In the Shadow of the Dam by Elizabeth M. Sharpe

Author:Elizabeth M. Sharpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

While Fred waited, he worked on his father’s farm and for Warner cleaning up the button mill lot. Fred prepared himself for the worst, confiding in his brother: “If Warner don’t start here, I don’t know what I shall probably go away from here.”

Skilled workers like John Coogan who owned their own homes were also concerned. If the factories that employed them didn’t reopen, they wouldn’t be able to resell their homes, even if they could afford to repair them, and move to another job. At age thirty-seven, Coogan, who had been recruited from Ireland by Joel Hayden Sr. to work at the brass mill, had made enough to buy his family a house in Skinnerville. His house may have been heavily damaged in the flood, and he now stood to lose his job. If the brass mill did not reopen, he would have to abandon any plans he might have made to send his children, who ranged in age from five to fourteen, to school, and instead move the family to a place where most of the family could work.

Coogan’s neighbor, widow Sarah Wrisley, needed the factories to rebuild too. At fifty-four, she rented part of her home to a female silk-mill worker, who gave Wrisley an income and companionship. Wrisley also rented out her fields to local farmers. But if the silk mill were gone, she would have no boarders, and without a factory population, local farmers might not need her fields to grow food for factory workers.

Some survivors who couldn’t wait for the mills to rebuild moved near friends or relatives who were able to provide support. Others considered newspaper ads that beckoned them to relocate out west where they could “buy a farm wholly on credit” in Nebraska. But in the immediate aftermath of the flood, most villagers felt that waiting for the mills to rebuild was the best option.

Deciding to remain in the valley was an emotional issue as well as an economic one. Like other New Englanders, Mill Valley villagers were sentimental about their home villages, drawn to civic, social, and church activities, good neighbors, a small scale that lent security and familiarity, and a heritage of self-sufficiency. It was no coincidence that many of the biggest donors to the Mill River Relief Fund were local men, like the Snow brothers, who had moved to Boston or New York but maintained strong family ties to the valley. Banker Luther Bodman of Northampton still retained the “old paternal acres” at Williamsburg that had been in his family for over a century. If survivors had to start over someplace to rebuild their lives, it might as well be in a place they knew and were known in. In the 1870s, when the nation was expanding in overwhelming ways—bigger cities, more people, larger mills, and more immigrants—it was a comfort to think one could hold on to a small, familiar place.

Hayden’s plans for rebuilding, announced the day after the flood, set the tone for the valley. The next day, he had contracted Emory C.

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