Stories from Fall River's mills: Child labor, hellish conditions, jobs and spindles galore

Minders. Winders. Weavers. Doffers. Mule spinner operators. Ring spinner operators. The job titles come at us from another world, that barefoot non-English speaking Fall River of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the big, elephant gray mills shook with the thunder of the Industrial Revolution.

David Jennings, local historian, presented a bit of that world Wednesday at the Heritage State Park theater.

The first slide up was a boy not too big, standing in the middle of the street, next to a pile of wood. No age is a given, but the kid looks about 7.

“Scavenging for wood, downtown Fall River, 1916,” the caption read.

“You could be 8 years old and start working in the mill,” Jennings said. “The owners felt they were doing these kids' families a favor”

The favor, in the beginning, was a work week over 60 hours long and fairly frequent injury.

Jennings showed slides of kids with bandaged fingers and hands.

The result of the “favors” done to so many families was a river of cotton cloth and a river of money for the few who owned the mills.

“We were second only to Manchester, England in the amount of cloth we produced,” Jennings said. “One million spindles.”

Jennings cited a book he read on conditions in the mills.

“One little girl got her hair caught in the machinery and it took out a piece of her skull,” he said. “They didn’t send her to the hospital, they sent her home.”

Jennings stood just in back of a table loaded with mill artifacts, including bobbins and spindles, a chunk of Fall River granite, and a branch bearing the cotton bolls that were picked, baled and shipped to Fall River.

He held up the iconic tin lunch pail that mill workers carried to work, and that children often carried to the mills with meals made and sold by their mothers, or with chow mein for the Catholic Church’s then-obligatory meatless Fridays.

The bales were opened and the cotton was prepared on top floors of the mills, Jennings said. While most mills were built of granite, some were built of brick, particularly those far from the city’s quarries, because the huge granite blocks needed to construct mills couldn’t travel from the quarries on the hill down to the waterfront, not in the days when those blocks were pulled by oxen and draft horses.

Pictures of workers, overalled, sometimes shoeless, standing between long rows of machines.

Jennings said mills kept the windows closed and the humidity high, so the threads wouldn’t break. The result was a hell box of a work place, Jennings said, but it was a place to work, and nearly everyone in Fall River had some connection to a mill.

The availability of mill jobs left Fall River with a couple of legacies, one of which is the mill buildings themselves, re-purposed or empty, victims of fires that have been frequent in the city’s history. Another was a lack of regard for education.

“The attitude was you didn’t need an education because you were going to work in the mill for the rest of your life,” he said.