Tag:

mill girls

When New Englanders Feared a French-Canadian Immigrant Conquest

When French-Canadians came to work in New England’s textile mills in the later 19^th century they sparked conspiracy theories of an immigrant conquest. Even the New York Times claimed that there were secret attempts to turn New England into New France.

Lowell Mill Girls

In its earliest years, women were the main component of New England’s textile workforce. In the 1840s, an increasing number of European immigrants came to operate the textile machinery. Then came the Civil War, a disaster for cotton textiles, New England’s largest 19^th century industry. New England’s mills were devastated by the Union blockade of Confederate ports during the war that hindered southern cotton from reaching northern shores.

Some New England mills closed their doors, while others slashed their hours. A contemporary observer described the result in the flagship mill town of Lowell, Mass.: nine corporations shut down and 10,000 workers thrown “penniless, into the streets.”

After the war, New England’s textile manufacturers found that their workforce had scattered and was not returning to the mills. To save the industry – and New England’s economy – the textile corporations scoured the rural areas of the region. They also searched Europe and Canada for laborers. Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec responded to this call en masse.

Newcomers

In the years between 1865 and 1900, hundreds of thousands of French-Canadians crossed the border in search of work in New England’s factories. By the beginning of the 20^th century, French-Canadian men, women and children comprised 44 percent of the region’s cotton textile workforce.

Young millworkers from Manchester’s Little Canada, 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

During this period French-Canadians established Little Canadas in industrial towns from Lake Champlain to the Blackstone River Valley, and from the coasts of Maine to the Connecticut River. In towns such as Woonsocket, R.I., and Biddeford, Maine, the French-Canadians eventually became the majority, electing their own as mayors.

St. Ann’s Church complex, Woonsocket. It was built with nickels and dimes from French-Canadian millworkers.

Throughout the region, the newcomers from the North preserved their French language, their Catholic religion and the traditions of their rural Canadian parishes. They established their own schools, and a host of mutual benefit and social organizations. They intended to preserve their French-Canadian identity within the U.S.

A Conspiracy Theory About an Immigrant Conquest

The French-Canadian desire to maintain their language and customs raised alarm bells in New England and throughout the U.S. So did their heavy concentration in densely populated neighborhoods and their ever-increasing numbers. The mainstream press reported on an alleged invasion of New England by immigrants from across the border. Major media outlets including the New York Times, Harper’s and The Nation weighed-in on the political, economic and social implications of this cross-border influx.

In the period between 1880 and 1900, elements in the press spun a conspiracy theory around the French-Canadian newcomers. Some commentators theorized that the Catholic Church had dispatched the French-Canadian workers into New England in a bid to take over the region on behalf of the church. The French-Canadian workers, claimed these conspiracists, would first seize political control of the region. Then, went the theory, Quebec would declare its independence and annex New England to create a revived New France.

Increasing Alarmism

The New York Times repeated these claims on several occasions throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In 1885, the paper stated that there were plans afoot “to form a new France occupying the whole northeast corner of the continent.” Returning to the story in 1889, the Times stated that this supposed revival of New France would include, “Quebec, Ontario, as far west as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New-England States, and a slice of New-York.”

Notre Dame of Montreal Basilica

The newspaper’s rhetoric became increasingly alarmist over time. By 1892, the Times opined that French-Canadian immigration was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith…This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

This editorial seems to have imputed subversive intent to the French-Canadians’ mutual aid societies. In fact, these groups offered insurance and other benefits unavailable to French-Canadian Catholics elsewhere. Such groups were not oriented around the conquest of New England. It was simply false to assert that “every adult French Canadian” belonged to them.

Protestant Efforts To Convert French-Canadians

Some Protestant clergy climbed on the immigrant conquest conspiracy bandwagon. They responded with initiatives to convert the French-Canadians. The Congregationalists of Massachusetts supported Rev. Calvin Elijah Amaron, a missionary who established the French Protestant College at Lowell. A few years later, he moved it to Springfield, Mass. A major aim of this college, today known as the American International College, was to train French-speaking Protestant missionaries to go forth and convert the French-Canadians of New England and Quebec.

American International College in Springfield, Mass.

In 1891, Amaron published a book called Your Heritage; or, New England Threatened. It was a long-form treatment of the theory that a French-Canadian Catholic cabal planned to undermine New England. In Amaron’s mind, Roman Catholics could not be reliable U.S. citizens since they owed their first allegiance to Rome. The “Romish clergy,” Amaron wrote, forced its adherents into a “moral and intellectual bondage” that is “worse than southern slavery.”

The Gospel Wagon

The Baptists also made efforts to convert the French-Canadians of New England. Statistics cited in the 1906 book Aliens or Americans? by Howard Grose showed that the Baptists expended more resources on missionary activities to convert the French-Canadians than on any other predominantly Catholic group in the United States.

The Baptists’ Henry Lyman Morehouse, in an 1893 article titled The French Canadian in Quebec and New England, compared the effort to convert the French-Canadians to the abolitionist movement. “Slavery in the United States has gone,” Morehouse wrote. “The next great act of emancipation is that which shall free from mental and religious servitude the people of Quebec…”

Henry Lyman Morehouse

The Baptists also fielded a contraption called the Gospel Wagon. A large horse-drawn vehicle, it had a pulpit, organ and lanterns for preaching by night. Missionaries deployed the wagon in Massachusetts and New Hampshire mill towns, preaching Protestantism to the French-Canadian enclaves from their customized vehicle.

Immigrant Conquest Conspiracy Countered

Other voices countered the rhetoric about an immigrant conquest conspiracy. William MacDonald, a professor at Bowdoin College, disputed the notion that the Canadiens were a threat to the region. In an 1896 article in The Nation, MacDonald soberly recounted the facts showing that a French-Canadian demographic takeover of New England was unlikely. MacDonald also summarized the region’s attitude toward the French-Canadians in their midst:

Useful and indispensable as they have become, they are nowhere received with cordiality, or commonly referred to save as an inferior class; even their religion is denounced as un-American, and the influence of the Church little regarded or else misconstrued….As a class, they are treated considerately in public because of their votes, disparaged in private because of general dislike and sought by all for the work they do and the money they spend.

The conspiracy theorists offered little evidence to buttress their claims beyond a handful of utterances from the ultra-Catholic wing of the French-Canadian elites in Quebec. A few firebrands in Quebec had made expansionist noises. But, then as now, the political future of Quebec was hotly debated. There were many views on the subject. There was no semblance of unanimity in Quebec around the notion of a revived New France that would include New England.

Most of the workers coming from French Canada to New England were poor farmers, their non-inheriting adult children, day-laborers and wage earners in small Canadian factories. Their motives for crossing the border were chiefly economic rather than political or religious. Jobs and steady wages were the magnets attracting them southward.

French-Canadians Assert Their Patriotism

While conspiracy theorists were proclaiming that the newcomers were incapable of U.S. citizenship, New England’s small French-Canadian elite were voicing their American patriotism at a series of national conventions held throughout the U.S.

French-Canadian family arriving from Montreal.

At these French-Canadian conventions, speakers pointed to their people’s service in the U.S. military dating to the American Revolution. They also highlighted their historical role in settling the U.S. Midwest. They or their French cousins had founded or helped to found Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, as well as Natchez, Mobile, New Orleans and numerous other cities.

Convention delegates also encouraged their people to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Contrary to the theory that Quebec planned to annex New England, many French-Canadians in the States favored U.S. annexation of Canada.

The End of a Conspiracy

The fear of a French-Canadian conspiracy subsided in the early 20^th century as newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe began to enter the U.S. in increasing numbers. New England manufacturing slowly lost its lead in the textile industry to the U.S. South beginning in the 1920s.

As the mills faded away, the Little Canadas gradually dispersed, a process that continued throughout the 20^th century. And along with these enclaves went the memory of a period when some Americans considered poor French-Canadian mill workers a threat to New England’s way of life.

David Vermette is the author of this story about fears of an immigrant conquest, updated in 2023. He is a writer, researcher and editor born and raised in Massachusetts. He wrote the book A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018).

0 comment 3.8K views

Girl Power in 1824: The First Factory Strike in America

America’s first factory strike happened just 30 years after America’s first successful textile mill started churning out cotton cloth in Pawtucket, R.I.

It was May 1824, and the mill owners in the burgeoning industrial city had made an announcement.

Sam Slater’s mill. first in the U.S. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

They planned to increase the workday by one hour and cut wages by 25 percent for power loom weavers – that is, for women between the ages of 15 and 30. They were, after all, earning “extravagant” wages – according to the mill owners.

On May 26, 1824, 102 young women along with sympathetic community members blocked the entrance to Sam Slater’s textile mill, shutting them down. The strike spread to other mills.

The Pawtucket Journal reported:

On Wednesday evening a tumultuous crowd filled the streets, led by the most unprincipled and disorderly part of the village, and made an excessive noise — they visited successively the houses of the manufacturers, shouting, exclaiming and using every imaginable term of abuse and insult. The window in the yellow mill was broken in. … The next day the manufacturers shut their gates and the mills have not run since.

The Textile Industry Takes Hold

Sam Slater gets credit for starting the Industrial Revolution in America because he built his water-powered textile mill in 1793. Similar textile mills then sprang up along the Blackstone River and beyond. Industrialization got further boosts from the Embargo of 1809 and the Tariff of 1816, which protected U.S. textiles from British imports. By the Civil War, textiles were America’s most important industry.

Sam Slater

Along with the modern factory, Slater also introduced child factory labor to America. He would seek out children aged 7-13 from poor white families. Then he’d hire them for 40 cents to 60 cents a week. They worked 12- hour days in winter, 16 in summer. Many children hated working in the gloomy and dangerous mills, and some ran away. Their parents sometimes took them away from work because they wanted them to earn higher wages.

Slater also hired entire families, putting them in company housing and forcing them to shop at the company store.

He and other mill owners found workers harder and harder to control. Some sabotaged the factories, stealing property and setting fires. Some showed up late. And some didn’t show up at all.

In 1814, the Pawtucket mill owners petitioned the state Legislature to organize a police force as ‘it has often been found difficult to preserve order and due subordination.’

Slater had another method. He introduced Sunday school for children, who, after working six 16-hour days could get indoctrinated in the Christian virtue of hard work and submissiveness.

1824 Factory Strike

After about 1810, Slater could no longer rely on child labor because he started using the power loom. The machinery was too much for young children, so to run them he hired the second-cheapest workers: young women.

Mill girls

But the ladies proved less submissive than the mill owners hoped. When the Pawtucket factory owners announced the pay cut and the longer work day, the women decided to have none of it.

At the Slater mill, 102 young women started the strike – then called a turnout.

The strike spread to seven other mills, and 500 workers walked off the job. And they didn’t just shut down the mills. They went to the owners’ houses, shouted insults at them and broke their windows. A local judge wrote that the streets were, ‘literally filled with Men Women and Children — making a mob of very daring aspect, insulting the managers of cotton mills in every shape — pulling and hauling — screaming and shouting thro the streets.’

On the last day of the strike, one of the mills burned down in a fire probably set by a striker. The owners agreed to a compromise, the details of which are lost to history. On June 3, the strikers returned to work.

Aftermath of the Factory Strike

We know little of the factory strike from the women’s point of view. But the Pawtucket strike set off a wave of labor organizing in Pawtucket and across the region. In Lowell, Mass., for example, the mill girls went on strike in the 1830s. They also went on factory strikes in Providence, Waltham and Woonsocket, in Lynn, Mass., and in Brunswick, Maine, to name a few.

Child labor would persist, however, as documented by photographer Lewis Hine. In 1938, Congress outlawed child labor, but women still struggle for equal pay.

Image of the Slater Mill (rear view) By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72955211. This story was updated in 2023.

3 comments 4.6K views

Six Amazing Indian Women From New England

Indian women faced double discrimination since the first European colonists arrived in the Americas. Many fought back against the prejudice that destroyed their traditional way of life.

Some Indian women like Lucy Nicolar exploited stereotypes to put across a message of equality for all. Other Indian women like Gladys Tantaquidgeon used modern education to preserve traditional customs and arts.

Here, then, are six amazing Indian women from New England. If you know of others, please mention them in the comments section.

Lucy Nicolar

Lucy Nicolar, a talented musician, took the stage name Princess Watahwosa, and spent her life mixing entertainment with political activism.

Publicity photo of Lucy Nicolar as Princess Watahwaso

She was born June 22, 1882, on the Penobscot reservation, which stretched along the Penobscot River in Maine from Indian Island to East Millinocket. As a child she traveled with her family to Kennebunkport. There they sold baskets and performed in Indian dress for tourists.

Lucy came to the attention of a Harvard administrator who hired her as his assistant, took her into his household and gave her musical and educational opportunities. Eventually she became a recording artist with Victor Records, performing adaptations of Indian songs such as By the Waters of Minnetonka and By the Weeping Waters.

Lucy Nicolar eventually returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation with her husband Bruce Poolaw, a Kiowa entertainer from Oklahoma. They opened a gift shop while Lucy and her sister campaigned to improve life on the reservation. The two Indian women raised the educational standards for Penobscot children by gaining access to the public schools. They also persuaded the state to build a bridge to the island.

Lucy and Florence also demanded the right to vote for their people. When the state extended suffrage to the Penobscots in 1955, Lucy Nicolar cast the first ballot.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain promoted the then-radical idea that Indians – and Indian women — are people.

The Lowell Offering

A half-Algonquian mill girl, she published some of the first criticisms of the treatment of Native Americans in short stories from 1841 to 1848.

Born sometime around 1797, perhaps in Wolfeboro or Brookfield, N.H., she was part European. She married Josiah Chamberlain, a farmer, in 1820 and they had three children. Her husband died in 1823. Betsey sold their farm and went to work in the Lowell textile mills to support herself and her children.

The mill girls wrote for magazines published in town called the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering. Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote for both.

Harriet Hanson Robinson, a Lowell Offering contributor, wrote that Betsey Guppy Chamberlain probably came to the mills from a Shaker community.

She had inherited Indian blood, and was proud of it. She had long, straight black hair, and walked very erect, with great freedom of movement. One of her sons was afterwards connected with the New York Tribune.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote 37 stories and poems for the magazines. In them, she embraced themes of Indian gods and spirituality while satirizing Christian hypocrisy. Robinson called her the most original, prolific and noted of all the Offering writers.

In a story called A New Society she wrote of her dream where new rules of living are adopted. Among those rules:

Resolved, That every father of a family who neglects to give his daughters the same advantages for an education which he gives his sons, shall be expelled from this society, and be considered a heathen.

Weetamoo

Weetamoo, a Pocasset Wampanoag Indian, was married to Wamsutta, the eldest son of Massasoit. Massasoit had negotiated a treaty of friendship with the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation, and the English and Indians coexisted peacefully for 55 years.

Wamsutta succeeded his father as the tribe’s sachem. When war broke out between the English and the Narragansetts, Wamsutta and the Wampanoags joined the English against their rival tribe. After Wamsutta died, the Plymouth Colony grabbed more and more Indian land, subjected the Wampanoags to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three of their men.

Weetamoo became sachem after Wamsutta died because the Wampanoags allowed women to become sachems in the absence of an adequate male heir.

Weetamo allied with her brother-in-law, Metacomet, also known as King Philip, to drive out the European settlers. They attacked the English in June 1675.

After months of bloody fighting in King Philip’s War, the English defeated the Wampanoags in August 1676. While trying to escape from them, Weetamoo drowned in the Taunton River. The English fighters mutilated her corpse, cut off her head and displayed it on a pole.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian acclaimed for her dancing in Paris.

Mary Alice Nelson

She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for recognition as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly was born on the Indian Island Reservation on Nov. 17, 1903, about 20 years later than Lucy Nicolar, with whom she performed early in her career.

As Molly Spotted Elk, she started out on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

In 1930, she starred in the film documentary The Silent Enemy. The next year Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned home, she stayed behind.

Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he wrote passionate love letters to her. She agreed to marry him, and they had a daughter. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

The Nazi invasion of Paris separated Molly and Jean. She fled with her daughter on foot over the Pyrenees and found her way home to Indian Island. For the rest of her life, she drifted between New York and the reservation, taking menial jobs. She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73, in poor physical and mental health. But she left a legacy: a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language.

Buffy St. Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a rising pop star in the 1960s until her activism on behalf of her Native-American people put a lid on her career.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970

She was born Feb. 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree Nation Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan. Her parents abandoned her as an infant. Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a Wakefield, Mass., couple of Mi’kmaq descent, adopted the baby known only as Beverly.

Nicknamed Buffy, she played piano and guitar by the time she went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

There she began to write songs about Native-American rights, addiction, incest and war. When the singer Donovan recorded one of her songs, Universal Soldier, it rose to the top of the charts. That launched her on a successful recording career – which began to sputter in the mid-1960s.

Starting in the 1990s, Buffy Sainte-Marie came out and said the industry blacklisted her in the 1960s because of her activism. She sent money to buy water for the Indians who seized Alcatraz Island the year before. She’d also set up a foundation to send young Indians to law school.

Her career took a twist in 1975, when Sesame Street called to ask her to make a one-time appearance on the show. Buffy Sainte-Marie then appeared on Sesame Street for the next five years.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon revived dying Indian traditions, published books on traditional herbal medicine and helped the Mohegan tribe gain Federal recognition.

She was born on June 15, 1899 to Mohegan parents, a descendant of the Mohegan chief Uncas. She grew up on Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, Conn.

Indian women elders selected her when she was five years old for training in traditional pharmacology and culture. While studying anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladys researched traditional Indian herbal medicine. Over her lifetime, she published several books about traditional medicine.

In 1931, Gladys, along with her father and brother, started the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum. It displays eastern Indian artifacts and is still run by the Mohegan tribe.

During the Great Depression, she worked as a native arts specialist with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. She helped western tribal artisans preserve traditional skills and arts by finding ways to sell their work. She also saved customs like the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance, banned in the 19th century.

Gladys saved tribal records and correspondence, documents that helped the tribe’s case for federal recognition.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon died in 2005. Her great niece, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, continues her work as an author and the current Mohegan Medicine Woman.

End Notes

Images: Gladys Tantaquidgeon By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37390510. Thanks to Bunny McBride for research on Lucy Nicolar and Molly Spotted Elk in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (Viewpoints on American Culture) edited by Theda Perdue and Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris . Thanks to Annalyssa Gypsy Murphy for her research on Betsey Guppy Chamberlain in Dissent Along the Borders of the Fourth World: Native American Writings as Social Protest and Judith A. Ranta in The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. And thanks to Jason Schneider for his research on Buffy St. Marie in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music… from Hank Snow to the Band. For more about Weetamoo, read Longing To Be Free: The Bear, The Eagle and The Crown by Judith Guskin. This story was updated in 2022.

10 comments 3.6K views

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 2022.

0 comment 3.2K views

The Brunswick Children Strike the Cabot Mill

In the summer of 1881, eight-year-old children working in a Brunswick, Maine, textile mill found out eight-year-old children working in a Lewiston, Maine, textile mill were earning a penny more than they were. The Brunswick children decided to go on strike against the Cabot Manufacturing Co.

A child textile mill worker in Evansville, Ind. Photo by Lewis Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

A child textile mill worker in Evansville, Ind., August 1908. Photo by Lewis Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

They weren’t the first children to strike a company, and they weren’t the last.

Child Strikers

Children went on strike in Paterson, N.J., in 1828, to reduce the workday from 13.5 to 10 hours and to restore their noon lunchtime. In 1836, 11-year-old Harriet Hanson and nearly 2,000 girls walked off the job at the Lowell mill where owners had essentially cut their pay by 12.5 percent. In 1903, Mother Jones led a march of mill children from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s summer home in Oyster Bay. And Hartford newsboys went on strike in 1909.

The Brunswick children, though, may be the most overlooked strikers. Labor historians make no mention of them. It was only recently that the French North America blog discovered a reference to the children’s strike in August 1881 editions of the Brunswick Telegraph.

Brunswick Children

The Brunswick children were mostly, if not all, Franco-American, the sons and daughters of recent arrivals from Quebec. Some were only seven years old. They worked in the Cabot textile mill, which employed 550 workers in 1881, 375 females and 175 males.

The millworkers lived in Brunswick’s Little Canada, four blocks of filthy, decrepit, company-owned tenements along the Androscoggin River. Nearby smokestacks belched carbon monoxide from burning coal.

Rats infested the mill buildings, and workers had to shake the vermin out of their clothes when their shifts ended. Typhoid and diphtheria stalked the millworkers and their families.

Grown men earned $1.42 a day in the Cabot mill. Women were paid 90 cents. Some young children, according to the Telegraph, worked for $1.00 a week. Some were said to work for as little as eight cents a day, but the newspaper reporter refused to believe that.

The millworkers were paid partly by scrip, which could only be redeemed at the company grocery store. The practice of gouging their own workers was so disreputable the mill owners denied any connection to the store.

Though the mill made healthy profit, the owners constantly pressured the city to lower their taxes.

Doffers working in the Bibb Mill No. 1. Macon, Ga., in. January 1909. Photo by Lewis Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

Dangerous and Dirty

The smallest children worked as doffers, removing the spools filled by the spinning machine and replacing them with empty ones.

Lewis Hine, a social reformer, photographed small children working in dangerous, dirty jobs. He visited textile mills around the country, where children had to be careful lest they fall into the moving machines. In the caption to the photo of a mill in Georgia, Hine wrote,

Some boys and girls were so small they had to climb up on to the spinning frame to mend broken threads and to put back the empty bobbins.

The Strike

On Aug. 12, 1881, the Brunswick Telegraph reported a strike by ‘the operatives in the spinning and mule rooms of the Cabot Company’s cotton mil’

These strikes left the weavers short of working material and the mill was shut down.

Then a few days later the newspaper reported the successful strike of the Brunswick children led the adults to walk off the job.

The Cabot Mill, where the Brunswick children worked.

…boys 8 to 14 years of age struck for higher pay, got it, and thus led to strikes in [the] spinning and mule rooms.

French North America notes,

Another effect of the strike was that Benjamin Greene, the local agent of the mill, the face of the Cabot Manufacturing Company in the town, and the richest man in Brunswick, gave 30 day’s notice to vacate to the residents in the company-owned tenements.

The newspaper editor justified Greene’s action, stating that the notice to the tenants may have been “done as a measure of precaution if the strike holds on.”

‘Partly Succeeded’

The strike didn’t hold on. The Annual Report of the Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics for the State of Maine shows the strike closed the mill for three days. It “partly” succeeded, costing the employees $1,500 and the employers $500. No labor union was involved.

But male workers’ average daily pay rose from $1.42 to $1.50; females from 90 cents a day to $1.05.

They kept their jobs, too. Presumably the mill needed labor as it added another 150 workers over the next four years.

Downtown Brunswick today. The Cabot Mill is to the left.

Living conditions apparently didn’t improve. In 1885, when a diphtheria epidemic raced through Brunswick’s Franco-American population, the New York Times called the tenements ‘the despair of sanitarians.’

Finally in 1886 the State of Maine ordered the Cabot company to clean up the tenements it had neglected so badly.

With thanks to the French North America blog. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Maine Street in Brunswick By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34036909.

6 comments 3.9K views

The Bates Bedspread of Maine, America’s Favorite Counterpane

The Bates Bedspread, once found in nearly every household, has links to presidents, First Ladies, a famous midwife and countless women who wove white candlewick counterpanes in their own homes.

1950 Bates Bedspread ad.

Though the first Bates Bedspread first sold in 1940, its American ancestors date to the 18^th century. George Washington gave Martha Custis the prototype for the bedspread as a wedding gift. Little did he know the precedent he was setting — or that the giant textile mills that made the bedspread named after him would employ more people than any other company in Maine.

A Bates Bedspread advertisement wasn’t far off the mark when it claimed,

Garlands and stylized flowers with a richly looped hand-woven look make this aristocratic bedspread truly an heirloom.

Candlewicking

Whitework embroidered bedspreads were fashionable when George and Martha tied the knot in 1759, but they became even more popular from about 1800 to 1840. In those days, having a fine white candlewick counterpane helped maintain one’s social standing.

In many places, the way to have an early American version of the Bates Bedspread was to make one yourself.

Candlewicking

Cloth was hard to get, especially on the frontier. The women had to pick, spin, comb, dye and card flax, wool and cotton. Cotton was bought by the pound in early America, according to historian Alice Morse Earle. Women picked out the one by one, carded it on wool cards, then spun into thread.

In Hallowell, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), Martha Ballard wrote in her diary that she had carded cotton on July 27, 1786. Ballard, made posthumously famous by Laurel Thacher Ulrich in A Midwife’s Tale, didn’t weave the cotton cloth herself; she took her spun cotton to her neighbor, Mr. Edson, to be woven.

Carding and Spinning

Most women back then spent endless hours carding and spinning. In 1790, 15-year-old Elizabeth Fuller started a diary from her home on a farm in Princeton, Mass. Entry after entry describes making cloth. “I spun two skeins today” and “I wove five yards today” were typical. In the spring of 1792, she wove for two months solid and estimated she produced 140 yards of cloth.

Some women were expert enough to make candlewicking bedspreads on home looms.

In candlewicking, large running stitches are sewn into a pattern on unbleached white muslin and passed over a small twig. The twig is later removed and the fabric shrunk in hot water, which holds the stitches in place. It gets its name from the soft cotton thread that’s also used as a candle wick.

Elizabeth Perkins Wildes Bourne made one (and probably more) on her loom in Kennebunk, Maine. Her daughter, Abigail Wildes, wove a poem into a coverlet she sent to First Lady Dolley Madison in 1809.

Benjamin Bates

Benjamin Bates, born July 12, 1808, grew up on a farm in Mansfield, Mass. He was the son of a Yankee farmer, merchant and maker of cotton cloth – probably on a home loom.

The Bates Mill complex, home of the Bates Bedspread

He moved to Boston, went into the dry goods business and made a public profession of his Congregationalist faith. He prospered and became the president of the First National Bank of Commerce in Boston, the Union Pacific Railroad and the Lewiston Water Power Company, which built the first canal in Lewiston.

The canal allowed water power to run the machinery in the textile mills that Bates’ money would soon build. Until then, weaving cloth had been a home-based profession. In 1810, for example, 88 percent of the households in Topsham, Maine, told census takers they made cloth. More than half had looms, and some loom owners, like Martha Ballard’s Mr. Edson, wove cloth for their neighbors.

Bates was the biggest investor in the Bates Mill, which opened in 1854. The company eventually built 11 buildings between 1852 and 1923.

Before the Civil War broke out, Bates bought cotton and produced uniforms for the Union Army. He contributed $100,000 to the Maine State Seminary, which renamed itself Bates College without his knowledge. The first girls to graduate from Bates College paid for their own education by working at the mills.

The Bates Bedspread

Bates Manufacturing Company wove its first basic Bates bedspread in 1858. Almost 60 years later, in 1915, Bates expanded and bought new kinds of looms to make Jacquards, crochets, satins, brocades, damasks and Ripplette.

The company grew and grew, and for many years the enormous Bates Mill complex employed more people than any other employer in Maine.

First Yankee farm girls worked at the mills. Then came Francophile Canadians and Irish fleeing the potato famine. No wonder then, why one mill building has a shamrock on one wall, a fleur-de-lis on the other.

Sometime in the 1930s, a Bates representative touring Mount Vernon was impressed with the bedspread George Washington gave Martha. The rep realized such an item could sell, as the colonial revival was at its peak.

The Bates rep also thought the Lewiston mills could make Martha Washington’s counterpane. So Bates designers went to work collecting samples of the antique spreads, visiting Mount Vernon and scouring museums and libraries for information about candlewicking.

Washington’s Choice

After experimenting for two years, Bates produced the first of the legendary Bates Bedspreads and called it George Washington’s Choice. It was made on a specially designed loom in January 1939. The company put the first Bates Bedspread on sale in March 1940.

It didn’t sell. But Bates added a double-knot fringe and made a few adjustments, and the Bates Bedspread caught on. It became a favorite wedding and anniversary gift in the 1940s and 1950s. Like the whitework embroidered counterpanes of the early 19^th century, it was a status symbol – and more. “Loomed to be Heirloomed” was the apt slogan.

Each Bates Bedspread had a ‘pedigree’ at one end of each bedspread that tells its size, style, year of production and loom number. New Bates Bedspreads were later introduced, such as the Abigail Adams and Queen Elizabeth.

Weavers worked seven days a week making Bates Bedspreads, but they couldn’t keep up with demand. It its heyday, 200,000 Bates Bedspreads were sold each year.

Poppy Shills for Bates

In 1948, a future president of the United States made his appearance in a Bates ad. George Bush and his new bride Barbara posed with Joan Walls of Bennington to show that Bates’ fine fabrics were perfect for the discriminating college student. The caption above the photo reads,

Victoria. Chosen by Barbara and George ‘Poppy’ Bush of Yale, and admired by Joan Walls of Bennington. Joan and Barbara wear easy-to-sew campus fashions in Bates cotton. Young marrieds on campus make Bates the beautiful basis of a long-range decorating plan. Indispensable at college, these bedspreads and matching draperies stay fresh and bright through four years of wear and washing. After graduation, they are ready to grace a future bedroom or living room.

(You can see the ad here.)

Decline

As New England’s textile industry moved South, and then overseas, the Bates Bedspread kept the Lewiston mills humming.

By 1990, the 50^th anniversary of the first Bates Bedspread, demand dropped off and only about 35,000 a year were sold. Fred Lebel, Bates’ executive vice president, told the Lewiston Sun-Journal the reason was that so many people had them and didn’t need new ones.

But then he conceded competitors were producing cheaper quality versions of the Bates Bedspread and hurting sales.

In 1992, the City of Lewiston took possession of the Bates Mill Complex after years of unpaid taxes.

Dalton, Georgia

When Bates came up with the first George Washington’s Choice, the company claimed candlewicking was a lost art. Actually it had been thriving in northwest Georgia in a small city called Dalton.

Dalton, which called itself “The Bedspread Capital of the World,” was home to a flourishing cottage industry of tufted cotton products. From the 18^th century, women made tufted cotton bedspreads for their own use.

After World War I, Dalton entrepreneurs set up roadside stands selling chenille robes and bedspreads for tourists driving south along Highway 41, known as Bedspread Boulevard. Later, thousands of men, women and children in Dalton would work on bedspreads at home for national distributors.

In 1942, the Dalton News reported that an early version of a Bates Bedspread from Dalton, Ga., had made a splash when displayed at ‘one of the national bedspread marts.

According to the Dalton News, J.T. Bates of Bates Bedspread Company owned an antique candlewick spread made by his great-grandmother, Eva Deck, in 1789. Deck was 16 when she picked the cotton, spun the thread and tufted the bedspread. The newspaper considered it less beautiful than the Bates Bedspreads her great-grandson’s company sold. J.T. Bates said he would sell

…any other spread for much less than he would this old heirloom, in fact this one is not for sale.

With thanks to Ashley Callahan in Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion. This story was updated in 2023.

7 comments 2.9K views

Newer Posts

Older Posts