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textile mills

Six Places Products Were Made

Back in the day, products were made in New England — a lot of products.

The early cod fishermen and Yankee traders made their fortunes and invested them in mills and factories and railroads. Those investments resulted in what we now call the Industrial Revolution in the United States.

Starting with the first water-powered cotton mill in Pawtucket, R.I., New England clothed a good part of the world for many, many years. New Englanders made clocks and can openers, steam engines and shoes, board games and battleships.

So many products were made in New England that people started attributing technical expertise and inventiveness to ‘Yankee ingenuity.’

Now, as you travel along the highways and railroad tracks you can see the crumbling brick remnants of New England’s industrial strength. If you want a glimpse of what it used to be like to make things, you can visit some restored mills that have been turned into historic parks. Or you can visit New England’s over-financialized downtowns, where once-productive factories and warehouses are now brew pubs, offices and condos.

Mickey Mouse Watch

Part of the Waterbury Clock complex. Photo courtesy Google Maps

Oh, could Mickey Mouse sell watches. He rescued a floundering clock company as well as Walt Disney studios during the Great Depression.

For years the Waterbury Clock Company was one of the biggest makers of clocks in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, known as the Switzerland of America. It also churned out wristwatches during World War I from its huge brick factory on North Elm and Cherry streets in Waterbury.

By the 1930s, the Waterbury Clock Company struggled financially. So did Disney. An ad salesman proposed making and selling the Mickey Mouse watch to save them both. Skeptical company executives – including Walt Disney – decided to try it anyway.

The cheap cheerful watch was just what a depressed public wanted. A Macy’s promotion sold 11,000 Mickey Mouse watches in one day. And by 1957, 25 million Mickey Mouse watches had sold.

In the 1950s, the company took the Mickey Mouse watch off the market and began selling a line of reliable and inexpensive watches. They called them Timex. Today, the Waterbury Clock Company has morphed into the Timex Group, its Waterbury factory buildings nothing but empty hulks. The company started a Timexpo Museum in Waterbury, which traced the company’s history, but that, too, closed.

Bates Bedspread

The old Bates mill, where products were made and people had jobs. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

For decades, the Bates Bedspread made an ideal wedding gift for a discriminating young couple like George and Barbara Bush. In fact, the Bushes posed in a 1948 magazine ad for the coverlet.

Bates for years was Maine’s largest employer. The giant textile mill complex in Lewiston, Maine, opened with one building in 1854 and grew to eleven. In 1940, the company hit on the idea of reproducing colonial-era candlewicked bedspreads like the one George Washington gave to Martha. It was a hit. By the 1960s, it seemed everyone had a Bates Bedspread.

By 1990, demand petered out and cheap imitators took a big piece of the market. The company closed in 2001, its mills now part of the Bates Mill Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places. You can still buy a Bates Bedspread at the Bates Mill Store (904 Main Street, Monmouth, Maine) from former employees who started Maine Heritage Weavers to carry on the tradition.

Monopoly

How ironic that the former Monopoly factory gave way to real estate development. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

In 1888, the Parker brothers started their eponymous company in Salem, Mass., making board games out of an old laundry building. First they made board games like Billy Bumps Goes to Boston, then they introduced ping pong and tiddly winks, and eventually they came up with Monopoly. They bought more land and built a 35,000-square-foot factory, employing 500 people.

Hasbro bought Parker Brothers and therefore Monopoly in 1991. The game is still actually manufactured in a 1960s-era plant in East Longmeadow. Hasbro bought the plant from Milton Bradley and then sold it to Belgium-based Cartamundi in 2015. Cartamundi agreed to make Monopoly in the East Longmeadow factory, at least until 2020.

Prophetically, perhaps, the Monopoly factory gave way to real estate development. The old Parker Brothers factory was torn down, replaced by the Jefferson Street apartment complex. The neighborhood now belongs to the Bridge Street Neck Historic District.

Levi’s Denim

Amoskeag Millyard, 1911, where many, many textile products were made

You can’t miss the Amoskeag Mill complex in the center of Manchester, New Hampshire. The city grew up around the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, founded in 1831. The mill yard it grew into the world’s largest cotton textile plant, with sixty-four mill buildings stretching a mile and a half along both banks of the Merrimack River.

Among the cloth it produced: denim for the first Levi Strauss ‘waist overalls.’ Strauss and his partner Jacob Davis invented the blue jean when they received a patent for the way they riveted their waist overalls in 1873. Amoskeag shipped its nine-ounce XX blue denim to San Francisco, where Levi’s workers sewed it into blue jeans. Until 1915, the Amoskeag mills supplied all the denim for Levi’s 501 jeans.

After World War I, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company suffered from recession, competition, aging technology and floods, finally closing in 1935. Some textile manufacturing continued in the old mills for a while, but many of the mills were torn down. Today offices, restaurants, college branches, and the Millyard Museum fill the old mill yard.

The Catamaran Sailboat

Products were made here for very wealthy people. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

One of the most talented naval architects in the world was Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, named after the Revolutionary general from his home state of Rhode Island.

After Nat Herreshoff graduated from MIT he opened a boatyard in 1878 with his blind brother, John, in Bristol, R.I. The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company started making steam-powered boats, but during most of its sixty-seven years designed and built yachts for wealthy Americans.

The Herresshoff boatyard built every yacht that won the America’s Cup race between 1893 and 1934. Nat Herreshoff built the U.S. Navy’s first torpedo boats, invented new and efficient marine hardware, developed methods to make light wooden hulls and patented the sailing catamaran.

The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company also built seven catamarans, including Amaryllis and Amaryllis II. The boatyard closed in 1945 after Nat Herreshoff died, but a museum now stands on the former site. There you can see the Amaryllis II, as well as some famous yachts, models and designs of the Herreshoff company.

Fairbanks Scales

Fairbanks scales, still made here on Portland Street in Saint Johnsbury. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

The town of Saint Johnsbury in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom once made Fairbanks platform scales and sold them around the world.

Today Fairbanks still makes scales in a long, low commercial building in scenic Saint Johnsbury. And the company still sells them around the world. You’ve probably stood on one in a doctor’s office.

In 1824, Thaddeus Fairbanks, a wheelwright by trade, opened an iron foundry with his brother in Saint Johnsbury. They made and sold heating stoves, plows, and farm implements. Around 1830 he got interested in growing hemp, but ran into trouble trying to weigh large amounts of the stuff from a balancing beam. So he came up with the idea of the platform scale, which used levers to counterbalance the weight. By digging a pit for his contraption and placing a platform on top of it, he could weigh an entire wagon accurately.

The Fairbanks brothers’ company has changed hands several times, its headquarters moved to Kansas City, Mo., and another plant built in Meridian, Miss. But they still make scales in Saint Johnsbury, and if you look around you’ll see the Fairbanks gave the town many of its public institutions.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six New England Places To Learn About Irish History

Outside of Ireland, New England may be one of the best places to explore Irish history. After all, many people of Irish ancestry live here – and we do love our history.

Massachusetts and New Hampshire have special claims on Irish history. More than one in five residents of each state claims Irish ancestry. And about 18 percent of people living in Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont have Irish ancestors. Connecticut may be the least Irish state in New England, with only 16.6 percent of its people claiming Irish ancestors. But still, it’s in the top ten, with only Delaware claiming slightly more.

We have already brought you six Irish landmarks in New England, but many of them are closed in the winter. So in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we bring you six more places where you can learn about Irish history. Even if it’s cold outside.

Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum

Learn about the most tragic chapter in Irish history at the Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum

Between 1845-52, half of all immigrants to the United States came from Ireland. A potato blight and English oppression caused mass starvation, disease and death.

The Irish came to the U.S. in vessels called famine ships. If they didn’t die of disease or hunger aboard the ships, they crowded into slums when they arrived. At Quinnipiac University, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in Hamden claims the largest collection of visual art, artifacts and printed materials about that tragic episode in Irish history.

The exhibit “Making America: The Irish in the Civil War Era” ends on March 17. The work of Irish immigrant John Mulvany, a sketch artist during the Civil War, accompanies the exhibit.

3011 Whitney Ave, Hamden, Conn.

Burnham Tavern

Both Revolutionary and Irish history can be found at the Burnham Tavern.

During the American Revolution, some of the most notable fighters on both sides had Irish ancestry. Two – Henry Knox and John Sullivan — served as Washington’s generals. Another, Jeremiah O’Brien, fought the first naval battle of the American Revolution.

On June 12, 1775, Jeremiah O’Brien led a group of Machias men – some armed only with pitchforks — in capturing a British schooner called the Margaretta. They planned the maneuver at the Burnham Tavern, today a National Historic Site. Visitors can learn the history of the battle and see some of the O’Brien family’s belongings.

Should you decide to explore Irish history in Machias, you’ll find a classic, picturesque Downeast town. And you can get the best blueberry pie in Maine and therefore the world at Helen’s.

Main Street, Machias, Maine

James Michael Curley House

The James Michael Curley house.

James Michael Curley, Boston’s ‘Rascal King,’ personified the big city political boss for the first half of the 20th century. He spent lavishly on parks and hospitals, which not only served his immigrant constituents but created jobs for them.

Curley first won election as mayor in 1914, and went on to win three more times. He also won as Massachusetts governor and congressman. But he went to prison twice, once for sitting in for a friend on a civil service exam and once for mail fraud. Curley embarrassed the Democratic Party, and he couldn’t get elected as a Democratic delegate to the 1932 convention. Somehow he went as a delegate from Puerto Rico.

Curley built a mansion in Jamaica Plain with shamrocks cut out of the shutters at 350 The Jamaicaway. He never quite explained how he managed to build it on a mayor’s salary. Today there are plans to open the house to the public on a regular basis. Until then, you can embrace Irish history by visiting James Michael Curley Park near Faneuil Hall.

1 Union Street, Boston, Mass.

First Parish Church, East Derry

The First Parish Church, where potato and Irish history were made.

The Scots-Irish arrived in New England at the invitation of the Massachusetts Puritans, who viewed them as a persecuted Protestant minority like themselves.

The Puritans didn’t exactly embrace the poor Scots-Irish who first arrived in five ships in 1718. They strongly encouraged them to push on toward the frontier (Maine and New Hampshire). The Scots-Irish settlers provided a convenient barrier to unfriendly French and Indians.

In 1719, a group of Scots-Irish settled Nutfield, which evolved into the towns of Derry, Londonderry, Windham, and part of Manchester. When they arrived, they planted the first white potato in North America.

A historic marker in front of the First Parish Church in historic East Derry notes the historic planting of the spud:

The marker reads, “In April 1719, sixteen Presbyterian Scotch-Irish families settled here in two rows of cabins along West Running Brook easterly of Beaver Brook. Initially known as Nutfield, the settlement became Londonderry in 1723. The first year, a field was planted, known as the Common Field, where the potato was first grown in North America.”

On April 12, Nutfield kicks off its 300th anniversary celebration, including a strawberry festival, a founders weekend and an old home day.

47 E Derry Rd, East Derry, N.H.

Governor William Sprague Mansion

Not just a Yankee monument, the Gov. William Sprague house also played a role in Irish history.

On New Year’s Eve 1843, Rhode Island textile baron Amasa Sprague went for a walk. His servant later found his body, shot and bludgeoned.

The rich and powerful Sprague owned several textile mills, including the Cranston Print Works and the Slater Mill. he had had a dispute with three Irish brothers who ran a saloon. One of those brothers, John Gordon, was convicted of his murder.

John Gordon’s real crime was to be Irish at a time when hatred of the Irish ran rampant. The judge had actually told the jury to pay more attention to Yankee witnesses than Irish witnesses.

Even though circumstantial evidence showed John Gordon hadn’t committed the crime, the state hanged him. After Gordon’s execution, Rhode Island banned capital punishment. Then in 2011, Gov. Lincoln Chafee pardoned him.

To trace the events in this sad chapter of Irish history, you can visit Cranston to see where Sprague and Gordon lived. Sprague lived in what is now known as the Governor William Sprague Mansion. The house, now a museum, was named for his son who also lived there.

Sprague died on the grounds of St. Mary’s Church in Cranston, a 100-year old building. His Slater Mill is now on the National Register of Historic Places. You can see a video at the mill in March.

And John Gordon lived above a general store and saloon that is now St. George Maronite Catholic Church.

Governor William Sprague Mansion, 1351 Cranston St, Cranston, R.I.

Battery Street Historic District

Burlington, Vt., has a lot of Irish history, especially along the waterfront.

Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Burlington in 1832 and published a sketch of the young city. He noted “the great number of Irish emigrants” to be found there. They were everywhere: “lounging” around the wharves,” “swarming in huts and mean dwellings near the lake,” and “elbow[ing] the native citizens” out of work. (You can read the whole sketch here.)

Burlington had lots of Irish immigrants – 30 percent in the mid-19th century. They first sailed from Ireland to Canada, then came down Lake Champlain on steamboats. Most settled near the steamboat wharf.

Irish laborers lived and worked along the industrial waterfront. Today, a section of that waterfront is known as the Battery Street Historic District.

You can join Burlington’s celebration of its Irish history on St. Patrick’s Day with an annual Irish Heritage Festival.

Battery Street Historic District: rough boundaries are Main, St. Paul, and Maple Streets, and Lake Champlain.

Irish History End Notes

Images: Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, By Jllm06 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50748374; Burnham Tavern By Unknown photographer – Reproduced from an original postcard published by G. W. Morris, Portland, Maine, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19769449; First Parish Church of East Derry By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24513489; Gov. William Sprague Mansion By Swampyank – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23861004; Battery Street Historic District By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8672750.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Unmaking of Rhode Island’s Manville Jenckes Mills

In 1923, Senator Henry Lippitt decided it was time to retire. At age 66, he had served in the U.S. Senate and gone on to run the family’s textile mills, the Manville Mills. With no obvious successor in his family, Lippitt reached out to the owners of the Jenckes Mills. mostly the Jenckes family. Merging their two operations seemed a reasonable approach to ensuring a peaceful succession for the mills. And the Manville Jenckes Mills were born.

Manville had three operations in Rhode Island — Woonsocket, Manville, and Georgiaville. It specialized in fancy, fine cotton clothing, draperies and upholstery fabrics. Jenckes had mills in Pawtucket and Central Falls, R.I., a large one in Gastonia, N.C., and a stake in a Canadian textile mill. Together, they had eight mills with 7,700 workers.

The combined companies had little overlap, and the merger anticipated savings by reducing the overhead and possibly sharing some specialized facilities. In total, it operated 620,000 spindles and more than 10,000 looms.

The stage was set for a disaster.

World War I Prosperity

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

Both Manville and Jenckes had prospered during World War I, but Jenckes, especially, had experienced exponential growth. It produced fabric used to make tires.

The tire fabric business boomed during World War I and in the decade that followed. As demand for tires soared, tire manufacturers signed deals with fabric makers to operate a mill on behalf of that tire company. So one mill might be assigned to Firestone, for example, which would receive its total output. And Firestone would pay the entire cost of operating that mill, plus a fixed percentage of profit for Manville Jenckes.

Over time, the tire companies began demanding better pricing, ordering only as they needed at competitive prices. Some manufacturers simply set up their own fabric divisions. Through the 1920s, Manville Jenckes made up for the changes in business practices by selling to smaller companies.

The fine cloth markets, meanwhile, had been more volatile during the 1920s as the company shopped around for jobs producing sheets, cotton twill or satin, whatever kept the mills turning. With military contracts drying up after the war, the overall textile industry suffered from excess capacity, which kept prices low.

Sales of fine textiles shrank at the new company from $13.2 million in 1924 to just $6.3 million in 1928.

The High Life at Manville Jenckes Mills

Life was good for the owners of Manville Jenckes. The company paid dividends to its owners of $600,000 to $1 million per year leading up to 1929.

Salaries were even richer. Salaries paid to the company management increased from three percent of all revenue in 1924 to five percent of revenue by 1930.

In The Financial History of the Manville Jenckes Company, the author concludes that the management salaries at the family-run enterprise were “high, though not exorbitant.” But the salaries undercut one of the original goals of the merger: reducing overhead. Rather than decrease after the merger, overhead increased over five years by 44 percent.

Henry Lippitt

Labor Unrest

As the family that owned the company prospered, its employees did not. To try to increase profitability, mills would speed up machinery and demand longer days from their employees. In 1927, Rhode Island used its police to force workers to return to the mills. Manville Jenckes simply closed two mills that had formed unions rather than negotiate with workers.

The violence would reach a peak in Rhode Island in 1934 when the National Guard shot four mill workers in Saylesville. When word spread that a crowd of workers were massing at Manville Jenckes North Carolina plant, the governor of Rhode Island banned public assemblies in Rhode Island. The Guard ordered an emergency supply of teargas. The plane carrying it crashed, killing the pilot.

Manville Jenckes’ North Carolina plant saw the worst violence. Northern mills had a long history of shifting work to the South. In the 1920s, a northern mill worker could expect $21.50 for a 48-hour work week. Southern workers got $15.80 for a 55-hour week.

But a squeeze on cotton continued, and even the North Carolina plant pushed its workers to work more hours at faster paces. By 1929, all across the South workers were furious. They walked off the job and demanded the right to unionize. In April of that year, workers struck the Manville Jenckes plant. Police and militia broke it up. In that strike, a local police chief was killed, a crime that was never solved.

End of an Era at Manville Jenckes Mills

The 1929 stock market crash and beginning of the Great Depression took a heavy toll on the tire fabric business. Small tire makers failed by the score. Manville Jenckes sales figures highlight just how deeply the crash hurt the company. In the first half of 1929, sales were $14.4 million. That dropped to $8.8 million during the second half of the year. The first half of 1930 saw the company take in $7.7 million. Only $4.9 million came in during the second half.

The impact on fine textiles was just as bad. Before the crash, annual sales were hovering at $5 million to $6 million. In 1932 the company sold just $2.7 million worth of fine textiles.

What demand for fabric existed focused on cloth used for essentials — underwear, coat linings and casket cloth.

Depression Days

Manville Jenckes had been blindsided by the Depression of the 1930s. The company purchased raw materials well ahead of when it needed them. That way production would not halt should commodities such as cotton become scarce. Now, with no demand for its own goods, the company had a massive oversupply of raw material. To make matters worse, the Depression crushed prices. So raw cotton that Manville Jenckes owned was worth less than half what it had paid for it. Even if it could find a buyer, the company would take huge losses on its raw materials.

The company was pressed to pay for orders of raw goods it didn’t need and years of fat salaries and dividends left it without enough cash to operate.

Mills fell quiet and workers lost their jobs. The pain was passed on to the families that owned the mill, as well, as the dividends stopped.

Sen. Henry Lippitt in 1930 came out of retirement at 73 to try to rescue the mills. Other members of the owners’ families would resign. Lippitt himself would die less than three years later.

In February of 1931, facing demands for money it didn’t have, the company went into receivership and reorganized.

Thanks to The Financial History of Mansville Jenckes Company, by Henry Lippitt II and Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960, by Gary Gerstle.

If you liked this story you might enjoy The Brunswick Children Strike the Cabot Mill. This story last updated in 2022.

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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.

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How the French-Canadian Textile Worker Came to New England

The story of a French-Canadian textile worker named Phillippe Lemay is the story of thousands of Quebecois farmers who came to New England to work in the mills.

They had no money, large families, little education, a strong work ethic and a deep attachment to the Roman Catholic Church. As soon as they stepped off the train in their homespun clothes, they were identified as ‘frogs,’ ‘Canucks’ and ‘pea soup eaters.’ The Irish especially disliked them – and that dislike turned into murder at least once.

Phillippe Lemay survived it all. In late 1939 and early 1940, he told his story to Louis Pare, an interviewer with the Federal Writers Project for the Folklore Project.

“The picture of one French Canadian textile worker and the picture of another are just as much alike as deux gouttes d’eau, or, as we have learned to say in English, like two peas in a pod,” Lemay said.

Weaving room of an Amoskeag mill.

The Quebec Diaspora

Phillipe Lemay was born June 29, 1856, the fourth child in a family of 14 children, on a small farm in St. Ephrem d’Upton near Montreal. The farm couldn’t support the growing Lemay family, so when Phillippe was eight years old his father decided to take the family to Lowell, Mass., and look for work.

french-canadian-textile-workers-lowell-mill

Lowell textile mills

The trip alone cost them nearly everything they had. The Lemays had to faire encan – auction off all their household goods — to pay for railroad tickets, food and lodging.

The wood-burning trains of the era moved slowly during the day, not at all at night. And so Phillippe Lemay’s family took four days to go from St. Ephrem d’Upton to Lowell. Today the trip takes about 4-1/2 hours by car.

Lowell

The Lemays arrived in Lowell with little more than the clothes on their backs and a new baby born during the journey. They joined 20 or so French-Canadian families in the city.

But after the Civil War ended, many more French-Canadians moved to Lowell in a great wave of migration. Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 residents of Quebec moved to the United States. One-third of Quebec moved to New England to neighborhoods called Little Canadas.

They were attracted to New England’s textile factories, which paid a living wage, albeit barely. But at least they earned enough to survive, which they couldn’t do back home.

In the early years, French-Canadian textile workers earned 50 cents a day. Their board cost $2 a week, and they worked from 5 am to 8 pm with a half hour each for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Later, the mills shortened the workday from 6 am to 6 pm.

Most French-Canadian textile workers didn’t come to stay. They wanted to go back to their Canadian farms with the money earned in the mills.

Some took leaves of absence from their jobs, perhaps a month in the spring to plow and plant their farm, another month in the fall to harvest. A friend or neighbor would tend the farm during the summer.

Many feared becoming citizens. They couldn’t speak English, a big handicap. They still paid taxes in Quebec and felt they couldn’t pay taxes in the United States.

In the end, about half the Quebecois – including Phllippe Lemay’s parents — returned to Canada.

A French-Canadian Textile Worker

As soon as he arrived in Lowell, eight-year-old Phillippe Lemay became a French-Canadian textile worker. He went to work in Lawrence Mill No. 5 as a bagboy and doffer, replacing full bobbins with empty ones. His father, who worked in a saw mill, wanted him to go to school. But Phillippe saw that his parents needed every penny he could earn. His disobedience earned him frequent spankings.

Doffer boys in a South Carolina textile mill, by Lewis Hine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

“The only ones who had a chance to get an education were the youngest of the children, because older brothers and sisters worked in the mills, helping their parents,” Lemay explained.

At first the newcomers from Quebec boarded with relatives. Then, when they could afford it, they rented tenements, usually owned by the company. The windows had no curtains, just paper shades that had to be rolled by hand. A braided rag rug covered the floor, scrubbed with lye once a week.

Life revolved around the mill and the church. Priests commanded enormous respect. In French-Canadian Old Town, Maine, for example, a popular superstition claimed a priest could cure any disease if he wished to.

Every night after dinner, but before the dishes were washed, the Lemay family prayed together and recited the rosary beads. Saturday nights they had fun during old-fashioned social gatherings in their homes, singing and square dancing. Phillippe Lemay remembered a fiddler who knew one tune and an accordionist who knew another, so they didn’t play together.

French vs. Irish

Lowell’s large Irish community feared the French had come to take their jobs. The Irish began a campaign of petty persecution. Irish boys put dirt in French children’s pails when they tried to get water from the public pumps. They stuck French worshippers with needles and pins during Mass, so much so that the French began to stay home. Phillippe Lemay’s father worked outside at night, when Irish boys threw rocks at him.

french-canadian-textile-workers-amoskeag

The Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H.

In 1872, when Phillippe was 16, the Lemays moved to Manchester, where the giant Amoskeag mills offered plenty of employment to a French-Canadian textile worker. But they fared no better with the Irish. Before the first French church was built in 1873, the French had to walk through the Irish neighborhood to attend Mass. Irish boys threw swill at them, beat them with sticks and threw rocks.

french-canadian-textile-worker-amoskeag-boy

A young French-Canadian textile worker leaving work at Amoskeag Mills, Manchester, N.H.

The completion of that first French church, St. Augustine, caused an immediate increase in French immigration from Quebec. Five or six families arrived every day on the train from Canada. The French Canadians began to open businesses — bakeries, beer parlors and grocery stores. They built a rectory for their pastor, then a school for French children, then a cemetery. They started to form fraternal organizations like the St. Jean Baptiste Society and to publish their own French-language newspapers.

Murder of a French-Canadian textile-worker

A marching band called the Fanfare Canadienne started at St. Augustine Church. Made up of French-Canadian textile workers, it played popular tunes for fraternal organizations.

One night in 1880, a 23-year-old band member named Jean Blanchette was talking in French with several bandmates near Victory Park in downtown Manchester. Three intoxicated Irishmen came out of a beer parlor and heard the French spoken. They attacked the French-Canadian textile workers, who fought back.

One of the Irishmen fell on a bottle of hard liquor in his pocket, and it broke. He threw the broken bottle at Jean Blanchette, severing his jugular vein. Blanchette died 20 minutes later. A thousand people marched in his funeral procession through the streets of Manchester, which were lined with French onlookers.

Sixty years later, Phillippe Lemay said the French-Canadian textile workers didn’t exact revenge from the Irish who killed their friend. Blanchette’s assailant went to prison for five years and died shortly after his release.

Lemay worked hard at his trade and rose through the mill’s ranks. In 1901, he asked for a promotion as an overseer of a spinning mill. His request shocked his superintendent. “What! A Frenchman had the crust to think he could be an overseer!” recalled Lemay.

He got the promotion to the dismay of the American and Irish workers, who stopped talking to him. Eventually more French-Canadian textile workers got promotions to management positions.

By 1906, Manchester had a French-Canadian bishop and in 1918, the first of many French-Canadian mayors. French-Canadians became distinguished doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, architects and bankers.

“To what do we owe our success?” said Phillippe Lemay.

I believe we owe it to the self-sacrificing French Canadian immigrants from old Quebec, to the courage that made them refuse to accept defeat and quit when that would have seemed the natural thing to do; to the cheerfulness that carried us through our trials and tribulation and helps us old-timers to wait happily for the final bell calling us home to rest after our long, hard life in the textile mills. And perhaps the bloody death of Jean-Baptiste Blanchette, a martyr in the true sense of the word, had its share in bringing about the conditions we are enjoying today.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also like to read about Lewis Hine, the photographer who exposed child labor, here. This story was updated in 2023.

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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.

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