Mill town

“ In the north, the men who built up the lumber interests of the State, who founded a mill town surrounded by the stumps of the pine forests [235] which they exploited for the prairie markets, have acquired wealth and political power. The spacious and well-appointed home of the town-builder may now be seen in many a northern community, in a group of less pretentious homes of operatives and tradesmen, the social distinctions between them emphasized by the difference in nationality. ”

“ The mill buildings went up first, on a broad space of one hundred acres levelled off for them, and then the town began to grow. That was sixteen years ago, and it has kept on growing. Every year sees a lot of new houses, of various values, and one and all well built and comely. And in all grades they are better houses than a workman, or a mill boss either, can get anywhere else in America for the same money. ”

“ John belonging to the townships should be surveyed as soon as possible and divided into 68 lots. It was also agreed that the Saw Mill, erected or in course of erection in the Township of New Town should remain the common property of all the members of the society for the space of twenty years from the date of the grant, expenses attending the building or repairing of the mill to be borne by all the proprietors of the several townships, and after the expiration of twenty years to become the property of the grantees of New Town. ”

“ In England, a concurrence of circumstances has generally led to the gradual formation of hamlets, villages, and towns. In many instances, towns have grown up in barbarous ages around a place of refuge during war; around a fortalice or castle, and more frequently around the ford over a river, where the detention of travellers has led to the establishment of a place of entertainment, a blacksmith's or carpenter's shop. A village or town never grows to any size in Canada without a saw or a grist mill, both which require a certain amount of water-power to work the machinery. ”

“ Whenever there is a river or stream available for such purposes, and the surrounding country is fertile, the village rapidly rises to be a considerable town. Frame-houses are so quickly erected, and the materials are so easily procured near a saw-mill, that, in the first instance, no other description of houses is to be found in our incipient towns. But as the town increases, brick and stone houses rapidly supplant these less substantial edifices, which seldom remain good for more than thirty or forty years. ”

“ The trouble was that the man lived in Twin Mounds, whereas we had been expecting a man and money to come from a distant point for that purpose, and had never thought of looking about home, but spent a great deal of money in sending committees away to make arrangements for a woollen mill. This circumstance, although humiliating, proved a good thing, for it taught the people that, if the town were to be built up at all, it must be by its own citizens, which knowledge was afterwards used to good advantage. ”

“ But to this the stimulus is wanting, which a large town population, connected with the rural districts by easy and unexpensive means of communication, would afford. That town population, again, does not grow up, because the few wants and unaspiring spirit of the cultivators (joined until lately with great insecurity of property, from military and fiscal rapacity) prevent them from attempting to become consumers of town produce. ”

“ In the smaller provincial towns it is customary for a labourer to own a small plot of ground outside the town. This plot he cultivates in the evening as his kitchen garden. He raises in it vegetables and fruits for the use of his family during the winter. ”

“ Elk river affords a fine water power with ten feet head. Mills were erected here in 1851. A great fire in May, 1887, destroyed mill property valued at $50,000. Since the fire a flour mill with a capacity of 250 barrels a day has been completed at a cost of $25,000. A saw mill is also in process of construction. The village has an elevator with a capacity of 10,000 bushels, 2 town halls, 3 churches, Episcopal, Free Will Baptist and Congregational; a first class school building, with rooms for four departments ”

“ Mills are mills indeed, and own no kindred with beauty. But along the slopes of the Hollow, behind and between the mill buildings, were tokens of life. Numbers of new cottages were risen, and rising, on the upper slopes of the banks, the new village even flowing over the crest of the hill upon the level land above. ”

“ The village is very scattered: on the right of the beautiful streamlet which flows silently down the valley, and runs across the road just in the centre of the village, stands an old mill; which for many a long year has been wont to throw out its murmuring sound, as the water falls over its broad and capacious wheel. On the other side of the stream, and just opposite the old mill, a few yards from the road, stands a neat, commodious, and well-built Methodist chapel, which, from the prominence of its situation, and good proportions, has often attracted the eye of the passing stranger. ”

“ A log school house, the first built in the county, was erected soon after, and the meetings were transferred to it. The population grew rapidly, being attracted by the beautiful location, and in due time there was a strong society. Under the energetic and effective labors of the Leader and his talented lady, this society was instrumental in the conversion of many souls.
In process of time a mill was built on the stream at Fall River. A fine school house was soon after erected, and the meetings removed to it, as the locality had become more central than the one on the Prairie. ”

“ Though the village mill usually—almost always—presents a pleasant picture in one's memory, a picture of cheerfulness and content, of good nature and neatness, it is not always so. I remember one mill which carries with it a sadness whenever I recall it. Not that the mill was gloomy in itself, but that the story connected with it was such as to make one sad.
The miller, whom we will call Pike, was unhappily somewhat inclined to drink. He [182] was not an intemperate man at home, far from it; and in his mill, at his work, he was always sober. ”

“ Past the melancholy flymen who linger in the broad roadway opposite the entrance to the Castle, and wear jaundiced looks as though it were years ago since they had had a fare and expect it to be years yet before they will get another, you turn to the right into Mill Lane, narrow street of ancient houses, leading down to the river and to the site of that ancient mill where the feudal lords had their corn ground. ”

“ Did the interest, any more than the good feelings, of this landlord, prevent him from destroying this remarkable creation of industry, and giving its creators cause bitterly to repent that they had ever made it? What might not be hoped from a people who had the energy and enterprise to create a flourishing town under liability to be robbed? ”

“ Here is no manufacturing in this town, or but very little, except spinning, the chief trade of the place depending upon the gentry who live there, or near it, and who cannot fail to cause trade enough by the expense of their families and equipages among the people of a county town. They have but a very small river, or rather but a very small branch of a small river, at this town, which runs from hence to Milden Hall, on the edge of the fens. ”

“ More than seventy-five families have left one mill village during the last ten years to buy farms with their savings, but this instance is rather unusual; comparatively few families return to the land. Efforts have been made to develop a community spirit, and the results are perceptible. Many mill villages are now really attractive. Scores of mills have had their grounds laid out by a landscape architect, and a mill covered with ivy and surrounded by well-kept lawns and flower beds is no longer exceptional. ”

“ With Excelsior as my future workshop I leave the mill to seek lodging in the mill village.
The houses built by the corporation for the hands are some five or six minutes' walk, not more, from the palace-like structure of the mill proper. To reach them I plod through a roadway ankle-deep in red clay dust. The sun is bright and the air heavy, lifeless and dull; the scene before me is desolate, meager and poverty-stricken in the extreme.
The mill houses are all built exactly alike. Painted in sickly greens and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil. ”

“ Nothing can be more peaceful, more secluded, more shut in; and if not wildly sublime, yet rock and wood and torrent combined to render it picturesque; a rustic bridge crossed the stream, and there, abutting against the hill side, stood the mill, and before the mill a large pleasant room for the reception of guests, for many come, especially on feast days, to dine here. ”

“ CHAPTER I THE HUT ON THE CLIFF No well informed resident of Millsburgh, when referring to the principal industry of his little manufacturing city, ever says "the mills"—it is always "the Mill."
The reason for this common habit of mind is that one mill so overshadows all others, and so dominates the industrial and civic life of this community, that in the people's thought it stands for all. ”

“ The town of Muddleton-upon-Slush, once little more than a village, has swelled to the proportions of a prosperous factory town, with its smoky chimneys, its gasometers, its rows upon rows of jerry-built houses, its new town hall, its salvation army barracks, its police station, its chapels of every conceivable denomination, to say nothing of its numerous public-houses, young men's Christian association, its baths and wash-houses, its low theatre, where questionable pieces are represented by indifferent actors to pander to the modern taste. ”

“ With all this record of fight and fire and flood, the Old Town was the reverse of strenuous. Its prevailing note was of sweetness and rest. The west wind that cut like a knife in November was soft in June as the touch of a woman’s hand. The grass was never as green in meadow; the wild blossoms that nodded on the river bank were never so sweet; nor ever did bird sing in forest or field as sang the skylark to its mate in my childhood’s home, as it soared toward the sky. ”

“ Although pleasant, green fields rimmed by distant mountains partially encircle the hill, this house near the railroad tracks is as unprepossessing as the shacks in the meanest mill village. It has no modern conveniences. ”

“ The streets are fringed with shade trees of every sort, and in midsummer the place looks like a veritable nest of green and cool bowers. The county is strictly and agricultural one; the farmers come to "town," as they call it, every Saturday; at least, hitch their horses to the iron railing that surrounds the park, and spend the day selling produce, buying dry goods, implements or other necessaries. The face of the village rarely changes ”

“ Several of the thickly settled villages spread out into equally attractive side streets. Here and there a church, a school-house, or a public building adds to the general tidy look of the place. Numerous pleasant wood roads, with a few fresh water ponds and streams, make up a variety of scenery which is certainly equal to any New England town. ”

“ The slopes are purely pastoral, with small farm-steadings scattered over them. But down in the bottom of the dale, we see the heavy stone-and-lime mill starting up from the bare landscape, with a sprawling village of mean cottages surrounding it, giving token of an industrial life totally opposite to that which is found beside the silver streams of the Tweed and its tributaries. ”

“ What the club is to the city man, and the general store or postoffice to the citizens of the country village, the mill is to the native of the backwoods.
Made to saw the little rough lumber he needs in his primitive building, or to grind his corn into the rough meal, that is his staff of life, the mill does more for the settler than this; it brings together the scattered population, it is the news center, the heart of the social life, and the hub of the industrial wheel. ”

“ These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. ”

“ During the earlier years of the Province, the discovery of the gold fields and the consequent rapid influx of population, gave such an impetus to buildings, that the town grew mushroom-like to large proportions, and wooden buildings sprang up as if by magic on all sides, with here and there a bank or store of more ornate and substantial pretensions. ”

“ So he hit upon a contrivance, a sort of lever under the roost, which, when the hens jumped upon it, opened the hives and let the bees out. After that he could lie in bed and laugh while his husbandry went on. He was the only inventor I ever knew the Old Town to turn out, unless you count in the telegrapher who came when the wires had been strung to our coast. He was a lonesome, morose man, fond of taking long walks by himself. On one of his tramps a vagrant dog attached itself to him, and the two became friends. ”

“ Where the cows had been pastured, suddenly [Pg 248] there was water, and the royalties turned out, eager to see the famed “storm-flood.” But the wind died down, and the cows went back to their own. Night found the Old Town in a blaze of light. In every window of every house stood lighted candles; the river was alive with boats carrying colored lanterns and joyous singers. Above it all a black cloud of bewildered rooks flew with loud squawks from the old Cloister to the Dom and back again, frightened out of their night’s rest, and thinking, no doubt, that the end of the world had come. ”