first, had only started running 35 years earlier in Pawtucket, R.I. The Waltham, Mass., mills began weaving and printing cotton cloth in 1813. And the giant Lowell mill complex was a mere six years old, having been opened by a group of Boston money men called the Boston Associates.

The Cocheco Millyard today

In New Hampshire, the Cocheco Manufacturing Company started out in 1812 as the Dover Cotton Company. It used waterpower from the Cochecho River to make cloth. The company thrived and expanded, shipping cotton cloth down the river to international ports. It attracted so many workers Dover’s population nearly doubled over a decade to more than 5,000 in 1830.

The company’s owners bought more land, built more mills and replaced the wooden blocks to print cloth with rolling cylinders.

But they needed financial help to expand. They got it from the Boston Associates.

The new printworks turned out to drain the Boston Associates finances. So they spun it off to the Boston investors as the Cocheco Manufacturing Company in 1827.

The new owners decided its employees made too much money.

Dover Mill Girls

In 1822, the textile mill had run a Help Wanted ad for smart, capable girls ‘between 12 and 25 years old,’ promising ‘constant employment and good encouragement.’

A 12-year-old mill girl. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

The Dover mill girls, mostly from farms in New Hampshire and southern Maine, earned 47 cents a day plus room and board. Two cents were taken from their paychecks for medical insurance. They needed it. The girls worked with only one break from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. They breathed noxious fumes and worked with noisy, dangerous machinery that mangled fingers and limbs.

Managers forbade the girls from talking to each other during the 11-hour day. They were paid in scrip and required to shop in the company store, which raised prices higher than other shops. Most lived in boardinghouses supervised by a widow, who enforced strict rules of behavior.

At the end of 1828, the Boston owners of the Cocheco Manufacturing Company lowered the wages of the 800 Dover mill girls by five cents a day and speeded up their work. Male millworkers and managers received no such pay cut.

Indignant, 600 of the Dover mill girls met that weekend to formulate a three-part resolution:

They would never agree to work for the lower wage. They believed the new owners had artfully manipulated the situation at the mill to promote their own wicked ends. Finally, they were far from home and they weren’t paid enough.

In a rhetorical flourish, the Dover mill girls concluded the owners’ aim was to turn them into slaves.

The Dover Mill Girl Strike

On the day after Christmas in 1828, about 600 of the Dover mill girls marched out of the factory yard, declaring war on the mill owners. They formed a half-mile procession and marched around the mill waving signs and banners, playing martial music and setting off artillery. They then marched through town.

The local newspaper, as is so often the case, sided with management. The Dover mill girls had walked out ‘over some imaginary grievance,’ the Dover Enquirer reported, and presented “one of the most disgusting scenes ever witnessed.”

The Dover mill girls underestimated management. The next day, the company ran a Help Wanted ad for several hundred scabs to break the strike.

By Tuesday, most of the Dover mill girls went back to work, except for the strike leaders who the company had blacklisted.

Though the strike failed, women like Harriet Hanson Robinson and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn would lead many more: in Lowell and Lawrence, in Bridgeport, New Haven and throughout New England.

Many would fail. But some would succeed in raising pay and improving working conditions.

Cocheco Mill: By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33639649. This story was updated in 2024.

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Six Places Workers Were Killed in New England

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

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

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

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

Remington Arms

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Penobscot River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georges Banks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amoskeag Mills

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sayles Finishing Plants

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proctor Marble Factory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 2023.

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