Three Distinctive Nineteenth-Century Workplaces
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CHAPTER THREE THREE DISTINCTIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WORKPLACES HE CONSTRUCTION of a nearly five-mile-long tunnel Tthrough the Hoosac Mountain, a huge undertaking which attracted some 1,000 laborers, added a frontier environment to the area, and a dangerous setting in which to work. With its high cost, bruising political battles, and unexpectedly lengthy times of completion, the Hoosac Tunnel was the state’s “Big Dig,” foreshadowing Boston’s own struggle to remake its highway system over a century later.1 For two previous decades, beginning in 1854, North Berkshire received an inordinate amount of attention from the statehouse and legislature in Boston, industrialists eager for a rail route to the Midwest, and members of the press who covered the controversial and costly project with zeal. THE HOOSAC TUNNEL “The West Shaft [Tunnel] workers conducted a successful strike after the bucket crushed the skull of one of their number. They refused to go back to work until the bucket’s hemp rope was replaced with an iron cable.” —Terrence Coyne2 Although the southern rail connection already in place had opened up the region’s trade with Pittsfield, and indirectly with Boston, the local business class had a grander scheme in mind: a tunnel through the Hoosac range, which would not only make the region’s link with Boston more direct, but when combined with a rail line to Albany, 40 miles to the west, would place North Adams at the hub of a transportation center to the western United States. Further, goods from the west would more easily be transported to Boston where they could be shipped to England and other European destinations. (The Legislature had scrapped an earlier plan to build a canal from western Massachusetts to the Erie Canal when the expense of erecting more than 200 locks over the Berkshires had been deemed too extravagant.3) The rail connection would, its local boosters hoped, “represent an open door to the riches of the Golden West,” earning North Adams its motto, “We hold the Western Gateway.”4 Despite the local boosters, construction of the tunnel, which was started in 1854 and completed in 1875, proved both frustrating and perilous, costing the lives of close to 200 workmen—many of whose names Chuck Cahoon still searches for. The tunnel’s construction force numbered more than 1,000—Irish, English, French-Canadian, and Italian—adding what many perceived as a dangerous element to an already diversified workforce engaged in the manufacture of a range of products which now included woolen and cotton goods, shoes, and textile machinery.5 Scenes around the shafts while work was going on seemed reminiscent of mining camps in the far West, with rows of small cabins and cheap boardinghouses where the tunnel workers slept and ate. They were a mixture of races and creeds . children poured in and out of the squalid houses where women, speaking foreign tongues, were busy with cooking and babies. Roughly dressed men, black with grime, went in and out of the diggings.6 While the names of many of the tunnelers have been, to date, lost to history, we do know that Constante Rosasco, thought to be the first Italian to migrate to North Adams, came to town originally in 1864 to work on the tunnel. Four years later, he went back to Italy to bring his family over, but did not 60 return until 1872, when he resumed laboring on the tunnel.7 In the interim, in 1867, the name of another worker, Thomas Mallory, became known, and he has remained to this day the most famous tunneler, or miner as they were called, due to a tragic accident and his personal heroism. On October 19, 1867, a gas explosion at the tunnel’s central shaft led to the collapse of a building at the shaft’s opening, causing fiery wood, a thousand pounds of drills, a mining car, machinery, and a bucket of rocks to fall down upon a work group of thirteen men who were at the bottom.8 In describing the scene, historian Terrence E. Coyne writes: “[O]nly one man had the courage to descend and survey the disaster . Thomas Mallory.” Mallory apparently tied a rope around himself, gave instructions to those holding the rope at the shaft opening, and began his descent. The flame on his lamp went out as he neared the bottom, but he continued. He saw no one and no bodies; he signaled to be lifted, but as he neared the top, he fainted from the noxious gas. He regained consciousness and in the next days went down twice more, but with no luck. The Transcript called him “a genuine hero . a brave, modest man.”9 The loss of the thirteen men in that incident made the explosion the deadliest accident in the tunnel’s history, and hereafter it came to be called “the bloody pit.”10 (See the end of Chapter Two for a photo of the memorial to the thirteen men.) Dozens more men met their death, and even more were injured, in numerous accidents after 1867, before the tunnel’s completion. Despite the sacrifices of its workforce and the accomplishments of its engineers, the nearly five-mile-long tunnel did not become the great economic boon its proponents had promised, partly because, ironically, the tunnel allowed cheaper goods from the sizeable eastern Massachusetts cotton mills to be sold in North Berkshire, negatively impacting several mills in Williamstown.11 Nonetheless, North Adams had become “a Western gateway,” and its residents enjoyed the sight and revenue of numerous passenger and freight trains coming through on a regular basis. The tunnel did lead to some industrial growth in 61 what was then called the North Village, and helped precipitate the decision for the North to separate and become North Adams in 1878.12 By 1880, 125 freight trains a day lumbered through North Adams.13 In what may well be an exaggeration, in 1885, one historian claimed that “[e]ven the much boasted Springfield, with its years of development and prestige, is not today a more important railroad center than North Adams . .”14 At the time the tunnel proved to be the longest in the United States, and the second longest in the world. A collision in the tunnel in 1882 resulted in the deaths of eight workers and injuries to thirty others and led to increasing calls to build a local hospital. In March of 1884, the North Adams Hospital opened.15 While the names of leading industrialists of that era like C.T. Sampson and Albert C. Houghton have become associated with the financing of the hospital, in 1890 theTranscript wrote: “[T]he funds that support the hospital come almost entirely from contributions from the citizens and churches of North Adams . .”16 No full-scale social or labor history has yet been carried out on the tunnel workers. In the numerous economic, political, and technological studies that have been completed, few references have been made to worker militancy or strike activity. The 1880 Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor (MBSL) Report does not officially credit Hoosac workers with a strike but, almost parenthetically, and intriguingly, recognizes such activity there. As mentioned in the introductory chapter, a strike had occurred in North Adams by workers in a small railway tunnel in 1875. The laborers were fired after demanding more money; the following paragraph from the bureau report merits quoting in full: A new force of men was engaged. The strikers assailed the newcomers with stones, and sought to drive them away, but without success. While the Hoosac Tunnel was in process of construction, numerous similar strikes occurred; but of these no record remains. They were usually accompanied with rioting and considerable destruction of 62 property, but generally resulted in the defeat of the workmen.17 Terrence Coyne has more to tell us about Tunnel worker strikes: Under [unsafe] conditions strikes were inevitable and apparently they met with a fair amount of success. The West Shaft workers conducted a successful strike after the bucket crushed the skull of one of their number. They refused to go back to work until the bucket’s hemp rope was replaced with an iron cable . They also struck for higher wages . .18 Coyne then quotes a reporter for the Troy Times who wrote: “[S]ome papers have been severe about the strikes of the men but no reasonable man could see the men at their work and denounce them for asking $1.25 for ‘[such] labors.’” On the whole the local papers, enthusiastic backers of the tunnel project, tended to ignore the difficult conditions of the workers, and even the names of some of the men killed building the massive enterprise. One report went like this: “Another Irishman [was] killed at the tunnel. The fuse had been lit but the blast was late. [The victim checked] . but just at the moment the blast went off and a small piece of rock struck the poor fellow’s head and broke it.”19 Even worse, a lengthy article from Scribner’s Magazine blames the tunnelers for their own injuries and deaths: Several serious accidents have occurred at the tunnel through [the] use [of nitroglycerine], but these, so far as the circumstances are known, have been occasioned by inexcusable carelessness . Later in the article, the writer continues: Most of those at the central shaft are Cornish miners, and their life-long experience in such 63 holes in the ground has made them reckless of danger. The fatal accidents that frequently occur among them have no effect to make them more cautious.20 The state legislature, chief funders of the massive undertaking, ignored the health and safety issues that the tunnelers faced: “No committee busied itself with investigations into the circumstances attending the loss of .