Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills were
sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see
the "hands" pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a
patient, throng; used, in those days, to standing eleven hours and a
quarter--women and girls--at their looms, six days of the week, and
making no audible complaints; for socialism had not reached Lawrence,
and anarchy was content to bray in distant parts of the geography at
which the factory people had not arrived when they left school.
Sometimes we counted the great mills as we drove up Essex
Street--having come over the bridge by the roaring dam that tamed
the proud Merrimac to spinning cotton--Pacific, Atlantic, Washington,
Pemberton; but this was an idle, aesthetic pleasure. We did not think
about the mill-people; they seemed as far from us as the coal-miners
of a vague West, or the down-gatherers on the crags of shores whose
names we did not think it worth while to remember. One January
evening, we were forced to think about the mills with curdling horror
that no one living in that locality when the tragedy happened will
forget.
At five o'clock the Pemberton Mills, all hands being at the time on
duty, without a tremor of warning, sank to the ground.
At the erection of the factory a pillar with a defective core had
passed careless inspectors.
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