Rhode Island - Day 16 - Woonsocket

Fishermen’s Memorial State Campground

Tuesday, 16 October 2018

I knew those winds last night were strong: the news today said gusts got up to 52 mph in Newport.  Good thing we’re not right on the beach.

today's route

On the radio this morning I learned that Rhode Island Public Radio has gotten a little cutesy and is now calling itself The Public’s Radio.   It’s no longer even identifying as public radio.  Nope, it’s the Public’s radio.  Kind of clever the first few times I heard it, but now it just sounds dumb, as my ever-tactful mother would say.  Oh well.  I don’t live here.

Thanks to my good friend Deb and her comments from a couple of weeks ago, I decided to go to Woonsocket today and visit the Museum of Labor and Culture.  I’d thought about going anyway but might not have made the effort without her prompting.  She was right.

I had to go to Woonsocket anyway because it’s one of the largest cities in Rhode Island, which isn’t really saying much but still -

Turns out it’s a charming town, obviously an old mill town – it’s easy to see the houses that once held workers, and some of the mill buildings are still there.  It’s in one of those that the museum is located.

I had trouble finding it though, even though it was on the main street, because I was concentrating on the traffic patterns and on not getting lost and didn’t have time to notice it as I went past.  When I figured it out, I stopped in a residential neighborhood to walk the dogs, and got more than just a dog walk in.

First I noticed this emblem embedded in the sidewalk.  That dates the still perfectly good (though definitely worn) sidewalk to nearly 90 years old.  I won’t look that good at that age, sadly.

Just around the corner I saw this lovely house.  There were quite a few in the area but I really liked the detail on this one.

A very short distance farther down the block was a miscellaneous church – I think it was Catholic – that looked relatively stunning.  I saw quite a few others in town that were as elaborate as this one and tell me that at one time there were a lot of craftsmen that came here, probably from Europe, don’t you think?

Across the street from the museum is the Woonsocket Falls Dam.  This dam was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers after a devastating flood in 1955 and is apparently functioning just fine still.  The falls have been used as a power source since 1666 (!) when a sawmill was set up here.  Other businesses set up in the area to use the river’s power, but it wasn’t until 1810 that a textile mill (the Social Manufacturing Co.’s) became the first to use the power on a large scale.

The Blackstone River starts in Worcester MA and, in its 46-mile run into Narragansett Bay, it descends 438’ so it’s one of the most powerful in the country.  Woonsocket Falls alone has a 30’ drop, which is why it’s such a good power source.  (Are a falls an “it” or a “them”?)

The Museum of Labor and Culture is aptly named as that’s what’s in it.  And it’s far more interesting than the name makes out.  Here are some of the things I learned:

• The US Industrial Revolution began in the Blackstone River Valley when, in 1790, Samuel Slater opened the Awkright Spinning Mill.  It still stands down the road in Pawtucket RI.

As mills began to open, the local labor supply grew seriously insufficient.  Beginning in the 1840s, factories started recruiting in Canada, coinciding with Canada’s increasing economic problem. French-Canadian workers began arriving in the US, especially in New England.

• The labor situation worsened during the Civil War when all able-bodied men left the mills to go fight the war; factories increased their recruiting efforts.
• Canada by no means took this situation lying down and began repatriation efforts.  However, in 1872, New England mills paid $1.50/day while Montreal’s paid only 55¢ so people just kept on coming.
• By 1900, a staggering one-quarter of Quebec’s population had moved to the US; Rhode Island had the largest proportion of immigrants in the US and Woonsocket had almost 50% of RI’s portion.   I loved the way these families looked - not your typical family portraits.

 

• The McKinley Tariff of 1890 provided incentive for French and Belgian wool and worsted mills to relocate plants to the US to avoid paying the tariffs.
• Woonsocket has been best known for its textiles, but it also had factories that made such varied items as glass Christmas ornaments, baseballs, toilet brushes, and soles for Keds sneakers.
• The Alice Mill was established in 1889 and became the world’s largest rubber mill.  It operated for more than 100 years producing rubber products from boots to rafts until, in 2011, a fire broke out that was so hot it melted the steel structure, with smoke so thick it could be seen on weather radar. 
  
  
  
• As Southern textile mills increased production after the Civil War, mill owners in the Blackstone Valley saw their profits diminishing; to counter this, they increased working hours and decreased wages, while raising the speed of the machines so workers had to work even harder.  To distract workers from listening to union organizers and Labor Day parades, mill owners encouraged company picnics and set up baseball teams for the workers.
• As these working conditions worsened, workers got little support from their parish priests; on the contrary, the priests told workers to live with these conditions because they’d be rewarded in the next life.  Workers didn’t much buy that explanation. 
  
  
  
• Unions started forming. In Woonsocket the largest was the Independent Textile Union (ITU), started by local mulespinners (see photo for explanation).
  
  
  
• In the 1880s, mill owners formed the Slater Club, to provide mutual support against labor unions.  For some years, this combined approach worked for them, but by the 1930s the bosses couldn’t agree on a common approach, allowing labor unions to gain strength.
• Unions saw concentrated capital as a threat to liberty and unamerican; they embraced nationalism as a way to unite the otherwise very disparate immigrant groups.   The 1934 nationwide Textile Strike heightened class consciousness and awareness of power inequities, leading to further growth of the ITU and gaining power for New Deal politicians.
• WWI saw a rise in patriotism [jingoism might be more accurate] throughout the country and increasing doubt about the loyalty of immigrants to the US.  This feeling was exacerbated because immigrants so often kept to their own national group and didn’t bother to learn English.
• In 1924 Congress ended open immigration and imposed new limits favoring older groups (e.g. English and Irish) over newer groups (e.g. Italian, Polish and Russian), and usually denied entrance from non-Western countries.
• By the 1950s, McCarthyism had taken hold and conservatives reclaimed the US flag from labor unions, weakening their positions, which were further weakened by changing industrial machinery.

Does any of this sound familiar?  It may give us an idea of what’s further in store for our country.

I’ve probably made all this information sound dry and boring, but the exhibits in the museum were absolutely not.  It was all very well done and I found it all fascinating.  I’ve been learning how important factories – especially textiles – were to the growth of the country ever since I started seeing so many mill towns in Pennsylvania, continuing into New York and New England.  That’s just not something we have in Texas, or Washington or Alaska for that matter.

After the museum, I just had to stop at Wright’s Dairy Farm and Bakery again, seeing as how it was practically around the corner.  Silly not to, actually.  More good milk and wonderful pastries.

I was really lucky on the highway (since I drove the entire length of the state, going and coming): I saw 3 major traffic blockages – all on the other side of the highway from me, and the worst I had to deal with was a school bus, which isn’t something that bothers me, not having deadlines.