Life At The Mill

The little houses shown a couple of weeks ago were all owned by the same company that ran the neighboring mills. Workers paid their wages back to the mill owners for rent and food. Work weeks could easily extend over 70 hours, and children often left school for mill jobs before their 12th birthday.

The houses were built right next to the mills because the owners wanted to keep a close eye on their employees. This staircase most likely was rebuilt over the path of a few hundred yards that workers walked at dawn and dusk six days a week back and forth from home to work.

The mills border a stream that was used to generate power until steam and then electricity were harnessed. Flour may have been produced by the first mill, but before long the workers were producing huge amounts of textiles.

A vast amount of dust was produced during the spinning of thread and then weaving and cutting of cloth. And the dust could catch fire easily — at least one original mill from the 1840s burned down, and the oldest buildings now date to the 1870s.

At some point long ago this wrought iron fire escape was added, possibly in response to a disaster like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, although you would hope that the mill owners were a little more progressive thinking than that.

Although the building designs are mostly utilitarian, it’s a sign of the times that the builders still put in elements that weren’t strictly functional — towers, cupolas, and fancy windows.

It’s hard to imagine that workers noticed any of this after a few long weeks working there. But you can imagine that these mills made a powerful impression on anyone visiting from the same class as the owners and operators. They were signalling that they had the money to go beyond pure functionality.

New Uses

The First World War meant sudden changes. First the war meant huge increases in demand from Europe, and then men joining the military meant remaining workers were in higher demand. And the great influenza pandemic led to even more worker shortages. For a time, workers were able to demand higher wages and shorter hours — “only” 55 hours a week.

But by the 1920s, owners struck back, and began pressuring for worker concessions. Even though the 1920s were a boom time and workers had new opportunities in fast growing manufacturing industries, textile mills were focused on lowering wages. Workers at these mills went on strike, and the owners retaliated by shutting down and moving operations to deep South states.

Unlike the bloody strikebreaking led by the owner of the Gilded Age mansion whose photos I posted a few months ago, this strike ended without murder, and workers “just” lost jobs. Eventually, most workers found jobs in other industries or worked for smaller companies. The mill company sold off the little company houses, and eventually the empty mills found new uses as offices, workshops, restaurants, and retail.

One neighborhood Methodist church that was founded in the 1870s and originally served the mill workers was sold recently to a business. A hint of its new purpose can be seen in the electrical boxes on the right of this photo.

The church is now owned by a solar energy company, and you can see the panels they have installed on the south facing roof in this photo, in part to power the office and in part to promote their work.

But the most striking change in the neighborhood took place to the mansion of the former mill owners. They lived for decades in this large house within a short distance of both the worker housing and the mills in order to keep a close eye on both capital and labor.

But after the last owner sold the mill and left the area, the house became lodging for unwed pregnant girls and women.

As we all know, for centuries society have shamed a girl or woman for being pregnant without a husband. Families would try to dodge being wrapped up in the shame by hiding the mother until the baby was born, and then the baby was sent away forever. Too often, the mother was the victim of incest, rape, or coercion.

The conversion of this house was an attempt to slightly address the problem — often pregnant women were simply thrown out of their homes and left to live on the street. But there wasn’t much effort to give women and girls the ability to control their lives before or after pregnancy.

The house has now been converted to apartments, but for decades it existed as a highly compartmentalized world of its own.