For National Textiles Day: A Voyage Home

 

May 3 is National Textiles Day. 

To say that this topic is outside of my ordinary beat is to put it mildly. But I had a very insightful experience while vacationing with my son last year, kicking around old haunts. Admittedly, it was the farthest thing from an original revelation. It was more like being a fish in an aquarium and suddenly noticing the water for the first time. Or, rather, a fish who emerged from the aquarium and noticed the water he used to live in. 

Like many (I hope) I'd certainly been taught about the importance of the textile industry to New England, America and the World when I was in school. But let's be real: that was really so much educational spinach. If you're Bart Simpson, you want to visit the CHOCOLATE museum on a field trip, not look at loom contraptions. On the other hand, at the stage I'm at now, something else "looms" as well, and that's senior citizenship. This stage of life feels very much like having attained a higher peak so you can a better look down in the valley. And as my son and I visited all of these places connected with my childhood, the truth sank in that most of these towns wouldn't even have existed without the textiles that were manufactured there and kept people employed. Every town had a mill without which there mightn't have been a town. It was one of those moments where you realize that something you thought has nothing to do with you...has EVERYTHING to do with you. 

As it happens we did this little junket (fittingly) last Labor Day Weekend. When I realized that a sort of theme had emerged, I decided to sit on the photos 'til today. Happy National Textiles Day.

We were staying with friends in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which happens to be the home of Slater Mill, which I first (and last) visited on a school field trip when I was about six years old. Its founder Samuel Slater (1768-1835) is often credited with jump-starting the Industrial Revolution in America by memorizing some plans for a mill he had seen in England, smuggling the information back to the United States. This is more like craftiness...or guile...or theft...than it is like, oh, invention, but Yankees take a weird pride in that kind of sharp practice. It's what P.T. Barnum was all about. Back then mills were built next to rivers and and powered by water wheels. At the instigation of merchant Moses Brown (a distant relative of mine) Slater built his mill on the Blackstone River in 1793. 

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Slater Mill was the site of America's first industrial labor strike -- precisely two centuries ago, in 1824. Most of the workers at that time were females, for they had been the ones who used domestic looms in the home. At any rate...as AI puts the fear of God into us all, I've thought a lot about the early days of the labor movement. Machines have been replacing humans in the workplace on a large scale for over two centuries now. Conceivably it's going to continue and become even worse. We've almost reached the point where there'll be no striking workers...because there will be no work. It's going to be 8 billion people twiddling their thumbs, I guess? Or going insane, maybe? Maybe not. 

Nearby Providence contains enough historic mills to fill a book, though on this particular trip, the only one we spent any time in particularly was just over the border in Cranston. We enjoyed a couple of manly mugs at the Buttonwoods Brewery, located in former headquarters of the United Lace and Braid Company Factory, est. 1912. Same year, one notes, as the "Bread and Roses" strike of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Such strikes are what drove a lot of immigrant workers (Italians, French Canadians) to my hometown. It's a little outside our timeline but does reinforce the industrial narrative!

Due west of Providence is my mom's hometown of Putnam, Connecticut. That's where you will find the Cargill Falls Mill, built 1806. 

Another digression, but a rewarding one. In a 2019 post, I recorded my visit to the grave of my 5th Great Grandfather Jonathan Bugbee in western New York, near Chautauqua. He was originally from the area around Putnam, of course. I am descended from his daughter, who remained in Connecticut. Anyway, on this recent visit, I was delighted to come across this on the main drag:

Howdy, cousin! 

In the 1940s, my mom moved from Putnam to South County, Rhode Island, where her favorite cousins lived, and settled in the twin villages of Peace Dale and Wakefield, which is where I grew up. 

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Yep! That's the son! 

The Peace Dale Mill was built by the town founders the Hazard Family circa 1802, and it kept growing and evolving. For most of the town's existence, everyone who lived there worked in the mill, and in the old noblesse oblige tradition The Hazards built amenities for them, mostly constructed out of granite from local quarries: 

Hazard School (the middle school when I attended, although it was originally the high school)...

...the Peace Dale Library (where I spent a downright sick amount of time in my late teens)...

...the Neighborhood Guild, which is the town's recreation center. And many others along similar lines. 

I was delighted to discover that Whaler's Beer, which I had enjoyed on recent trips to Newport, is brewed at the Peace Dale Mill complex. 

The Wakefield Mill, a ten minute walk from my childhood home, is much newer than the one in Peace Dale, dating to 1845. Today, Wakefield is the much more vibrant of the two villages, but it is quite a bit younger than Peace Dale. As the sign above the door tells, the mill in Wakefield now houses Hera, a feminist art gallery that's existed in my town for about a half century. Wakefield has a theatre, too! Your correspondent was a very lucky scout to be born where he was. 

Which prompts another brief detour. While it is my mother to whom I owe the lineage that puts me near these towns and their mills, my father's story is just as relevant. He grew up on a cotton farm in Tennessee near the Alabama border. When his dad enlisted in the Navy during World War Two he was stationed in Quonset, Rhode Island, and just decided to settle there with his wife and five children. They lived in the mill village of Shannock, which is on the Pawcatuck River (sic--confusingly, the region has both a Pawcatuck and a Pawtucket). There had been mills in Shannock since the early 19th century but the factory complex where my dad's whole family worked had been built in 1901, and was still owned by the same family, the Clarks. Ironically, my dad's family had left the South, as so many did, for what politicians call "good paying factory jobs" up North...but meanwhile back home, after the war, dad's part of the South became a textile manufacturing center, making use of local cotton. In other words, my family could have just stayed home and gotten very similar work without the displacement. But of course, in that case I never would have been born.

We return you now to the Wakefield walking tour with my son. In this photo he stands in front of what used to be the town's only department store, until national chains like Woolworth's at the local mall drove them out in the 1970s. The Kenyons are one of the area's principal families. Why, there's even a historic Kenyon Mill (though it's a grist mill). I have many Kenyon relatives. Hi, Kenyons! Anway, nowadays this old store houses....wait for it...The Rhode Island Weaving Center. 

We popped in to have a looksee when I was there in the hopes we might run into my new daughter-in-law's grandmother, who runs the joint. Like my wife and my niece, she is a Carolyn, and I always feel you can't have too many Carolyns. Anyway...you see how the textile theme kind of knit (ha! I said "knit!") the whole trip together. It was nothing I intended. It was just...there. 

In Utopia, of course, activities like weaving or a million other options are what the human race will be doing in the post-AI world: peaceful past-times that provide satisfaction and pleasure. Life was kind of like that prior to the Industrial Revolution. Yes, it could be harrowing and even deadly before the coming of the machines. But, so are, oh assembly lines and 16 hour work days and low pay and soul-deadening repetition. Who wouldn't rather be a craftsperson than a cog in a machine? I'm pretty sure that's what people hoped the 21st century would look like. Something to aspire to, anyway. 

I dedicate this post to my family, of course -- including my new in-laws. Okay, that about sews up this post. 

POSTSCRIPT: After posting this, I learned my old schoolfriend and room-mate Rebecca Williams made a documentary about the textile mill in her community, Swannanoah, North Carolina. It's called Blanket Town: The Rise and Fall of an American Mill Town. Learn about it here.