"Tales from the Rock City" by Helen Schloss, 1913

Thanks to the efforts of Little Falls native Bill Simpson, a series of thirteen articles by the public health nurse and labor activist Helen Schloss is being made available at low cost, or free, to the public. Bill is the great-grandson of Irving Stacey who founded the Little Falls Felt Shoe Company in 1905.

Writing for The New York Call in 1913, Schloss describes the horrendous conditions then existing in the working class slums of the town. At that time Little Falls was home to at least twice its present population, with foreign-born immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe living in extremely crowded housing on the south side of the Mohawk River, which was itself literally an open sewer. Not only did industrial waste flow unchecked into the river but toilets were located directly over the water in many cases. Workers slept in shifts in the slums and small children did piece work for the mills in their living quarters. Schloss decries the wasteful spending of the rich mill owners on the new YMCA on Jackson Street while mothers died of untreated infections on the other side of town. She was particularly affected by the fate of a small girl who fell to her death in a terribly crowded tenement.

The Russian-born Schloss came to Little Falls in April of 1912, was hired by a group of wealthy women to address the ongoing tuberculosis epidemic among the poor. She soon developed a disdain for “the good ladies” when her struggle for better housing and safer working conditions met with obstruction from their husbands. She describes her discouragement as she realizes that the workers simply cannot follow her advice on how to avoid disease., and felt that she had become only “a fad for the ladies.” By the time strike spontaneously broke out that Fall, she was isolated from both her wealthy employers and the poor whom she was so desperate to help. Shocked by Police Chief Long’s observation that all of the strikers “ought to be shot,” she helps to organize a soup kitchen, only to be jailed for inciting to riot. After two weeks in the Herkimer County lock-up, she returns to the battle which finally ended in January, 1913 with modest pay increases for the strikers.

Helen Schloss and the Little Falls strikers in jail

The articles which the young nurse wrote for the socialist newspaper provide a very individual look at the life of factory workers of a century ago. Helen Schloss is quite candid about her own doubts and weaknesses while offering very vivid descriptions of the people and environments she encounters. She later went on to join the labor battles in Paterson, New Jersey and Ludlow, Colorado. The last record of her is from 1919 when she went to Bolshevik Russia as part of a Quaker medical mission.

The Helen Schloss who appears in her own words is, in my view, only slightly different from the version of her I imagined in my 1912 novel of the strike, The Red Nurse. Her stay in the Herkimer County jail was much longer – two weeks- than I described it in the novel. If anything, she downplays her leadership role in these pages, failing to mention her part in the speaking tour with Big Bill Haywood which is well documented elsewhere.

Interestingly, she also fails to mention the key role of the other female strike leader. Matilda Rabinowitz, who similarly did not mention Helen in her own narrative, included as an appendix to The Red Nurse. The two young women were the same age, were both Russian Jewish immigrants, shared similar politics, and both went on to other labor battles of the era – but perhaps they had some kind of rivalry or simply did not get along.

The paperback version of “Tales from the Rock City” is available at cost, $4.00, and the PDF is a free download. 

My fictional version of the same events in The Red Nurse  is available at Wilderness Hill Books and Amazon paperback and kindle.

A much more fictionalized version of Helen also appears  in Mr. Dolge's Money, published this month on Amazon kindle. After fighting in the IWW battles at Paterson, New Jersey and Ludlow, Colorado, Helen joined a Quaker medical mission to Russia in 1919 and there is no  record of her after that point - In this novel she is imagined as finding a new career as a Comintern agent whose humanity soon marks her as an enemy of the Bolsheviks who so quickly subverted the socialist dream.

Greater Love: a Tale of the Underground Railroad in Little Falls, New York

Greater love than this, no man has
     -John, 15:13

Greater Love, available for $.99 on Kindle, is a new short story about the Underground Railroad in Little Falls, New York. The historical record of he activities of the Underground Railroad in that immediate area is very limited, but Richard Buckley has found evidence that there was a station at Little Falls, centered on the African Methodist Episcopal church which stood– as far as I can determine - on West Main near Furnace Street.  A leader in that congregation, Enoch Moore, was himself an escaped slave and a chief organizer of the town’s branch of the secret network that guided fugitives from the slave states all the way to freedom

Southern Exiles on their Way North by Thomas Nast, Harpers Weekly 1858

Enoch Moore appears in the story, which is set in 1853 when the Fugitive Slave Act, passed a year earlier, had unleashed legions of southern slave-catchers armed with the legal authority to pursue fugitives  anywhere in the U.S. and to deputize free citizens in the North to aid in their manhunts.  Under the Act, anyone aiding a fugitive would face a $1000 fine (at the time an enormous sum) and a six month jail sentence.  

Richard Buckley’s research makes it clear that the anti-slavery efforts in Little Falls were not confined to African Americans.  In Greater Love, two leading white citizens of the town are active in aiding fugitives:  Judge Nathaniel Benton and former congressman and attorney Arphaxad Loomis.  Loomis, who had liberated the town from the death grip of the Ellice Estate twenty years earlier,  was clearly a man of strong ideals and I believe that it corresponds with his character to imagine him as an ardent member of the Underground Railroad.

Much of the drama is set in an actual cavern which extends for an unknown distance in the vicinity of West Monroe Street and Topnotch Road.  The cavern, whose very existence has been almost completely forgotten, was known in the 19^th century as Hinman’s Hole and evidently resembles Howe Caverns in its geology, consisting of a series of tunnels and an underground stream.  It appears that the only time it was explored was in the 1840s when a group of students from the Fairfield Academy descended into its dangerous depths. (The cave also probably resembles Schroeders Pants Cave in Dolgeville where cave explorer James Mitchell lost his life in 1965)

Hinman’s Hole is depicted in the story as a refuge for a family of fugitives who are being closely pursued by a band of southern slave-catchers. The possibility that the cave was actually used as such a hiding place is in the category of myth.

What is very true is that the East-West route from Troy to Rochester was an important branch of the Underground Railroad during the 1840s and 50s. Frederick Douglass in Rochester and Harriet Tubman in Auburn played a major part in the final stage of moving thousands to Canada.  Another, less well-known former slave and anti-slavery leader was the Rev. JermainWesley Loguen, who was educated at the Oneida Institute near Utica and centered his activities in Syracuse. According to Richard Buckley, Rev. Loguen had visited the AME Zion church in Little Falls. 

 

          Jermain Wesley Loguen                

Louguen, who escaped slavery in Tennessee. spoke eloquently against the Fugitive Slave Act and had been helping fugitives for many years. In his memoir he describes an 1839 escape in Syracuse when a slavemaster named Davenport came north with what appeared to be his wife, infant child, and older daughter Harriet. The older daughter was a slave, despite her white appearance, and Davenport’s intent was to sell her for $2500 to a local man “for the worst of purposes.”  The citizens of Syracuse sprang into action and spirited her off to Canada and the city remained strong in the anti-slavery cause through  the next two decades.

           

Stephen and Harriet Myers House , Livingston Ave. Albany

 Anti-slavery feeling also ran high in the Capital District where Stephen Myers assisted in setting the fugitives on the east-west route.  Troy was the scene of a famous and successful effort to forcibly free a runaway, Charles Nalle, from the custody of slave-catchers.  Harriet Tubman, who happened to be in the area, took a leading role in breaking Nalle out of jail in an 1860 episode which gained national attention and inflamed secessionist sentiment just before the Civil War.

Plaque Commemorating the 1860 rescue   of Charles Nalle on State Street in Troy

Amsterdam was also an active center, with shoemaker Chandler Barrett providing refuge. People in a number of very rural Mongomery County hamlets, including Ford’s Bush, Fonda’s Bush and Ames, are said to have sheltered fugitives and helped them on their way.

 Engraving of the Erie Canal at Little Falls, 1839










The fugitives probably made most of the journey on foot. The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, was possibly used but canal boats were mule-drawn and proceeded at no more than a walking pace. 

The world’s first regularly scheduled steam railroad had opened between Schenectady and Albany in  1831 and within ten years it was possible to travel all the way to Niagara by train, and many fugitives seem to have used the railroad.  However, the influx of southern slave-catchers after 1852 probably drove many  fugitives back to foot travel, possibly through rural regions far from the main travel routes of the Mohawk Valley. Buckley mentions the role of Zenas Brockett, whose farm was in Manheim, and that farm becomes a destination in mentioned in the story.

It is certainly safe to assume that many tense moments occurred in and near Little Falls as fugitives were secretly moved from one refuge to another.  Resisting slavery in this way became a federal felony in 1852 and the risks to liberty and reputation were high; it is not surprising that little to no record of such resistance has been passed down.  The feelings of Northern whites about slavery were divided, with abolitionism a minority view throughout the 1850s.  The Ladies Aid Society of Little Falls might organize an ice cream social to benefit the AME Zion church, as they did according to Buckley, but if leading citizens like Arphaxad Loomis directly assisted in hiding fugitives, they might well have concealed their violations of  law.

Arphaxad Loomis in later life

And if slave-catchers from the South mysteriously vanished in Little Falls, as they do in this story, their disappearance might well have been concealed by the strongly anti-slavery political leaders of the village.

Greater Love can be purchased exclusively on Kindle for $.99.

Recommended reading:

Unique Place, Diverse People; The Social and Political History of Little Falls, New York by Richard Buckley:

Available at the Little Falls Historical Society, 39 South Ann Street, Little Falls NY 13365


The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, a Narrative of Real Life by Jermain Wesley Loguen