Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Lowell Lite

Last month, I joined a group sponsored by the Society for Industrial Archaeology for a two-day whirlwind tour of factories, mills and bridges and other historic attractions in the Quinebaug-Shetucket National Heritage Corridor, a National Park Service creation that spans 35 municipalities in eastern Connecticut and southern Massachusetts. The area goes by the name "The Last Green Valley," encompassing both natural and historical resources. The tour group, as the name of the sponsoring organization suggests, was composed largely of engineers, architects, wannabes, and others with an interest in the workings of things.

One stop on the tour was the city of Willimantic, Connecticut. Like Lowell, it is a distressed mill town whose glory days seem long past.  Like Lowell, it is mobilizing cultural resources in the service of redevelopment. Stops on our tour included the new Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum, the Frog Bridge built in 2000 and adorned with cement frogs on spools of thread to commemorate an 18th-century incident in which the croaking of frogs dying of drought led townspeople to take up arms to repulse an imagined enemy attack, and the Windham Textile and History Museum, at the center of Willimantic’s mill complex.

                                                       A frog on the bridge


While my visit to the Willimantic mills lasted about two hours, compared to Cathy Stanton’s two years of research, the comparison was instructive. I bypassed the tour of mill buildings, which was heavy on mechanical detail (here’s to you, Tilden), in favor of the interpretive materials at the small central museum. The interpretation struck me as a pastiche.

The introductory film depicted mill work, with the obligatory nods to ethnicity, community, child labor, occupational injury and gender. One set of rooms re-created a mill worker’s home; another showed how the manager lived. Another room held sewing machines of various vintages. On the stairway were pictures of churches attended by each of the city’s main ethnic groups. A large mural narrated the ecology of the mill town, an interpretive framework favored by the museum director.  The museum periodically sponsors special events, such as the recent exhibit on Connecticut’s “cotton connection” to the Civil War. In all, the Willimantic effort, a smorgasbord of commodified culture within the added context of a pristine natural environment provides one response to Stanton’s question about the potential of second-generation culture-driven revitalization, particularly when lacking the concentrated financial largesse and political muscle that propelled the Lowell experiment.

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