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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).

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Six Abandoned Places

What is so appealing about abandoned places? Cyberspace abounds with photos, videos and bloggers waxing elegiac about abandoned old mills, mansions and malls.

Tim Edensor, a geography professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, studies why people like abandoned places.

He called them ‘marginal spaces filled with old and obscure objects,’ where people can see and feel things they can’t in everyday life. They’re about time, nature, mortality and disinvestment, he says.

Perhaps people like abandoned places because they feel genuine in a world full of commercial clutter and Disneyized cityscapes. Or perhaps they long for an industrial past, when manufacturing provided jobs that would support a family.

Here are six abandoned places, one in each New England state.

Remington Arms, Bridgeport, Conn.

Remington Arms, one of the many abandoned places that once made something.

You can barely swing a cat in New England without hitting an abandoned factory. They’re a sad reminder of the region’s past as an industrial powerhouse. The old plants stand as silent witnesses to the impact of trade deals, tax incentives and government policies rewarding finance over manufacturing.

New England’s once-enormous textile industry began to move south around the turn of the 20^th century in search of cheap land and labor. A similar fate befell the high-tech industry that sprang up after World War II.

Factories that made products for the military continued to thrive, however, and successive wars masked manufacturing’s decline. Remington Arms serves as a prime example.

Eliphalet Remington founded the company in 1816 in New York. He sold it in 1888 to a company that also owned the Union Metallic Cartridge Co. in Bridgeport and the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. of New Haven.

Remington made arms for France, Britain, Russia and the United States during World War I. During the Great Depression, it began making ammunition, and it made the Springfield bolt-action rifle for the U.S. government during World War II.

Remington’s Bridgeport factory expanded in 1915. At one point it was called ‘the greatest small arms and ammunition plant in the world.’ At its height, Remington Arms employed more than 17,000 workers.

Remington Arms closed its Bridgeport plant in 1986.

Today the abandoned Remington Arms plant still sits at 812 Barnum Ave. in Bridgeport, though plans call for its demolition.

Since workers were killed there, it is said to be haunted.

Abandoned Locomotives, The Allagash, Maine

One of the ghost locomotives in the Allagash wilderness.

Deep in the heart of Maine’s Allagash region sit two abandoned locomotives silently rusting in the wilderness. Only a few intrepid canoes, hikers and snowmobilers can see the hulking machines, miles from any road or railhead.

An independent logger named King Ed Lacroix, put the ghost locomotives there. He built a 13-mile railroad in the middle of the Allagash — some would call it nowhere — to haul pulpwood to Maine paper mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket. There the mills turned it into newsprint.

By 1933 the Great Depression had depressed demand for newsprint, so Lacroix abandoned the Allagash, the railroad, the rolling stock and the ghost locomotives.

By the time demand for paper picked up, trucks hauled logs more efficiently than railroads.

Today the abandoned places that Ed Lacroix left are part of the remote and scenic Allagash Wilderness Waterway protected by the State of Maine.

Abandoned Bear Pens, Boston

Bear pens, among Boston’s odder abandoned places.

Abandoned bear pens in Boston? Yup. They’re part of Zoo New England, formerly the Franklin Zoo in Franklin Park.

Frederick Law Olmsted designed an open plan zoological park surrounded by the larger park, also designed by Olmsted. The free zoo was a huge hit when it opened in 1912. Millions came each year. Then came the depression and the decline of the wild zoo.

Bears roamed freely (well, freely-ish) in a large stone enclosure at the bottom of a grand stone staircase. Large bas-reliefs of bears still stand amid the decaying cages.

Bears before their pens became abandoned places. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

In 1958, a city commission took over the zoo and tried to figure out how to revitalize it. They built a fence around the wild menagerie and charged admission for it. The bear pens, hard to tear down, and a badger enclosure, were simply left outside to rot.

They appear in the book and film Mystic River, where a murder victim was found in the pits.

More photos here.

Beech Hill Estate, Dublin, NH

Beech Hill Estate. Even mansions can be abandoned places.

Just because the National Park Service lists a building on the National Register of Historic Places doesn’t mean it’s been preserved. Such is the case with Beech Hill Estate in Dublin, N.H., as it also makes the list of abandoned places.

Noted architect Charles Platt designed the large Georgian Revival manor house for his sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Francis Jencks of Baltimore. Like other wealthy Victorians, they fled the hot cities along the Eastern Seaboard for the summer colony along Dublin Lake. Platt designed several other mansions for the Dublin summer colony, but none so large as the Beech Hill Estate. A prominent landmark, the house has a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside.

Built in 1902-03, the house changed hands before becoming the guest house for a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in 1949. Though it remains in private hands, the owners abandoned the house in the 1980s and it shows plenty of signs of neglect. The surrounding property is now conservation land with public hiking trails.

Abandoned Kmart, Cranston, R.I.

Cranston’s abandoned Kmart. Dead retail space make up a lot of abandoned places these days.

The company that incorporated as S.S. Kresge in 1916 had 85 U.S. stores. In 1962, the company had grown to hundreds of discount stores and took on the name Kmart.

By 2000, Kmart peaked with 2,171 stores in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.

Then shopping malls started to die, Kmart bought Sears and began to shut down stores. In Rhode Island, both Kmart and Sears stores closed in Warwick, Woonsocket, South Attleboro, Swansea and nearby Fall River in Massachusetts.

In August 2017, the company announced the closing of Rhode Island’s last Kmart in Cranston.

Abandoned Interstate 189, Burlington, Vt.

I-189, one of Vermont’s abandoned places.

Once the Federal Highway Administration planned to build an interstate from Exit 13 on I-89 in Burlington, Vt., to the industrial waterfront where it would service freight carriers. But then a toxic barge canal stopped highway construction just beyond the US Route 7 interchange, only 1.488 miles from its beginning.

About half a mile of unfinished highway remained, though, so Jersey barriers prevented traffic on the orphaned stretch of pavement.

And then industry disappeared. By the 1980s Burlington’s commercial activity mainly involved tourism, so transportation officials abandoned plans to finish I-189, at least for a while.

In 2012, federal highway planners came up with a new plan to extend I-189 to funnel traffic from Route 7 to downtown. Opposition to the plan halted construction, and the abandoned pavement serves as a pedestrian walkway for curious explorers.

Images: Remington Arms by Eric Kilby; Franklin Park Bear Dens By Ekmall – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29727050; Beech Hill Estate By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25650567; abandoned Kmart by JJBers Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0); abandoned interstate by Doug Kerr Attribution Share-Alike 2.0. This story last updated in 2023.

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The Unmaking of Rhode Island’s Manville Jenckes Mills

In 1923, Senator Henry Lippitt decided it was time for him 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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You Don’t Have To Be Italian To Love RI Chicken Family Style

Chicken family style evolved in Northern Rhode Island during the Great Depression, and even today people will drive for miles and wait in long lines for the cheap, hearty dinner.

Served in restaurants as an all-you-can-eat meal, chicken family style consists of roasted chicken, salad, pasta, potato and rolls. The poultry is seasoned and slow roasted until the meat falls off the bones. Chicken family style is always served in bowls at the table, never as a buffet.

So popular is chicken-family style that Yankee magazine in 1990 reported it was featured at nine out of 10 weddings and made up half of all orders in Blackstone Valley restaurants. Quahog.org argues it’s unique to nine communities within the Blackstone Valley that have large Italian-American populations. They are Burrillville. Harrisville, Woonsocket, North Smithfield, Lincoln, Central Falls, Cumberland, Glocester, Pawtucket and Smithfield.

Chicken Family Style History

The Blackstone Valley can make a strong claim to starting the Industrial Revolution with Sam Slater’s mill in 1790. The mills and factories that sprang up in the region needed cheap labor, and many Italians came per lavorare (to work) during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Rhode Island today is the most Italian state in the country, with 19 percent of the population claiming Italian descent.

Chicken family style restaurants began in northern Rhode Island in the 1930s, because Italian chicken farmers had more chickens than they could sell. So the farmers and their wives opened small restaurants that sold chicken dinners. The Great Depression ended, but the restaurants didn’t.

In Woonsocket, the Pavoni family used to host bocce games on weekends for friends and family. Mama Pavoni, the story goes, came up with the inexpensive meal of chicken with rosemary and olive oil, later adding pasta, salad and French fries.

The Bocce Club. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

A Pavoni stepdaughter Mary Ann Delgado Tavernier, and her husband, “Tivvy,” eventually opened a small restaurant in the basement. They served chicken family style for 65 cents and called the restaurant the Bocce Club.

One patron recalled that after World War II, the Bocce Club served meals in the kitchen by reservation only. People knew about it by word of mouth, and it took weeks to get to the top of the waiting list. He called it the real beginning of chicken family style.

The Bocce Club expanded and expanded, offering take-out as well. It set a record one Mother’s Day for serving about 2,100 guests.

Worth the Wait

Gene Wright supplied chickens for the Bocce Club, and in the early 1950s he began holding outdoor chicken dinners for the Knights of Columbus. He ran them out of his garage on his farm in Harrisville. He did so well that in 1954 he opened a restaurant called Wright’s Farm Restaurant.

Wright’s Farm Restaurant. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

A Providence Journal reviewer in 1989 wrote that he sat next to a couple who drove 52 miles from Charlestown, Mass., every Sunday to eat at Wright’s. Today, Wright’s has seating for 1,200, but can squeeze in 1,400 for special events.

Other restaurants where you can get chicken family style include the Village Haven in North Smithfield, the Embassy House and the Broaster House in Woonsocket and the Lodge Pub in Lincoln.

With thanks to Edible Rhody and Quahog.org. This story was updated in 2023.

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Remembering the 1978 Blizzard

In Connecticut they called it ‘Storm Larry.’ But to anyone old enough to remember, the words ‘1978 blizzard’ conjure up some very snowy memories.

The 1978 blizzard started with snow during the morning of February 6. It didn’t stop for 33 hours, dumping two feet of snow on New England. Sometimes it fell as fast as four inches an hour. Parts of Boston’s South Shore and Woonsocket, R.I., got hit with the most: 54 inches.

Two feet of snow had already fallen in previous storms, causing the collapse of the Hartford Civic Center the month before.

A residential street after the 1978 blizzard in Woonsocket, R.I.

The 1978 blizzard killed about 100 people and injured about 4,500. In central and southern New England, the snowfall turned to ice at night, leaving everything covered with ice. The snow turned to rain on Cape Cod, but the wind wreaked plenty of havoc.

Wind speeds reached 79 mph at Logan Airport, 92 mph at Chatham Weather Station on Cape Cod, and unofficial reports said wind gusts exceeded 100 mph. From Provincetown to Eastern Maine, the northeasterly winds flooded the coast. Ten thousand people evacuated.

In Connecticut, 547 National Guardsmen cleared roads and returned people to their homes – if they still had homes. In Massachusetts, a massive effort to clear Logan’s runway allowed 200 troops from Ft. Bragg and Ft. Devens to manage the emergency response.

1978 Blizzard

The snow took New England by surprise. No one advised people to stay home. Weather forecasters knew something was coming, they just didn’t know what. Only CBS’s Harvey Leonard seemed to have a clue: “We are going to get hit hard.”

Boston City Hall

The sun and moon aligned to cause spring high tides that produced record floods. In Massachusetts, the flood destroyed 2,000 homes between Marblehead and Plymouth and damaged another 10,000. One flood tide ran into the next; with four successive flood tides, it seemed the tide never went out. The South Shore and Revere, Mass., took the hardest hits from the flood tides and towering waves.

When Mrs. Joseph Conley returned to her home in Scituate after the storm, the tide surge demolished everything but the toilet. She was lucky. A giant wave ripped five-year-old Amy Lanzikas from her mother’s arms while they were being rescued in a firefighters’ skiff. Amy and a Scituate neighbor, Edward Hart, drowned during the rescue attempt.

Some Snow Day

People left school and work early so they could get home, but the snow fell so fast that staying put would have been safer. Thousands of cars had to be abandoned on the highways. Snowdrifts trapped 3,000 cars and 500 trucks along eight miles of Rte. 128 alone. Fourteen people died of carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in their snowbound vehicles.

In New England’s cities, the 1978 blizzard stranded thousands more cars that took days to dig out. Connecticut Gov. Ella Grasso abandoned her car on the highway and walked to the Hartford Armory.

Women standing on top of a snowbank in Boston.

Boston Mayor Kevin White could only make his way home slowly from Palm Beach. He won little sympathy by complaining about the cold weather in Florida and that he ‘didn’t even swim in the pool.’

Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, on the other hand, was everywhere during the 1978 blizzard — in his cardigan sweater. He happened to be on a radio call-in show with David Brudnoy on the evening of February 6. He heard from Revere residents on the second-floor of their houses wondering whether they’d survive. As panic set in, Dukakis began to direct the emergency response on the Brudnoy show. “I am pleading with Winthrop Shore Drive residents to evacuate their homes!” he said, between calls from constituents complaining about discrimination enforcement and civil service exams.

Trapped

Many people ended up trapped in their workplaces, living off vending machine food during the 1978 blizzard. People slept in pews at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Needham, Mass., which sheltered 2,000.

In Dedham, Mass., 300 stranded motorists ate popcorn and watched movies at the Showcase Cinema just off the highway.

Hockey fans in Boston who came to watch the Beanpot college tournament got stranded at Boston Garden. For several days they ate hot dogs, slept in the bleachers and, as Boston Globe writer Dan Shaughnessey pointed out, used ‘combs and deodorant left behind by Terry O’Reilly and Wayne Cashman.’

National Guardsmen and Boston residents during the cleanup after the 1978 blizzard.

In Massachusetts, the flood tides and giant waves dragged Motif No. 1, Rockport’s famous fishing shack, into the harbor. The high tides wiped out the Outermost House on Cape Cod and submerged the Peter Stuyvesaant, a restored riverboat outside of Anthony’s Pier 4 in Boston. Motif No. 1 was restored, but the Peter Stuyvesant was not.

One of many homes damaged by the 1978 blizzard.

Disaster Area

The postal service couldn’t deliver the mail for the first time since the Great 1938 Hurricane. One letter carrier got stranded in Providence, so he slept on sacks at the post office for two nights. He had to field a phone call from a woman complaining she didn’t get her mail.

In Massachusetts, the MBTA actually performed well. On the Monday after the storm, the driving ban was still in effect. The MBTA carried 50 percent more riders than it did on an ordinary day. The load strained the equipment so that the MBTA had to curtail commuter rail service by 25 percent for two months.

In Montville, Conn., someone wrote a plea to the governor — ‘ELLA HELP’ — in the snow on a lake. Grasso saw the message from a helicopter. She then transmitted a communique through the National Weather Service asking anyone with a four-wheel-drive vehicle to volunteer. Many did. Grasso ordered all roads and highways closed to everything but emergency vehicles, and asked schools and businesses to shut down. So did Gov. Michael Dukakis in Massachusetts and Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy in Rhode Island.

President Carter declared Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut federal disaster areas.

Community

Many remember the storm fondly because it built a sense of community. In Cumberland, R.I., for example, it took 10 days to plow out the roads. People gave a neighbor money to go shopping. He hauled a sled two miles to the IGA and back with food. Cross-country skiers and snowmobilers evacuated people from cars stranded on I-95. Snowmobiles and sleds took people to hospitals.

In Hull, Mass., Lillian Willis and Joanne Fallon prepared meals in a local middle school for 1,400 people in 36-hour shifts over 10 days. On the fourth day, Willis’ shoes fell apart.

Cars stranded on Rte. 128 after the 1978 blizzard.

The storm suspended work and school, so people played in the snow. UConn students made Star Wars sculptures. Brown students jumped out of dorm windows into the snow and made an eight-foot-high snowball. But according to one report, 4 percent of the Brown students and employees needed medical attention during the 1978 blizzard. Peter Gosselin, 10, jumped off his porch roof into the deep snow, hit his head and died in a snowbank. He wasn’t found for three weeks.

Cashing In

After the 1978 blizzard ended, entrepreneurs quickly capitalized on it. One company made a board game called the Great Blizzard Travel Game, which at one point you could buy for $59 on eBay. Others made T-shirts that said, “I Survived the Blizzard of 1978.” And “We Survived the Blizzard of ‘78” bumper stickers were as ubiquitous as Michael Dukakis’ cardigan sweater.

Dukakis actually had four or five cardigans. After the 1978 blizzard, people gave him a sweater when he appeared at a speaking event. He eventually gave 40 cardigans to the Goodwill. (Rhode Islanders, by the way, were treated to the sight of Gov. Joseph Garrihy in a flannel shirt.)

To see a video of the 1978 storm, click here. This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Boston City Hall By City of Boston Archives from West Roxbury, United States – Snow near City Hall, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65429193; Boston during cleanup By City of Boston Archives from West Roxbury, United States – Workers and residents during blizzard cleanup, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65420068. Women on top of snowbank, By City of Boston Archives from West Roxbury, United States – Women on top of snow drift near City Hall, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65420027

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