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    Rhode Island's Mill Villages: Simmonsville, Pocasset, Olneyville, and Thornton
    Rhode Island's Mill Villages: Simmonsville, Pocasset, Olneyville, and Thornton
    Rhode Island's Mill Villages: Simmonsville, Pocasset, Olneyville, and Thornton
    Ebook217 pages30 minutes

    Rhode Island's Mill Villages: Simmonsville, Pocasset, Olneyville, and Thornton

    By Joe Fuoco

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    About this ebook

    In 200 rare historical photos, Rhode Island's Mill Villages fascinating history comes to life.


    Some 200 rare and historic photographs are coupled with detailed and informative captions that immerse the reader in the daily lives and environments of these communities. In the years surrounding the Civil War, European immigrants and textile workers came to Rhode Island to work in the state's mills. Soon, villages and neighborhoods formed around these mills, creating unique and closely knit communities in which the wealthy families who owned and operated the mills lived side by side with those who labored for them. The photographs presented here offer a glimpse at the development of these familial communities that are such an integral part in the history of both Rhode Island and the United States.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMar 1, 1997
    ISBN9781439637289
    Rhode Island's Mill Villages: Simmonsville, Pocasset, Olneyville, and Thornton
    Author

    Joe Fuoco

    Joe Fuoco is a local historian, freelance writer, and the editor of the Federal Hill Gazette. In Rhode Island's Mill Villages, he continues the exploration of Rhode Island's immigrant communities that he began in his volume on Federal Hill. Through these photographs generously donated by residents of the area, he has created a volume that is sure to delight visitor, resident, and historian alike.

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      Book preview

      Rhode Island's Mill Villages - Joe Fuoco

      vanished.

      Introduction

      For over one hundred and twenty-five years mills dominated life in the little Rhode Island villages of Thornton, Simmonsville, Pocasset, and Olneyville. Nearly everybody worked in them; even those who did not benefited from their presence, for fortunes were made around the influx of people into the area, drawn by the mills.

      The mills were named for their owners, and those names were stamped forever on the villages and towns. Hundreds were employed by the mills of Simmons Upper Village, nestled near the river that overflowed and drowned the village once, more than a century ago. Small, stucco mill houses remain to tell of that era, alongside the broken shards, the shattered walls of old mills built of New England stone. Simmons Lower Village, later named Thornton, a town teeming about an intersection, possessed mills named for British Royalty, Queen Victoria of England. British Hosiery (which later became Victoria Mill) stood on a mount of the same name and was built by Charles Fletcher, who christened the village of Thornton after his own village in England. Senator James Fowler Simmons built the first textile mill here in 1835.

      The streets were laid out close to the mills, secure in their great shadows. One thing was certain: you would awaken at dawn in the tiny rooms of the row duplexes and the mills would be there. They were always there, sure and reliable. Work was a certainty. Hamlets like Frog City, named for the croaking denizens of its brooks, were the pockets of legend where folklore was nourished. There were the big, wide dirt roads that, once paved, would become Morgan (named for a mill owner), Plainfield, and Atwood Avenues. A half mile to the east were the big mills of Olneyville, the work places of thousands of immigrants, who lived on narrow, crisscrossing alley-like streets named Delaine, Aleppo, and Dike. Joining this, somewhere in between, was the village of Pocasset, with its mill and river of the same name, and its water tower still standing almost 200 feet high. In many places there were smaller, indeed tiny, factories, some no more than a floor and a few rooms—but mills nevertheless—with names like the Bag Mill, Fitch’s Factory, the Paper Box mill, etc.

      A way of life was created in the mill villages, and the people of the villages, the Italians, English, Irish, French, and Germans—everybody knew everybody—became a closeknit family. They all worked side by side in the din of mill machinery, lived side by side, gathered in yards on summer nights before bonfires to sing and talk, and went to each other’s baptisms, weddings, wakes, and funerals. Their names are carved in gray slate and New England granite, locked in time, in cemeteries at the sides of old roads, near fields, in back yards. Bosses, foremen, and mule spinners, skilled and unskilled workers of all kinds, sleep the sleep of eternity together.

      The mills were the core. My father Joe was a mill hand; his mother worked in a mill as well, along with his sister, brother, cousins, uncles, and aunts. Children worked there, too. Few were able to envision the mills ever falling silent, but when cheaper opportunities for manufacturing arose in the South, the textile businesses left. A way of life ended for people then in the mill villages. Many felt the emptiness of panic, of uncertainty. Others moved on to different jobs, passing the great, quiet, abandoned mills, remembering. Those mills that stand today have found other uses. They are flea markets, condos, and warehouses, holding kinds of businesses that have nothing to do with the great heyday of their flourishing. Some have burned to the ground, others are fragments, a wall here, a floor there, perhaps several empty rooms. But the memory of the characters who lived in the villages are alive, and the row houses have been modernized and restored. The streets still bear the old names—Pocasset, Mill, John, Myrtle Avenue, Custer, Plainfield, Atwood, Victoria Mount, Pezzullo, Walnut, Maple, Joy, School, Baker, Priscilla Lane, Angelica, Delaine, Harris, Aleppo—old names that remain intact.

      The people who worked in the mills are mostly gone, but the few that remain remember those days well. Generations have passed into memory, yet the mills stand as

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