The Red Sweater Girls of 1912

This article appeared in the Little Falls Evening Times on June 20, 2011 and served, in part, to generate local interest in last year’s series of events commemorating  the centennial of the  great textile strike. I was inspired to re-publish it on this site after finding several more photographs of the strikers in an article in the 1912 International Socialist Review.

The primary source for my article was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings on the strike kept by a teacher, Miss Hughes, who worked in the old Jefferson Street School. Miss Hughes scrapbook is now at the Herkimer County Historical Society. Other sources include Richard Buckley’s “Unique Place, Diverse People” (Little Falls Historical Society, 2008) and Robert Snyder’s “Women, Wobblies and Workers’Rights: The 1912 Textile Strike in Little Falls, NY (New York History LXI, 1979)

Nearly a hundred years ago, two thousand mostly female textile workers went on strike in Little Falls, and the leading radicals of the era soon arrived by train to urge them on to battle. And as they marched under the red banners of the International Workers of the World, some of the women also wore red sweaters or shawls, leading opponents to deride them as “the red sweater girls.” But in contrast to the many unsuccessful labor struggles of the years just before World War I, women took over the leadership of this strike and they won. 

Young women and children were the primary work force of the textile industry that had developed in Little Falls and similar northeastern towns during the latter part of the 19^th century. Many workers had a story like that of my grandmother, Jenny McTiernan, who left school for the Gilbert knitting mill  at 13 when her father died, leaving behind a pregnant wife and  six younger children. Working conditions were abysmal and my grandmother was not shy in describing the ear-splitting noise of the machines and the sexual harassment practiced by male foremen in the mills. 

It was the death of 146 women in the Triangle Factory Fire in New York City in 1911 that finally got the New York state legislature moving on these horrendous conditions , but the reforms had unforeseen results. As soon as a law reducing the work week for women from 60 to 54 hours was enacted, the owners of the Gilbert and Phoenix knitting mills reduced the pay of women to match the shorter hours. Since the workers were already living at a near-starvation level, the women were outraged. On October 9, 1912 eighty of them spontaneously walked out of the Phoenix Mill in protest. At this point there was no organized strike, but very possibly  brutality toward the strikers by the owners and by the local police ignited a much larger walk-out, eventually including perhaps as many as a thousand workers from Phoenix and another thousand from the nearby Gilbert’s Mill.

At that time the Socialist party was quite strong in Schenectady, and party activists came by train on October 13. A number of them were immediately arrested for making speeches in Clinton Park adjacent to the Phoenix Mill on what is now Canal Place. George Lunn, the Socialist mayor of Schenectady, was arrested by Police Chief James “Dusty” Long just as he launched into a quote from Abraham Lincoln.

The rapid appearance in Little Falls of the Socialists, who were at that point becoming a major political party nationally, may have been in response to a call for help from Helen Schloss, a nurse specializing in the treatment of tuberculosis. She had been hired by the “Fortnightly Club,” an organization of wealthy women who were probably unaware of her earlier work with the Socialists in Malone, NY. When the Factory Investigating Committee, set up in response to the Triangle tragedy under the leadership of Al Smith and Robert Wagner, came to Little Falls that August, Miss Schloss had provided investigators  with graphic evidence of unsanitary conditions in the factories and tenements on the South Side.

Local authorities actively opposed the strikers, most of whom were immigrants from southern or eastern Europe. Police Chief Long made no excuses for his attempts to deny free speech and assembly rights to strikers and their supporters:  “We have a strike on our hands and a foreign element to deal with. We have in the past kept them in subjugation and mean to hold them where they belong.”

Chief Long’s efforts to silence free speech failed as socialists sent hundreds of supporters to town, leading to mass arrests beyond what the city could manage. At the same time the first organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World arrived and established committees for each factory and subcommittees for each ethnic group. By October 22 a Strike Committee was up and running, relying on democratic procedures of motions, amendments and vote counts. By the 24^th the strikers voted to affiliate with the IWW and were awarded with a charter as Local 801, the National Industrial Union of Textile Workers of Little Falls.

Marching under the banner of the IWW on October 25, the strikers paraded in a great circle around the Gilbert and Phoenix Mills. The better-paid male “American” workers of the Snyder bicycle plant attempted to attack the largely female and foreign-born strikers, but newly hired police deputies managed to keep the two sides apart.

The daily parades continued until a major clash occurred on October 30. Patrolmen and privately hired deputies, some on horseback, charged the largely unarmed pickets and many were beaten unconscious. The strikers fought back. One police officer was shot in the leg and a hired deputy was stabbed in the neck.

A running battle ensued, with the police and hired deputies pursuing strikers across the river into the South Side, where most of them lived. The police then broke into the strike headquarters at the Slovak Hall, smashed the place up, and proceeded to make mass arrests. Helen Schloss, by now considered a ringleader, was arrested a mile away. The police brought in three doctors to “examine her sanity” but she had a lawyer who soon secured her release.

 

Poster circulated on behalf of imprisoned strike leaders

Even though Ben Legere and the other male members of the Strike Committee had been arrested on October 30, and some were held for over a year, the strike continued.  Matilda Rabinowitz, a Russian-born IWW organizer, soon arrived and joined forces with Helen Schloss. Together, the two women had a largely female picket line up within a day of the mass arrests.

“Big Bill” Haywood, a founder of the IWW, arrived a few days later to organize the “Little Falls Defense League” to provide living expenses and legal support for the strikers. Haywood, Schloss and Rabinowitz set off on a speaking tour of the north east that month to raise the funds that kept the strike going into the winter months. The anarchists Carlo Tresca and Filippo Bocchino also came to Little Falls to help organize the Italian-speaking strikers.

As Christmas neared, the IWW won a public relations victory by announcing that the children of strikers would be sent away for the holidays to join Socialist families in Schenectady. With the newspapers publishing reports of the embattled mothers and their children, Albany politicians were moved to act. Just after Christmas, the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration held three days of public hearings in Little Falls.

The strike ended on January 3, 1912 on terms set by the Board that were favorable to the strikers: (1) The companies were to reinstate all workers (2) There was to be no discrimination against  strikers (3) All men and women working 54 hours are to receive pay formerly paid for 60 hours.

However, the victory was a transient one. The Phoenix Mills closed seven years later and moved its operations to North Carolina, and by 1930, city population had dropped by 2000. The Phoenix building, later occupied by the Allegro shoe factory, was eventually replaced by a parking lot, and Gilberts has been closed for years.

And what became of the organizers and those they led to victory?

The radical organizers moved on to the next industrial battle, and there were plenty just before World War I. However, the IWW’s attempt to replicate its success in the larger textile town of Paterson, New Jersey a year later met with failure when the silk mill workers were starved into submission.  Bill Haywood, Carlo Tresca, Matilda Rabinowitz and other leading radicals of the age all tried to rally the workers but to no avail. Unlike the Little Falls conflict, there was no state board to step in and impose terms.

Considering its success, it is not surprising that Haywood, who later fled to the USSR, described the Little Falls strike in glowing terms in the pages of the International Socialist Review, where he provides details on the roles of Helen Schloss and Matilda Rabinowitz, as well as on the support provided by Helen Keller. In her unpublished memoir, however, Matilda Rabinowitz discounted Haywood as an unreliable grandstander.

Matilda (aka Matilda Robbins) went on to play a role in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti and was a UAW organizer. Her papers, including her memoir, are preserved in the Labor History archives at Wayne State University in Detroit. She and Ben Legere later had a child and their granddaughter Robbin Legere Henderson has been helpful with this article.

Carlo Tresca became an outspoken opponent of Mussolini and was assassinated in New York in 1943 by a Mafia gunman associated with the Fascists. Fillippo Bocchino followed another path and became one of Mussolini’s most ardent defenders in the Italian-American community in the years before World War II.

George Lunn’s political career continued in both the Socialist and the Democratic Parties. As a Socialist he was elected mayor of Schenectady, twice as a Socialist and once as a Democrat. He was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1917 and Lieutenant Governor in 1923. He later became friends with Chief Long and spoke at his retirement dinner in 1940.

As for the strikers themselves, many were certainly still living in Little Falls when I was growing up, as were their children and grandchildren. However, the story of the strike seems to have been an episode that no one really wanted to talk about. Perhaps, the later closing of the textile mills, made the whole strike something people just wanted to forget. And the nationwide witch hunt in 1917-1920 known as “the Red Scare” certainly made any past associations with socialists or anarchists something most people did not want to be reminded of.

Although lost to history, the textile strike in Little Falls was a major victory that brought together the Socialist Party, the IWW and a progressive state administration. And even more importantly, it was a strike by women and led by women in an era when men dominated the left as well as the right sides of American political life.

My novel based on the strike, as told in the voice of Helen Schloss, can be purchased on kindle for $2.99 or in paperback for $9.99.  The book is also available at the Little Falls Historical Society.


 Drawings from 1912

Several drawings  made in October and November, 1912  have recently come into my possession: The drawings depict the riot of October 30, the attack that same day on the Slovak Hall, and an arraignment of arrested strikers on November 15:

Fictional stories in a real place

The eleven short stories in the newly published collection, Asteronga New York, are undeniably inspired by growing up in Little Falls during the late 1950s and 1960s.  But anyone looking for actual models for Uncle Artie, Juliana, Marjorie, Ronnie Van Vranken, Gracie McGee or any of the other characters will be disappointed. No one should search their memories to recall an apparition of the Virgin Mary or a Hungarian boy who rose from the dead. All the people and events in this book are as imaginary as the narrator who tells us about them.

Available in paperback for $9.95.

Asteronga, New York may also be purchased  on Kindle for $2.99.

Excerpts from two of the stories 

in the collection: 

 from: " An Appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary"

     I woke up cold, wet and stiff just as the sky was starting to turn gray. Feeling miserable, I stood under my cousins’ carport and watched the drizzle for a while, getting my strategy together. I could just walk into the Selective Service office, I figured, and tell them who I was. Then I’d act crazy. But what would I say? What could I do to convince them I was unfit for Viet Nam? The old guys on the Board must have heard the same act every day. Thousands of guys my age and younger were being called up and about half a million were over there already.  The death count was up to about forty or fifty names a week. Thinking about it now, I realize that half the names on the Wall in Washington were already listed somewhere by then.

     The rain continued to come down, getting heavier, and the sky was solid gray. I noticed the Valley Bus stopping in front of the closed ice cream store, so without thinking about it any more, I hopped over the backyard fence and ran to the bus. A half hour later, I looked out the window of the bus as we passed the Hotel Snyder and rolled to a stop directly in front of St. Mary’s.

     As the bus pulled away toward St. Johnsville, I looked up at the familiar steeple and decided to just go into the church for a minute. I felt like seeing the stained glass window where the children come to visit Jesus. Once I was inside, all the old feelings of my praying days with little Christina came back to me.

     She and her family had packed up and moved out to California years before but the church was unchanged and completely empty. The same smell of dust and wood polish and a lingering fragrance of incense from Benedictions of long ago. I slumped into a back pew, genuflecting before I knew what I was doing. I had been thinking that I was an atheist but once I was back in St. Mary’s, the old feelings of devotion rolled up out of me. I began to pray without any words, just with emotion, letting my feelings pour out.  I discovered that my eyes were full of tears.

     Later that day, after stopping in to say hello to my parents, I grabbed a pile of camping gear from the attic and headed up to the woods near Indian Cave. Now that I was back home, my first idea was to build a hermitage and settle down to some serious praying.

     Now, you may be thinking that I had smoked some funny stuff down in New York City that me right over the edge into religious mania, but I hadn’t really smoked that much grass and I never took any LSD or anything like that. I just had an impulse to do some serious praying on my own. This was not a new idea for me, as I explained earlier. I was always inclined toward the monastic lifestyle, in a sense.

     I settled down that night in the cave, just rolled up in my sleeping bag and snoring away. Going to the cave probably was something like going back to the womb. First of all, it was narrow and dark, hardly a cave at all, more like a cleft in the rocks. The rocks in the hillside are way too hard to allow for a regular limestone cave full of dripping stalactites and extending for miles underground like the one Tom Sawyer and his pals got lost in, but as a kid, Indian Cave had pretty much defined caves for me.

     My brother had introduced me to the cave when I was only four or five. We played various games in it, mostly some variation on Cowboys and Indians. I remember once Joe and I went up on the hillside in the winter and dug down through the snow to find the entrance of the cave and then we huddled together inside it, looking out at the freezing cold world outside.

      In the morning, I was a little stiff after two nights sleeping outdoors so I built a small fire of twigs to warm up and tried a few prayers. All that came to mind was the Hail Mary and Our Father routine and somehow that didn’t seem to suit my surroundings. I did some Zen meditation like Jack Kerouac used to write about, trying to focus my mind but the tweety-tweet singing of the birds kept distracting me from the Empty Mind thing. I gave up on the spiritual exercises and went down to Reese’s Mom & Pop store on East Madison and bought a six pack of Utica Club. By mid morning I had finished the beer and gone back to my sleeping bag for a nice nap.

     When I woke up around noon, my mind was clear, or at least I thought it was. I decided that I would get my gear together and walk up through the Adirondacks to Canada. Cramming what I could into a backpack, I rolled up the sleeping bag and tied it on top of the pack. Looking around at my campsite, I said a few more prayers and strode off in what I assumed was a northerly direction. The only problem was that I didn't have a compass so after I had walked about five miles, I realized that I had been heading due east.

     I was getting tired, after all that beer and walking and no food, so I sat down on a log and watched the cars skimming past on Route 5, a road that pretty much directly followed an east-west line up the Mohawk Valley from Albany to Syracuse.

     As I sobered up, the idea of walking the 200 or so miles to the Canadian border grew less appealing. I thought maybe I would head up a county road from Neary's Bar & Grill, which was visible through the trees, to the old pond where I could do some swimming and maybe find a girl. I was so horny that I felt certain I'd meet a very willing girl down at the rocks. Horniness often induces a state of certainty like that.

     About an hour or so later, I made it to the trail that led down from Clay Hill Road to the flat rocks below the dam. Only one car, a beat-up ’57 Ford, was parked near the top of the trail. Scrambling downhill, I fell once, felt like an idiot, and dusted myself off before going on. I heard some laughing and splashing sounds so I knew I was getting closer to the flat rocks.

     When I was in high school, I used to go down to the rocks with Mark Halsdap, who’d drive his brother’s El Camino. He'd invite as many of us as could fit to jump into the back and we'd head off to the pond.

     Usually, somebody would have ID for beer and we’d arrive semi-drunk and acting like idiots. Mostly, it was a bunch of guys. We kept hearing stories of girls who would join in the skinny dipping off the rocks below the dam, but to tell you the truth there were almost never any girls there. The place was too wild and unsupervised for most of them, except maybe Gracie Simchak.

     That's why I was so surprised when a girl in a two piece bathing suit came running full speed out of the trees. “Whoa!” I yelled, “Watch out!” Bam! She crashed right into me, and practically knocked me over.

     “Hey, aren’t you Ellen, Linda’s sister? What’s up with you?”

     I thought maybe she was terrified but I’m not that good at reading people.

     Just then two guys came running like maniacs, followed by another girl. She was holding the top of a two piece as and her eyes were wild.. I couldn’t help noticing that she had very nice tits.

     “Hey, hold on!” I yelled. “What’s going on?”

from:  "Burying Uncle Artie"

 

     “What killed him the end, anyhow?” asks Paul.

     “Wife called. Said he was running off, again, you know, like I give a shit or could do anything about it. He was always running off on a drunk. What’s she calling me for? I never even met her. Some tramp he picked up at A.A., probably.”

      This was a pretty long speech for James, but he wasn’t done.

     “So she calls me again ten minutes later. She says Artie went out to the car. I said, so? Then she says he started the ignition and let it warm up, like he always did. He was careful that way. But he never gets to put it into Drive. She sees him slumped over the wheel, with the transmission still in Park. She opens the door and he falls out. He’s dead, she says. His heart must’ve gone.”

      “All this in what, ten minutes?” I ask.

     “Yeah,” says James. “She calls me when he’s running out on her, then she calls me and says he only made it to the car and dropped dead, and she’s got no money, she goes on, she doesn’t have any cash, she can’t pay for a funeral, can she send me the body C.O.D. and can we bury him up here.”

     “So what’d you say?” I ask.

     “I says yeah, ship the body to Shepardson’s and we can bury him here.”
     “Is she coming?”

     “Who?”

     “His wife,” I say. “Is she coming to the funeral?”

     “She didn’t say. She only said she’d send Artie home so I told her okay.”

     “Where are you gonna put him?” asks Paul.

     “Up in Old St. Mary’s. Next to Ma and Pa and Iggie. We got a lot of plots up there. My old man had foresight. He bought a dozen plots back in the twenties. Room for all of us, he used to say. One big happy family. That’s what he’d say.”

     “I don’t think they’re allowing people to get buried up there any more.”

     “What do you mean?”

     “It’s on such a steep hill,” explains Paul. “They built that place back in horse and buggy days. A hearse can’t get up those dirt roads they got. Some of the gravestones are even falling down the hill so nobody knows who’s buried exactly where.”

     “What are you saying? They’re not burying anybody up there?”
     “That’s what I’m saying. The monsignor says everybody’s got to go to the New Cemetery out on Route Five where it’s nice and flat.”

     “The fuckin bastard. The cheap fuckin bastard.” James is glowering into his beer. “No fuckin way. No fuckin way.”

     “What do you mean, Uncle James?”

     “No fuckin way am I gonna buy a new plot to put Artie in. He belongs with Ma and Pa and Iggie.”

     “Don’t worry about it,” I offer.  “I’ll talk to the priest.”

     I leave James at the bar. I knew he’d be there the rest of the day. I drove over to the rectory at St. Mary’s and rang the bell. An old lady answers. The housekeeper. “ I’d like to see the pastor,” I tell her, so she lets me in and has me sit in the parlor for about fifteen minutes before this big beefy guy in black pants and a white T-shirt comes in.

     “Hiya, father,” I say. “I want to talk to you about a funeral.”

     “Monsignor,” he corrects me, not offering to shake hands. He knew who I was, I guess, even though he’d only been here a couple years.  He probably noticed how I never dropped by the church.

     “The funeral director will handle all the details, son.” He never even asks who died. Maybe he already knows.

     “Yeah, we’re using Shepardson but I wanted to ask you something.” He waits for me to continue. “I wanted to ask you about Old St. M’s. We got a family plot up there…”

      He raises his hand, cutting me off. “Interments are no longer permitted in Old St. Mary’s.”

     “I don’t know, father,” I say. “I got to talk to my mother and my uncle.”

     “Monsignor,” he reminds me.

     “Yeah, well so long for now, Monsignor.” How much would this cost, I wonder, and who’ll pay for it?

     I find James back at the bar and lay out the situation to him. “No fuckin way” is his response, so I drive back to Dolgeville, where my mother was living that year.

     “James is a stubborn old bastard,” she agrees. “But I see his point. Why should Artie be all by himself when Ma and Pa are up in Old St. M’s? It’d be like burying him on a golf course.”

     “Yeah, but the priest says they don’t allow what he calls interments up there anymore.”

    “James is pretty used to getting his own way, that’s all I’m saying,” my mother concludes. “I’d never cross him.”

     Artie’s body arrived the next day. Tom Shepardson said we could come down and have a gander. My mother wanted to, so we did. I let her look him over as long as she wanted, but I took just a quick glance. He looked like he’d been dead for a year as far as I was concerned. Then Tom took us on the grand tour of casketville and Mom picked out something middle priced, not cardboard but not mahogany neither.

     “And will you want to wake him for two nights?” Tom inquires.

     “One should do it,” says my mother. “Not that many people around here know him anymore.”

     After that, we reported to James at the bar. “Sounds okay,” he says to the idea of a one-night wake and a 9:30 funeral on Wednesday. He would be picking up all the bills. Since he never spent any money, he had plenty. One time he was driving along Route 5 with a bunch of uncashed checks stuck up in the visor. He got hot and rolled down the window and the checks all blew out. He didn’t even stop to go back and try and find them. He had that much money piled up.

     “How about the cemetery?” he asks. I could see he was ready for a fight.

     “Tom says they don’t bury people in old St. M’s any more.” My mother was assessing James’ reaction, trying to hide a smile. “You heard about that, right?”

     “No fuckin way.”

     My mother turned to me and held out both her hands, palms up. “What can you do? My brother James is incorrigible.” She was delighted with him and eager, I could tell, to see what would come of  James’ impending battle with the priest.

     “Artie woulda loved this,” she mouths to me.

     The wake went pretty much as might be expected.  His wife never showed. A few old drunks came, a few more old pals of Artie who were now in A.A., and the two sides went at it pretty good, accusing each other of being lushes and hypocrites respectively.  One old guy comes in, wearing his American Legion cap, and did a little patriotic service.  “We are going,” he confided in a loud whisper to my mother. “We are going, Mary, one by one.”

     “Better than two by two” is her reply. 

     I look around, trying not to laugh, and I notice that James is nowhere in sight. He was always restless and the idea of him sitting around next to his brother’s embalmed body probably didn’t appeal to him. Maybe he’s gone back to the bar, I thought. Then, to my surprise, he reappears at the door to what the Shepardsons call the reception room. He was standing there, fidgeting. He didn’t have a suit jacket or tie or anything. Didn’t own any, I’m sure. He was in his flannel shirt and overalls, as usual. I eased my way past my mom and the American Legion guy, who were still chatting, and went over to James.

     “Kid,” he says to me. “I got a couple of bum arms here.”

     “Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

     “Otherwise, I wouldn’t put you in a spot like this.” He looks right and left to see if anyone was near. “Let’s talk out on the porch.”

     Once we were outside, James tells me his plan.

     “Here’s what we do. We’re going up to Old St. M’s.”

     “Why?”

     “I got a shovel and a pickaxe in the truck. And a Coleman lantern. “

     “Are we gonna dig somebody up?” I couldn’t figure this out at all.

     “We’re going to dig a grave for Artie, right where he belongs.”

 

    

Comments from readers are welcome at wildernesshill@gmail.com.



Old & New Industries in Little Falls, New York

Entering Little Falls from the west

This week we return to the Mohawk Valley, once the industrial heartland of the United States, and visit my hometown, Little Falls, New York. The village, still officially a city, has lost about half its population since the 1950s, and many of its manufacturing industries. But the longtime residents of Little Falls, as well newcomers, have a strong love for their picturesque community and have done much to promote its revival. In 2008 the city sought a $650,000 grant to continue the revitalization of its old mill district, according the Utica Observer Dispatch:

Little Falls also boasts its own daily newspaper, the Little Falls Evening Times and maintains a website that provides an overview of community life. Of special interest is the annual Canal Days festival, which attracts thousands of visitors each August.

Entering Little Falls from the west on Route 5, the first sign of local industry we encountered were buildings belonging to the Burrows Paper Corporation, founded in Little Falls by Charles and Andrew Burrows in 1913. Although Burrows has thrived in the global economy, the corporation is still an important presence in the community and now occupies a number of buildings that formerly housed other industries.

At the intersection of West Main and Furnace Streets, we stopped to take a look at the abandoned Gilbert Knitting Mill buildings across the railroad tracks. Long ago, workmen walked down Furnace Street and crossed under the tracks via the city’s pedestrian subway.

Abandoned Gilbert Mill, pedestrian subway on left

As early as 1831 there was a water-powered paper mill on this site. After a series of other mills came and went, the Gilbert company began with J.J. Gilbert as a principal owner in 1872. The Gilbert family were prominent in the city for many years and their mansion on a nearby hill is now an attractive bed and breakfast known as the Gansevoort House. Like many early industrialists, the Gilberts built their mansion in a spot that overlooked the source of their wealth.

We headed for Mill Street, the old industrial area along the Mohawk River. The settlement began here before the American Revolution due to the rapids in the river, which necessitated a cumbersome portage of the canoes and small boats of that era. During the Revolution, the Tories and their Iroquois allies waged a fierce guerrilla war against the patriots in the Mohawk Valley. In 1782 they attacked and burned the grist mill at "the little falls."

Remains of the 1795 Little Falls Canal

It was George Washington who first recommended the building of a canal around the rapids at Little Falls, and work was begun in 1793. Opened to traffic in 1795, the Western Inland Navigation Canal was the first true canal in the nation. The lock pictured here was a guard lock that prevented flood stage river water from rushing into the canal and helped control water levels when the canal was in use. In 1883 the state legislature declared the lock to be a heritage site to be forever preserved, but expansion of the railroad right-of-way and generations of neglect have taken their toll. The remaining limestone walls of the old canal can be found just beyond the parking lot beside Hansens Island. Although the ruins may not seem impressive, the New York State Museum has a very thorough description of this early canal, including a series of maps and images.

From the canal site we looked across to Hansens Island, famous as the place where Junket custard was made for many years. Christian Hansen founded his company in Denmark in 1874 and in 1890 bought the small island as the site for his American factory. Junket desserts are now a brand offered by Redco Foods, whose better known products include Red Rose and Salada tea. The island was recently the scene for a protracted dispute between Redco and the employee labor union, and feelings are evidently still bruised.

Hansen's Island and the Mohawk River rapids

Walking down Mill Street past the Hansens Island parking lot, we soon came to the renovated Power House, where hydroelectric power was generated. I can recall when the limestone dam was dynamited, reportedly for a tax advantage by Niagara Mohawk, thus putting to an end to the generation of power at this location. The Power House has been significantly remodeled by its current owners, who replaced one deteriorated stone wall with brick. I believe there was a plan to provide cultural events at the building, but there was no sign of any current activity. This may require an update when we learn more.

The Power House and broken dam

The Power House adjoins a set of ruined stone walls that may be the remains of the old Henry Cheeney Hammer Company. According to the 1911 Centennial history, the Cheeney company "does an extensive business in all kinds of high grade hammers, its product being sold all over the United States and in foreign countries."

Probable ruins of the Henry Cheeney Hammer Company

Only a little further east, across from what was once the Andrew Little Lumberyard, is another stone foundation, which has been partially excavated. This was the location, according to my father, of the “old stone mill,” built at some point early in the 19th century on the site of the wooden gristmill burned by Tory raiders in 1782.

Foundation of the old stone mill and site of 1782 massacre

A little farther west on Mill Street is an impressively renovated set of old stone mills, which now houses a variety of shops. The Little Falls Antique Center and the adjoining Shops at 25 West Mill Street are well worth a visit. For a fine dinner, I recommend Canalside Inn. And the adjacent Ann Street Lunch is always good for lighter meals.

Canalside Inn on left, Stone Mills of Little Falls shops on right

Turning right on South Ann Street, we came to the Mohawk River bridge and took a look at the ruins of the Erie Canal Aqueduct, which was opened in 1822 and collapsed only a few years ago.

The Erie Canal Aqueduct, present and past

Crossing the bridge brought us to Moss Island, and a walk along the canal to its highest lift lock, Lock 17, is a very enjoyable experience. Moss Island is home to many “potholes” created by the tremendous rush of water that came through this gorge at the end of the last ice age. With the outlet to the St Lawrence River still blocked by glaciers, all of the waters of the Great Lakes once poured through this narrow valley. We looked across to the south side of the river and the rocky cliffs of Lovers Leap where, according to legend, doomed Mohawk lovers embraced the fate of Romeo & Juliet.

All that remains on Moss Island of the Adirondack Woolen Company, where my grandmother worked long ago, is a single brick storage building, now used by Burrows Paper Corporation.

Old Adirondack Woolen Co. shed on Moss Island

Lovers Leap from Moss Island

Across a rusted and long-closed bridge we glimpsed the Cherry Burrell Buildings and headed in that direction, thinking that this once-dynamic manufacturing firm was still in operation. Alas, Cherry Burrell, long a mainstay of the town’s prosperity, no longer has a presence here. The company survives elsewhere as Waukesha Cherry Burrell, a subsidiary of the multinational, SPX Corporation.

Empty Cherry-Burrell buildings on Mill Street

The Burrell Office Building on Main Street

Overlook Mansion, present and past

D. H. Burrell, the founder of the dairy equipment manufacturing company that bore his name, was a major contributor to the prosperity of Little Falls. He financed the Burrell Office Building in a time when elevators were still a novelty, and he also donated to the building of the YMCA and a new city hall in 1916. The Burrell mansion, Overlook, still looms over the town, but in a sad state of abandonment and ruin.



We never leave town without visiting the Little Falls Historical Society Museum at 319 North Ann Street, where the history of this picturesque and productive little city is carefully maintained by a staff of dedicated volunteers. Those interested in the history of Little Falls could find no better place to begin their inquiries.

The museum offers for sale a number of works on the town's history, including Unique Place, Diverse People; The Social and Political History of Little Falls by Richard Buckley (2008), not to mention my own historical novel of the American Revolution in this area, Neither Rebel Nor Tory; Hanyost Schuyler & the Siege of Fort Stanwix. The Cooney scrapbook collection contains newspaper articles from the mid 1800s to mid 1900s, and a wealth of genealogical material, primary sources and maps, are available for reference.

For those interested in doing their research via the internet, the volunteers at the Three Rivers website have posted a huge collection of public domain books on the history of the Mohawk, Hudson and Schoharie Valleys, including my father Edward Cooney's 1961 history of Little Falls.

The Mohawk Valley near Little Falls in the 1870s

from "Picturesque America"