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 18^th-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.

You Must Remember This...

Memorial Mania, by Erika Doss (2010)


We cannot change our memories, but we can change their meaning and the power they have over us.  --David Seamands

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. --Albert Einstein

It’s a likely bet that Erika Doss wasn’t an invited guest at any of the myriad of media events held two months ago to mark the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. A professor of American Studies at Notre Dame trained as an art historian, Doss is the author of Memorial Mania, which explores the memorials raised to events and personages, major and minor, in the United States. Her terrain is the intersection of material culture and historical memory, as expressed in built memorials that cast emotion in physical form.

Her sprawling book looks at memorials that range from roadside crosses marking the site of fatal accidents, to the AIDS Quilt, to war memorials, to the new national September 11 memorial at the World Trade Center. By and large, she argues, these memorials reflect the identity politics and grievances of the elites who erect them.

Doss’ criticism raises the question not only of who is mediating and giving material form to historical memory, but what the adequate interpretative memorial would look like. She seems to favor, for example, an alternative to the official 9/11 memorial of a figure in free fall that made me think of the emotive quality of Edvard Munch’s painting (and visual icon of the anti-abortion movement),  “The Silent Scream.”  Ten years after the horrifying events of that day, it is asking a lot to assume that witnesses, survivors, relatives, first responders and the general public are willing and able to accept a memorial that links the three plane crashes with a narrative of American adventurism in the Middle East. 

                                             "Tumbling Woman," by Eric Fischl

                                   "The Silent Scream," by Edvard Munch

The Indian Memorial at Little Bighorn (renamed from Custer Battlefield), for Doss, is too little, too late, failing to capture the myth of the frontier, and disseminating stereotypes about American Indians. Other commemorative representations of Native Americans and their history, are infused with “warrior expectations,” not least from Indians themselves.

Doss acknowledges the right of those who participate in or are affected by events to contribute to interpreting their meaning, in memorializing them. But don’t the privileged as well as the marginalized share in this right?

Another weakness in her argument is her focus on the visual nature of memorials. Even when built of granite, these monuments are too fragile to bear the fraught weight of historical interpretation Doss would assign to them. Ultimately, the chisel and the hammer must be supplemented by words, photos, recordings and other tools of the modern interpreter’s art to create the fully faceted, representative memorials Doss so ardently and eloquently advocates.