Tag:

labor

The Maine Ship Captain Who Invented the Modern Donut

In 1847, a Maine ship captain invented the donut as we know it today – with a hole.

On the day Lewis Hine took the photo of a waitress next to a plate of donuts (with holes), Capt. Hansen Gregory lived in the next town. He was telling his cronies how he’d gotten the great inspiration to cut a hole in a donut.

14-year-old waitress at the Exchange Luncheon in South Boston. Photo, by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

Captain Gregory, 85, lived at the Sailor’s Snug Harbor in Quincy, Mass. His fame as the inventor of the modern donut had spread, and the Washington Post interviewed him in a story published March 26, 1916.

He told the reporter he discovered the donut hole when he worked as a 16-year-old crewman on a lime-trading schooner.

“Now in them days we used to cut the doughnuts into diamond shapes, and also into long strips, bent in half, and then twisted,” he said. “I don’t think we called them donuts then–they was just ‘fried cakes’ and ‘twisters.’ Well, sir, they used to fry all right around the edges, but when you had the edges done the insides was all raw dough. And the twisters used to sop up all the grease just where they bent, and they were tough on the digestion.”

First Donut

He asked himself if a space inside the dough would solve the difficulty – and then came the great inspiration.

“I took the cover off the ship’s tin pepper box, and—I cut into the middle of that donut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes!”

Gregory, born in 1832, would have had his insight around 1858. According to the New York Times, he rose to second mate at 19, mate at 21 and master mariner at 25. He sailed in all kinds of vessels from the lime coaster to a full-rigged ship.

A plaque at Nativity Lutheran Church pays homage to an iconic food. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

But the donut made him famous. He had asked a tinsmith to fabricate a donut cutter for him, and soon, reported the Times, ‘cooks everywhere had adopted it.’

He returned to Camden, Maine, where he taught his mother the trick. She sent several plates to Rockland, Maine, where people gobbled them up. After that, the donut never looked back.

A plaque in the town of Rockport, Maine, marks Captain Gregory’s birthplace, now the parsonage of the Nativity Lutheran Church. The National Baking Association nominated him for the Baking Hall of Fame, but it doesn’t appear he made the cut.

Sailors Snug Harbor

More Donut History

How reliable is the old sea captain’s tale? The Food History Timeline posts donut recipes before 1858, and they all advise cutting the donut into diamonds, squares or twists. Then in 1877 a donut recipe calls for cutting them into rings.

The Food History Timeline also notes that after the Civil War, ‘ inexpensive tin doughnut cutters with holes were manufactured commercially and sold widely.’

Capt. Hanson Gregory died in 1921. You can visit his grave at the National Sailors’ Home Cemetery.

Lewis Wickes Hine, by the way, took many photos of very young workers, which then influenced the passage of child labor laws. His caption read, “Exchange Luncheon. Delia Kane, 14 years old. 99 C Street, South Boston. A young waitress.”

This story about the donut was updated in 2023.

Image of Nativity Lutheran Church courtesy Google Maps.

17 comments 3.3k views

Sarah Bagley Avenges the New England Mill Girls

A powerful Massachusetts politician in 1845 learned the hard way not to mess with the mill girls – and especially not with Sarah Bagley.

Sarah Bagley

To the mill girls of antebellum New England, Sarah Bagley stood taller than the reform leaders of the day. She meant more to them than Horace Mann, Susan B. Anthony, Dorothea Dix, or Sojourner Truth.

She was one of the earliest and most important advocates of working women’s rights. Like another Lowell native – Jack Kerouac, a century later – Sarah Bagley refused to be stuck in a second-class life.

But newspaper editor and state Rep. William Schouler viewed Sarah Bagley as a greedy troublemaker. The two adversaries confronted each other at the Massachusetts State House. Too late did Schouler didn’t realize how formidable an opponent he faced.

Sarah Bagley

Sarah Bagley was born on a farm in Candia, N.H.,, sometime in April 1805 or 1806. After her family fell on hard times, she moved to Lowell, Mass., in 1835 to work in the Hamilton Mills. She was 28, older than most of the mill girls.

Her conflict with newspaper editor and politician William Schouler began with her involvement with the Lowell Offering.

In the early days of the great textile mills in Lowell, mill girls got decent wages. However, they worked long hours and were supervised closely.

french-canadian-textile-workers-lowell-mill

Lowell textile mills

When they did have free time, the mill girls took advantage of Lowell’s many cultural offerings: libraries, concerts, improvement circles and lectures. One mill girl came from Maine to work in Lowell just so she could have access to books.

Lowell Offering

A local clergyman started the monthly publication called the Lowell Offering in 1840 to publish poems and fiction by the culture-crazy mill girls. By then, working conditions in the mills were deteriorating. So Sarah Bagley wrote a story for the Offering called Pleasures of Factory Life. Those pleasures, she wrote, resembled angels’ visits: ‘Few and far between.’

In October 1842, state Rep. William Schouler bought the Offering. He was also the editor of the Lowell Courier, a friend to the factory owners. The Offering stopped publishing Sarah Bagley’s criticisms.

In November 1842, the Hamilton Mills management tried to force the mill girls to work two looms instead of one. They walked off the job, and management fired and blacklisted them.

There was a depression on, and a thousand textile workers left Lowell between 1842 and 1844. They were fed up with wage cuts and heavier workloads. By 1844, conditions had improved so that male workers received raises. Women did not.

In December 1844, Sarah Bagley met with five other women at the Anti-Slavery Hall in Lowell to organize the Lowell Labor Female Reform Association. They defied the prevailing belief that women who organized were reprehensible, and they fought for safer workplaces and the 10-hour day. the women elected Sarah president, and she persuaded the group to buy a small, militant labor publication, The Voice of Industry.

The Lowell Labor Female Reform Association quickly grew to 600 members. It had Massachusetts branches in Waltham and Fall River, and New Hampshire branches in Manchester, Dover and Nashua.

The Whip of Necessity

Sarah Bagley led the mill girls in a petition drive for safer working conditions and shorter hours. She wrote – and spoke – for the cause with power. Typical of her rhetoric was this:

Is anyone such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand girls in Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious employment I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntarily! … the whip which brings us to Lowell is necessity. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother’s ambition to be aided and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery.

The mill girls’ petitions, with 2,139 signatures, led to one of the earliest legislative hearings on factory conditions. But to the dismay of the mill girls, Rep. William Schouler chaired the committee.

Schouler may have tried to intimidate the mill girls by insisting they testify before the committee – something women had never done before.

Cringing Servility

Mill girls

The mill girls, undaunted, told the committee of too-short meal breaks and dangerous air polluted by cotton dust and smoke from oil lamps. The committee took their testimony, visited the mills and talked to the mill agents. The committee finally concluded ‘the remedy is not with us.’ The remedy was in ‘a less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and intellectual superiority.’

The furious mill girls accused the committee of ‘cringing servility to corporate monopolies.’ They passed a resolution:

That the Female Labor Reform Association deeply deplore the lack of independence, honesty and humanity in the committee to whom were referred sundry petitions relative to the hours of labor. – especially in the chairman of that committee; and as he is merely a corporation machine, or tool, we will use our best endeavors to keep him in the “city of spindles,” where he belongs, and not to trouble Boston folks with him.

The fall election was coming up, and the mill girls made good on their threat. They worked hard to discredit Schouler. When the results came in, Schouler had lost. The mill girls thanked the voters for ‘consigning William Schouler to the obscurity he so justly deserves.’ Schouler then took his wrath out on Sarah Bagley in the pages of the Courier.

More petitions resulted in more hearings, but no action from the Legislature. But public pressure was so great on the mill owners they finally shortened the workday in 1847 by 30 minutes to 13 hours. In 1853, the workday was shortened to 11 hours. By 1874, the 10-hour workday was the law in New England.

Another First

By then, Sarah Bagley had gotten a job in Lowell as a telegrapher, probably the first in the United States. In 1847 she moved to Springfield, Mass., as a telegrapher. She was devastated to find out she earned three-quarters of what men earned. That year she also published a book, Biography of Self-Taught Men.

She returned to Lowell, worked briefly in the Hamilton Mills and continued to speak about reform – women’s rights, prison reform, health care and working conditions. Then she fades from the historical record. According to some accounts, at 45 she married widower James Durro or Durnough, a homeopathic physician. Sarah took up homeopathy, caring primarily for women and children. The couple moved to Brooklyn and manufactured homeopathic medicines. James Durro died in 1871. The date and circumstances of Sarah Bagley’s death are unclear.

With thanks to The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove by William Moran. This story about Sarah Bagley was updated in 2022.

10 comments 1.7k views

Frances Perkins Works for God, FDR and the Common Workingman

Frances Perkins was having tea with her friend, Mrs. Gordon Norris, in New York City, on the afternoon of March 25, 1911, when they heard fire engines screaming by. As the sirens kept coming, Frances Perkins followed them, and what she saw changed her life.

Frances Perkins

Smoke and flames engulfed a 10-story factory. Young men and women were jumping from the windows on the top floors as the fire pressed in on them. Onlookers screamed, ‘Help is coming,’ but they were beyond help.

In the end, 146 people – 123 women and 23 men – died in one of the worst industrial disasters in history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Frances Perkins would never forget.

Frances Perkins

She was born on April 10, 1880 in Boston, Mass., as Fannie Coralie Perkins. Her parents, natives of Maine, owned a stationers’ store. Fannie changed her name to Frances after she graduated from college.

Fannie Perkins grew up in Worcester, Mass., and graduated from Mount Holyoke College committed to social change. She taught for a while, volunteered at settlement houses and at 30 received an M.A. in political science from Columbia University.

On the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Frances Perkins headed the New York Consumers League. She lobbied for better hours and conditions for workers. Then came the afternoon when she witnessed the horror of dozens of young men and women flinging themselves to their deaths in front of her. Of that day she said,

I shall never forget that frozen horror which came over us as we stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing there was no help.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

She knew about the dangers of New York’s factories because she was taking a crash course in fire safety. After she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster, she left her job at the Consumers League. She then got a job as executive secretary for the Committee on Safety of the City of New York.

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected governor in 1929, he appointed her as New York’s first Commissioner of Labor. In that post, she fought for minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws. She also fought against child labor and dangerous workplaces.

As a close ally of Governor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins reduced the work week for women and expanded factory investigations.

Brahmin Reformer

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described her:

Brisk and articulate, with vivid dark eyes, a broad forehead and a pointed chin, usually wearing a felt tricorn hart, she remained a Brahmin reformer, proud of her New England background . . . and intent on beating sense into the heads of those foolish people who resisted progress. She had pungency of character, a dry wit, an inner gaiety, an instinct for practicality, a profound vein of religious feeling, and a compulsion to instruct . . .

Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in November 1932. He then appointed Frances Perkins Secretary of Labor, the first woman ever to serve in a United States cabinet position on Feb. 28, 1933. When he asked her to take the job, she told him she had a long list of programs she’d fight for, including a minimum wage and Social Security. “Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

She then served as Secretary of Labor for 12 years, longer than anyone. In that job she played a key role in writing New Deal legislation and helping to create Social Security. She also helped oversee the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Social Security

Perkins persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to ride the wave of Townsend clubs to support a federal retirement program for workers. California physician Francis Townsend started the clubs after he saw three elderly women rooting through a garbage can for food. During the Great Depression, more than half of older Americans lived in poverty.

Thousands of Townsend clubs pressured Congress to pass an old age pension plan. Sensing the opportunity, Roosevelt agreed to Perkins’ demand. He assigned her to run the committee that would craft the legislation.

As soon as the Social Security Act passed, conservatives in Congress began to attack it as unconstitutional. Frances Perkins had made sure it would withstand judicial scrutiny. Months before Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on Aug. 14, 1935, she had consulted with Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone, a native of Chesterfield, N.H. He assured her the high court would support the government’s taxing power. It did.

Of her time in Washington, she said,

I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen.

With thanks to The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins–Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage by Kirstin Downey. You can learn more about Frances Perkins at the Frances Perkins Center in Damariscotta, Maine, where she spent her summers. This story was updated in 2022.

15 comments 539 views

The Great New England Shoemakers Strike of 1860

The great shoemakers strike of 1860 began with 3,000 Lynn, Mass., shoe workers who deliberately chose George Washington‘s birthday to start their righteous rebellion.

Shoe workers march during the shoemakers strike.

Employers had taken advantage of workers’ desperation following the Panic of 1857 and cut their pay. Tens of thousands would soon join them in the struggle for a living wage.

Within a week the strike spread to 25 New England shoe towns, as 20,000 shoe workers walked off the job. Another 20,000 supporters marched in parades, came to rallies and jeered the out-of-town police.

Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, then campaigning for president of the United States, announced his support for the shoemakers strike.

“I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to labor whether you pay them or not,” he wrote. “I like a system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere.”

By the end of the shoemakers strike, shoe workers would claim a partial victory, and their newly formed unions would live on to fight another day.

$1 A Week

The New England shoemakers strike had been brewing for years. Shoe workers had traditionally worked as fishermen and farmers. They made shoes at home to supplement their incomes. Men shaped the leather and their wives and daughters sewed uppers to soles. Eventually, demand for shoes increased, and employers centralized production in factories. By 1850, Lynn produced 4.5 million shoes a year.

In 1852, the Lynn factories introduced Singer sewing machines. Consequently, boys and girls could do the work previously done by skilled adult artisans. The children worked for 10 exhausting, dangerous hours a day.

Then the financial panic of 1857 sent the country into a long depression. Shoe workers lost their jobs and ran up heavy debts. When their employers rehired them the next year, they cut the workers’ wages and lengthened their hours. For 16-hour days, men earned $3 a week, women only $1. It wasn’t enough to support a family, let alone repay debt.

Of the 50,000 journeymen shoe workers in Massachusetts, only Lynners had organized a union by 1860. They formed the Mechanics Association in 1859, led by Alonzo Draper, a married 24-year-old law student. Draper also edited the paper, the New England Mechanic.

The union members elected James Dillon, a 35-year-old Englishman, as vice president. Napoleon Wood, another leader, was a Methodist minister who often said the struggle for decent living standards didn’t conflict with his religious beliefs.

Best Interests

Lyceum Hall, where the shoemakers strike began.

In early February, the Mechanics Association held a mass meeting at Lyceum Hall in Lynn to decide on a plan. They appointed committees to meet with employers, and they wrote a circular stating their demand for higher wages.

The circular said the working men had everyone’s best interest at heart, “inasmuch as the wealth of the masses improves the value of real estate, increases the demand for manufactured goods, and promotes the moral and intellectual growth of society.”

The employers refused to meet with the workers.

The Shoemakers Strike Begins

And so they walked off the job on Washington’s birthday because it was a “fitting day for a blow in favor of the cause you engage in.”

Reporters covered the mass meeting at Lyceum Hall in Lynn on Feb. 22, 1860, calling it the ‘largest and most enthusiastic of its kind ever held in New England.’ The workers set up committees of 100 men each to post the names of scabs, to keep order and to make sure shoes wouldn’t be finished elsewhere. They then marched to their factories and handed in their tools.

That same day, several hundred shoe workers in Natick met. They decided to strike and marched through the streets singing a song to the tune of Yankee Doodle.

Starvation looks us in the face.
We cannot work so low.
Such prices are a sore disgrace.
Our children ragged go.

The strike leaders over the next few weeks traveled throughout New England, urging shoe workers to organize and to strike. In Massachusetts they went to Marblehead, Newburyport and Haverhill. In New Hampshire to Rochester, Dover, Farmington and Barrington. They also traveled to Berwick, Maine. Draper went as far as New York, giving speeches and raising money for the strike. Newspapers called it ‘The Revolution at the North’ and ‘The Rebellion among the Workmen of New England.’

No Slaves Here

A few days after the men went on strike, the women stitchers and binders decided to join them. They planned a Great Ladies Procession in Lynn at 10 a.m. on March 8, but a blizzard began two hours earlier. Undaunted, 1,000 women and 5,000 men plowed through snow drifts that appeared impassable. They carried banners that read, ‘American Ladies Will Not Be Slaves: Give Us a Fair Compensation and We Will Labour Cheerfully.’ Others read, ‘Our Union is complete: Our success certain!’

Ten days later, workers marched in another procession in Lynn. It was two miles long, with 10,000 workers from North Shore shoe towns, two companies of infantry from Lynn and Marblehead and several fire departments. Thousands lined the street to watch the parade, including school children who got the day off.

Shoemakers Strike Ends

lincoln-hamlin-republican-ticket-appleton-motor-wi-19-jul-1860

Lincoln supported the shoemakers strike.

There was no rowdyism, and the strike leaders strongly discouraged alcohol. The strikers enjoyed community support, with businessmen contributing money and groceries and clergy denouncing the employers from their pulpits. When Boston police arrived at the train station, a crowd of 8,000 people jeered and hissed at them.

The employers were ready to raise wages by the second week of the shoemakers strike, but refused to recognize the union. On April 10, a thousand Lynn workers went back on the job after 30 employers agreed to raise wages by 10 percent. Some held out for a few weeks longer, but the shoemakers strike had ended.

The women had already gone back to work. Though the men supported them, they didn’t include the women’s wage demands in their proposals. They were concerned the employers wouldn’t consider their demands if they added the women’s.

Some employers did sign agreements with the local unions. Most of the male workers got a raise, and unions organized where previously they hadn’t existed. As the Haverhill Gazette reported, “An Association of mechanics will grow out of the movement which will doubtless do much for the protection of the laborers in their rights.”

Alonzo Draper would become a general for the Union Army in the Civil War and die from a stray bullet at the age of 29.

With thanks to History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume One From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor by Philip Sheldon Foner. This story about the shoemakers strike was updated in 2023.

18 comments 2k views

Harriet Hanson Robinson, Lowell Mill Girl

Harriet Hanson Robinson went to work as a Lowell mill girl when she was 10 years old to help support her family. She grew up to earn fame, if not fortune. She started off writing the mill girls’ magazine, The Lowell Offering, then wrote books and led the woman’s rights movement.

Harriet was able to leave the mills for two years to attend high school, where she studied French, Latin and English grammar. While there she wrote two essays that typified her spirit: “Poverty Not Disgraceful,” was one, while “Indolence and Industry” praised the honest labor of the poor.

Harriet Hanson Robinson

Harriet Hanson Robinson, mill girl

She was born in Boston on Feb. 8, 1825. Her father died suddenly when she was six and her widowed mother struggled to support her four children. A neighbor offered to adopt Harriet, but her mother replied, “No; while I have one meal of victuals a day, I will not part with my children.”

Harriet wondered for years what ‘victuals’ meant.

Her mother tried to run a small store selling candy, food and firewood. The family lived in a room at the back of the store, five of them in one bed. Though friends helped out, she couldn’t make a go of it.

Finally, Harriet’s aunt invited her to come to Lowell, Mass., to run a boardinghouse for mill girls. The giant textile mills then hired Yankee farm girls under a paternalistic system that paid them decently, worked them long hours and supervised their lives closely.

Mill Girls

In the early years of the Lowell mills, the mill girls could take advantage of cultural offerings: libraries, concerts, improvement circles and lectures by people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Harriet recalled how the mill girls would attach poems and hymns to their looms and frames so they could memorize them while they worked.

Working conditions in the mills deteriorated over time, and the mill owners replaced the Yankee mill girls with immigrant families who were exploited and abused. When Harriet Hanson Robinson worked in the mills, though, the mill girls were respected, even admired.

Mill girls’ boardinghouse in Lowell

Harriet went to work as a bobbin doffer, removing full bobbins of thread and replacing them with empty ones. It wasn’t hard work, requiring only about 15 minutes of actual labor every hour, and she could read or play during her spare time.

When Harriet was 11, the mill owners raised the mill girls’ boarding charges, which equaled a 12.5 percent pay cut. The mill girls went on strike, or ‘turn out,’ as they called it. In her autobiography, Loom and Spindle, Harriet Hanson Robinson wrote the girls in the upper rooms walked off the job, shutting down the mill.

Doffers and spinners in a South Carolina textile mill. Photo by Lewis Hine, By Lewis Hine – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16100329.

Turnout

She wrote, “Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, “Would you?” or “Shall we turn out?” and not one of them having the courage to lead off, I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado, “I don’t care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether any one else does or not”; and I marched out, and was followed by the others.”

Sarah Bagley, an important labor leader in her own right, also took part in the strike.

The mill girls’ magazine

Not only did the strike fail, but Harriet’s mother lost her job in retaliation for her daughter’s action. Still, Harriet Hanson Robinson wrote years later that it was the proudest moment of her life, and would be exceeded only when women got the right to vote. She didn’t live long enough to see it.

Offering

Harriet continued to work in the mills, rising to spinner and drawing-in girl. She fought to attend Lowell High School for two years, then afterward she returned to the mills. She wrote stories and poetry for the Offering, the first magazine in the world written exclusively by women, and which had supporters throughout the country.

One of the best writers, wrote Harriet, was Betsey Guppy Chamberlain, an Indian who published some of the first criticisms of her people’s treatment. Lucy Larcom, another talented writer, also wrote for the Offering.

“The fame of The Lowell Offering caused the mill girls to be considered very desirable for wives,” wrote Harriet. “Young men came from near and far to pick and choose for themselves, and generally with good success.”

At 23 she married William Stevens Robinson, a journalist who strongly opposed slavery. A poem she submitted to his newspaper had first attracted him to her.

His opinions made it hard for him to keep a job and the couple often struggled. They lived for a while in Concord, Mass., where Thoreau occasionally called on them. Harriet thought he shouldn’t have wasted his abilities and suspected his mother had fed him while he stayed in his cabin at Walden.

They moved to Malden, Mass., and had four children, three of whom lived to adulthood. In 1862, William got a good job as clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, which he would hold for 11 years until then-U.S. Rep. Benjamin Butler forced him out.

Suffragist

At 51, Harriet Hanson Robinson became a widow when William died after a long illness. She rented out rooms to support her mother and three daughters and wrote books, including Loom and Spindle , still in print.

By then she joined the suffrage movement. She and her daughter, Harriet Lucy Robinson Shattuck, organized the National Woman Suffrage Association of Massachusetts and helped Julia Ward Howe form the New England Women’s Club. A powerful advocate for women’s rights as a writer and speaker, she testified before the Select Committee on Woman Suffrage in Congress.

Harriet Hanson Robinson lived to be 86. She died at home in Malden on Dec. 22, 1911.

This story about Harriet Hanson Robinson was updated in 2022.

31 comments 1.5k views

Four New England Shopping Malls – Landmarks of Changing Times

New England shopping malls not too long ago were monster-sized, congested and commonplace. But in the early days, they were not a sure bet to succeed.

When America emerged from World War II, it wasn’t readily apparent how radically the country was about to change. It was clear that prewar America wasn’t going to return, but what would the new future look like?

Now we know. Following the war’s upheaval, everything from religion and politics to gender roles and labor expectations to business and leisure trends went through the tumbler and came out forever changed.

One of the most dramatic changes was the way Americans shopped. Today’s consumer culture was born from the postwar transition to an era of low unemployment and rising wages. Those who had the foresight to predict what was coming enjoyed tremendous success over the following decades.

Four New England shopping malls served as guideposts to the transitions shoppers would soon encounter.

1947: Ridgeway Center, Stamford, Conn.

Postcard showing Stamford’s Ridgeway Center. Courtesy Ferguson Library.

Alfons Bach understood what was about to happen to American consumerism. Bach emigrated from Germany well before the war and wound up in Connecticut in 1947. Perhaps because of his German roots he had no nostalgic fondness for the old ways of New England. That allowed him to shape the future around the tastes of the generation coming of age in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Bach had become a giant in the industrial design field. His work was sought after by companies making all sorts of products. Rugs, pianos, toasters, desk accessories, tube-steel furniture and countless other items all bore his brand.

But he had bigger ideas. He saw how rapidly the automobile was changing the culture. And shopping, he believed, was bound to change. With cars that needed parking, it made less and less sense to travel to congested cities to shop. Suburban consumers, he believed, would respond to convenient new shopping malls with clean uncluttered design. Parking and access were essential. The trappings of a city were not.

Bach took this vision to Lerner Shops, a chain of women’s clothing stores. He suggested they should join with him in building a modern shopping center that would satisfy the emerging tastes. The Lerners, however, did not see the wisdom in what he said. So Bach struck out in his own in 1947 and began work on the Ridgeway Center in Stamford, Conn., on 15 acres of land he acquired.

Prototype for Shopping Malls

Originally opened in 1947 with 110,000 square feet of space, the motor age merchandising mecca’s tenants included W. & J. Sloane, Pennsylvania Drug, Deena’s, The Lurie Company, Chizzini, a Slenderella figure salon and a liquor store.

It grew rapidly. In 1951, Bach added a three-level Sears, an office tower, and a cinema — essentially a prototype of today’s New England shopping malls. By 1958 he added a Saks 34th Street boutique-type store.

Though Bach sold the property and moved on to other ventures, the mall remains in operation today.

1951: Shoppers’ World, Framingham, Mass.

Shoppers’ World, one of New England’s most innovative shopping malls.

In the late 1940s, the outward migration of city dwellers from Boston was pronounced. New roads and reliable cars created a steady push westward, southward and northward from the center city. Framingham, on Route 9, was in a perfect position to take advantage of the free-traveling Bay Staters.

Enter Huston Rawls, with his plans for a shopping destination unlike all other shopping malls.

With 44 stores and parking for an astounding 6,000 cars, Shoppers’ World was the destination for virtually any product a consumer could think of. Rawls promised Framingham town fathers, apparently with a straight face, that the new mall’s tenants would not compete with other, existing stores.

Rawls was a marketer, not a designer, and that proved a problem in the end. But he knew what people liked. He lured Jordan Marsh to his property, the first time the venerable department store left Boston. Rawls put the store under a giant clear-span dome, said to be the third largest in the world. In 1951, Boston’s downtown looked old and dangerous, but in Framingham Rawls’ design team spread on the modern Populuxe style in abundance. The shopping center had a space-age look.

Rawls also plucked at New Englander sensibilities by building the whole thing around an enormous town green.

Shoppers’ World in 1974

Unique Among Shopping Malls

His marketing chops were obvious, as he featured the likes of the Lone Ranger, Rin Tin Tin and Rex Trailer to draw crowds. On the day of the grand opening, to be sure shoppers didn’t have to choose between attending and staying home to watch the World Series the same day, Rawls hired “ask me” girls to patrol the shopping center with radios. Anyone who wanted to know the score could just ask them.

The New England weather, however, did not cooperate with his plans. Rain and snow plagued Shoppers’ World throughout its life. Poor construction that didn’t stand up was another problem. Rawls was not able to bring a second major tenant to the facility.

Still, his vision lasted for 43 years. Shoppers’ World was torn down in 1994.

1967: Midland Mall, Warwick, R.I.

Shopping malls weren’t new when the Midland Mall was built in Rhode Island.

There was little left to chance when a subsidiary of Sears opened the Midland Mall in Warwick, R.I. By 1967, shopping malls were not a new idea. The Midland was an up-to-date mall that benefited from the collective lessons learned from earlier shopping malls. It hummed from the start.

But its builders knew that innovation was key to success. Shoppers wanted the latest and greatest. To add a new wrinkle to the experience, Midland was built on two floors with an open courtyard – the first such mall in New England. Unlike Shoppers’ World, which was also on two floors, it was fully enclosed. The retailers had learned the importance of keeping that New England weather at bay.

Speedramps

Adding to the contemporary two-story look, the developers also eschewed escalators in favor of “speedramps.” Like a moving walkway on a slant, the speedramp was designed to accomplish two things. It looked sleeker and more modern than escalators. It also tried to ease the fears of people who were intimidated by escalators while drawing in curious customers to see these innovative people movers.

The developers also locked in two key anchor stores: Cherry & Webb and downtown Providence’s Shepherd Company took the key spaces in the mall, and its 450,000 square feet of space filled rapidly. The mall survived through 2011.

1969: Nashua Mall, Nashua, N.H.

Woolco, an experimental version of Woolworth’s.

With competition growing in southern New England, the mall movement set its sights on northern New England in the ‘70s. New competitive angles were needed.

New Hampshire’s status as a no-sales-tax state naturally appealed to builders of shopping malls looking for a new hook to lure consumers. Less than five miles over the New Hampshire border, the developers built the first mall in Nashua: the Nashua Mall, convenient for shoppers who wanted to slip across the border for some tax-free shopping.

Today, of course, five miles would seem ridiculous. The newer Pheasant Lane Mall is so close to the border that parts of its parking lot are actually in Massachusetts. But in 1969, the concept hadn’t been brought to its logical conclusion yet.

With 220,000 square feet of space, the mall was one of the many Woolco malls that featured a Woolco Discount Mart at one end and an Almy’s at the other.

Shooting Star

Woolco was a shooting star in American retailing. Owned by Woolworths, the stores were to be a big brother to the smaller five-and-dime sized Woolworths, but offering discounted pricing on a large scale. They launched in 1962 with Red Grille restaurant tucked inside most, an update to the Woolworth lunch counter. in 1962. They were crushed by the 1970s economy, which snuffed out all the company’s U.S. stores in 1982.

In 1969, however, the marketers knew how to bring in the customers in New Hampshire. No celebrities or ultra-modern styling. Instead, the shopping mall featured indoor tropical palm trees and the promise of 72-degree temperatures all year round. It finally gave way to more modern retail concepts, such as outlet shopping malls. The Nashua Mall closed in 2003.

For more information about early shopping malls, visit here.

This story about shopping malls was updated in 2022.

4 comments 594 views

Newer Posts

Older Posts

labor

The Maine Ship Captain Who Invented the Modern Donut

First Donut

More Donut History

Sarah Bagley Avenges the New England Mill Girls

Sarah Bagley

Lowell Offering

The Whip of Necessity

Cringing Servility

Another First

The Great New England Shoemakers Strike of 1860

Lincoln

$1 A Week

Best Interests

The Shoemakers Strike Begins

No Slaves Here

Shoemakers Strike Ends

Harriet Hanson Robinson, Lowell Mill Girl

Harriet Hanson Robinson

Mill Girls

Turnout

Offering

Suffragist

Four New England Shopping Malls – Landmarks of Changing Times

1947: Ridgeway Center, Stamford, Conn.

Prototype for Shopping Malls

1951: Shoppers’ World, Framingham, Mass.

Unique Among Shopping Malls

1967: Midland Mall, Warwick, R.I.

Speedramps

1969: Nashua Mall, Nashua, N.H.

Shooting Star

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Thanks for Signing Up!