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1 | Spindle City
- Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth
- Chapter
- Additional Information
[7] [ One ] Spindle City Too many stories about Fall River begin with Lizzie Borden, who has often seemed to own the franchise on the city’s history. It is more fruitful to start with the Quequechan River, at scarcely two miles long, one of the more modest but hardworking millstreams in all of industrial New England. The Quequechan flowed through the heart of Fall River; it also coursed through my early life. We lived near the heart of Flint Village, the city’s largest mill district, which overspread the Quequechan’s rock-ribbed banks and mud flats in Fall River’s East End. I crossed the river hundreds of times, on foot or in a car, before I left Fall River for college. During the summer I worked in steamy mills along the Quequechan to help pay college expenses. After I graduated I taught for two years in a Portuguese Catholic school, Espirito Santo, which squatted on the north bank of the Quequechan. From kindergarten to eighth grade, the school was filled with the children of immigrants and kids who had been born in the Azores. In 1954, when I was nine years old, an engineering report summarized the consequences of Fall River’s historic abuse of the river: “It is our opinion that the quality of the water in the Quequechan River is unfavorable for anything but the roughest industrial usage and furthermore is an ever-present health menace to the inhabitants of the City of Fall River.” I was too young to be aware of this report. But my brothers and I did not need engineering consultants to tell us that we lived less than a half mile from a sludgy, toxic millstream. The Quequechan partially redeemed itself in downtown Fall River, where it made a dramatic plunge toward Mount Hope Bay. The Pocasset Mill, a six-story granite cotton manufactory built in 1846, had harnessed the power of the Quequechan’s “Great Falls,” which plummeted sixty-eight feet into what became the center of Spindle City. In 1928, one of Fall River’s most devastating fires had reduced the mill to rubble, exposing the falls to public view. The Pocasset Mill’s ruins were still visible in the 1950s and ’60s, as Fall River antiquities that recalled an era when the city rode the rapids of industrial capitalism to national distinction. The falls bestowed some welcomed natural dignity on downtown Fall River. On every childhood visit to Main Street, the falls lured my brothers or my friends and me. We marveled at the power of the Quequechan and tossed stone residue of the Pocasset Mill into the cascading river’s foam. The falls, the mill ruins, and their location in the center of the city gently reminded us that Fall River had not always been down-at-the-heels—had not always been as spent and listless as the unhurried water that flowed through Flint Village. I need to tell the story of such mementos of boyhood that echo through Spindle City’s past. [] I knew one major historical fact growing up: the strange name Quequechan is an English version of the Pocasset Indian word for “falling water” and “Fall River” is an adaptation of that translation. But I grew up unaware of what happened along our millstream. “Quequechan” actually designated a river that flowed over eight falls in less than a half a mile as it descended precipitously into Mount Hope Bay. The multiple falls transformed the humble Quequechan’s geography, defining it as a distinctive, exploitable New England site. The river offered significant waterpower for industrial use at a coastal location with ocean access to major textile markets in New York City and Philadelphia. Little did I realize growing up that geography awarded Fall River another major advantage over expanding industrial centers north of Boston, along the Merrimack River. Baled southern cotton and mid-Atlantic coal for steam-powered mills could be more easily and cheaply delivered to Fall River than to major inland industrial cities. To reach Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire, for example, ships had to travel around Cape Cod’s extended arm. The early cotton manufacturers who clustered along the Quequechan discovered an additional competitive edge Fall River wielded over interior textile centers to the north: a more humid climate that increased the elasticity of cotton fibers, reducing breakage and slowdowns in production. Geography dealt Fall River yet another hand that shaped the city’s history , particularly its industrial...