The Mill of Lost Dreams, by Lori Rohda: The Story Behind the Story

When Annie died, it left a hole in my heart that has never healed. For forty years, this petite, quiet, woman loved and guided me when my mother couldn’t. She raised me. I am literally rooted in her and draft off her amazing courage every single day.  

I wanted to write about Annie as a way to remember and honor her; not simply to describe our relationship, as incredibly special as it was, but to learn about her life before me since she was thirty when I was born. I was curious about the people and events that shaped her life.

Annie rarely talked about herself except to reveal that she’d been left in a cardboard box on the steps of St. Vincent’s Orphanage along with a note that she was ‘Annie Kenny’. She waited for eleven years for her parents to return for her or for anyone to adopt her. That never happened, she would never learn where she came from – just that she was never wanted. The day after her eleventh birthday she ran away from the orphanage to find a job in one of the mills along the river.  

The Fall River that Annie grew up in became the largest textile manufacturing center in the entire country but, years later, I walked to school in the shadow of those same mills – now abandoned, covered in graffiti, with shards of glass from hundreds of broken windows littering the ground.

Reading historical accounts of the city and the growing textile industry helped me understand what drew textile manufacturing to Fall River was a start. Learning about the actual processes and the machinery required to turn the 450-pound bales of cotton that arrived by train into yards of cloth was more interesting.  

But I was most curious about the people who worked in these mills. Who were they? Where did they come from? What were their lives like? What was Annie’s life like as a ‘mill girl’? Well, I am a psychologist after all!

In a word, they were immigrants. Between 1870 and 1900, twelve million people immigrated to America and hundreds of thousands of them came to work in the textile mills in Fall River, Massachusetts. Regardless of their country of origin, they were people who had already endured circumstances and conditions that degrade the human spirit — which was why they were willing to risk everything, including their lives, for the chance of a better life. 

Most came to America on ships. Entire families assigned to a single, straw-covered platform along the windowless steerage deck, crammed together like the kernels of corn on cobs.  Not surprisingly, in such unhygienic conditions, diseases like cholera and dysentery spread rapidly along with lice and fleas. So many died, were wrapped in sailcloth and hurriedly buried at sea.  

After these long and dangerous journeys, immigrants were probably happy to accept job offers and housing offered by mill agents whose sole purpose was to recruit human grist for the mills. 

Several memoirs of ‘mill girls’ detailed the callous working conditions and the shameful substandard housing. They reported that having to stand at or bend over a machine for ten to twelve hours a day making the same repetitive motions caused such swelling in ankles and feet that most women worked barefoot or wore boots one or two sizes larger than their shoes. 

According to these young girls, the cacophony of hundreds of metal looms running simultaneously left many with permanent ringing in their ears, blinding headaches, significant hearing loss and, in some cases, deafness. It was common to see historical pictures of women and girls at their looms with cotton stuffed in their ears.

And these machines moved so terrifyingly fast, in the mill’s dimly lit rooms, that their hands, sleeves, and hair were regularly snagged and pulled into the machine before the operator could shut it down. 

Although the mill’s windows were large and closely spaced to maximize natural lighting, they were shut, even in the summer, because the slender cotton threads broke more easily when they were dry. To ameliorate this problem, steam was piped into the rooms or water was sprayed from overhead nozzles to keep the air moist. Regardless of the weather outside, the work rooms were always warm, humid and filled with floating cotton lint. 

For ten to twelve hours a day, mill workers breathed in fumes from oil lamps, thick airborne lint and cotton dust which settled on every machine. Many doctors came to believe that this combination of dampness and lint caused the eventually fatal respiratory disease called ‘brown lung’. 

It was hard for me to understand how desperate people must have been in order to make these kinds of sacrifices. And harder still to imagine what they must have felt when the work they found was as unhealthy and dangerous as what they’d left behind.  Because she was so young and small, I was distressed about Annie and all the other children, some as young as six, who worked day after day, year after year, in these conditions.

The combination of historical research and wretched biographical accounts left me feeling shame and grief and, as a consequence, changed the story I would write. Sometimes you learn something or see something and your life can never be the same because the truth doesn’t always set you free. 

Once I started writing, there seemed to be weekly, if not daily, news stories about masses of people fleeing their countries, leaving everything behind except for what they could carry. Too often these stories were accompanied by heartbreaking photographs of people crammed into or clinging onto small, leaking boats begging for help; of dead bodies washing up on foreign shores; of hundreds of people walking hundreds of miles, sometimes barefoot, to the United States border only to be turned away. But what literally made me cry, were the pictures of inconsolable children, who did not speak English, being forcefully separated from their parents. 

After that, I simply couldn’t tell Annie’s story without telling the bigger story about immigrants and immigration. The Mill of Lost Dreams is the result – a story of survival, sacrifice and heart-breaking loss for people who simply wanted to find a place where they could belong and thrive. 

What is the human cost of lost dreams? What happens to people when they cannot build the lives they dreamed about, or when they realize that their dreams of a better life are irretrievably lost. Why aren’t we paying attention?  

As I write this in July of 2020 there are still immigrants living in cages, waiting without hope of a reprieve and toddlers crying for the comfort and safety of their parents arms.

—

Lori Rohda, an MBA and PHD psychologist, is a former Assistant Dean of Students at Boston University and, as President of King Walker and Associates, was a management consultant to Fortune 500 companies.

She divides her time between Boston, Massachusetts where she loves to golf and design perennial gardens and Whistler, British Columbia where the skiing and hiking are unsurpassed.

THE MILL OF LOST DREAMS

Between 1870 and 1900, twelve million people immigrated to America. Hundreds of thousands of them came to work in the textile mills of Fall River, Massachusetts.

The Mill of Lost Dreams is a story of love, friendship and sacrifice that provides an inside view into the world of textile mills and the daily life of seven courageous souls who leave home and risk everything for their shared dream of a better life: Angelina and Guido Wallabee, who have left their family’s failed farm in Italy; eleven-year-old Miranda Alysworth and her fifteen-year-old brother, Francois, who have escaped from indentured service in Canada; twins Phoebe and Charlie Dougherty, the children of Irish immigrant parents, who, though not yet thirteen, are forced to work in Troy Mill to support their family after their father’s untimely death; and eleven-year-old, Anne Kenny, an orphan who’s never known where she came from. All but one take jobs in Troy Mill in Fall River.

Over the course of seven decades, there are marriages, births, secrets exposed, friendships tested, and innocence lost. Some succeed in making a new life away from harm but pay a terrible price. Many cannot build the life they dreamed of and the consequences impact and shape the lives of their children―and their children’s children.

 

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Category: On Writing