Fall River History Club: Granite Mill Fire

The next meeting of the Fall River History Club is on Wednesday, April 15, 2009, but NOT at the Fall River Public Library.

Instead, the club will convene at Bristol Community College to hear a lecture presented by Philip T. Slivia, Phd.D., and Jay J. Lambert, J.D., as part of the series of Bristol County commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Massachusetts Superior Court.

The talk is titled “Rights of Labor and Capital in the Gilded Age: The Granite Mills Fire.”

TIME: April 15, 2009, at 6:30PM.
PLACE: Bristol Community College, 777 Elsbree Street, Fall River, MA. Health Services Building C, Room C111.

The lecture will review the labor conditions and issues, together with the relationship of capital and labor in the period of Fall River’s post-Civil War industrial expansion, with a focus on the most tragic example of the consequences.

Songs were written about this disaster. Here are the lyrics to one such tune.

The Granite Mill Fire

Was in Fall River City
When the people was burned and killed,
In a cotton manufactory
Called as the Granite Mill.
At seven o’clock the firebells rang
But oh, it was too late,
The flames they were fast spreading
And at a rapid rate.

They were men and women there
And children too, I’m told,
Who might have been saved from out of the flames
If the truth was only known.
But oh, the villains that locked thc doors
And told them to keep still,
It was the bosses and overseers
That burning Granite Mill.

The first scene was a touching one
From a maid so young in years,
She was standing by a window and
Her eyes were filled with tears.
She cried, ” Oh, save me! Save me! ”
She called her mother’s name,
But her mother could not save her
And she fell back in the flame.

The next scene was a horrible one
Just as it caught my eye.
They were leaping from a window
From up so very high,
And the only means of their escape
Was sliding down a rope,
And just as they were half way down
The burning strands they broke.

Christ, Christ, what a horrible mess,
They were mangled, burned and killed,
Six stories high, and falling from
The burning Granite Mill.
But I hope their spirits has fled
To a better place far still,
Up high, up high, up in the sky
Above the Granite Mill.

From Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia, Creighton Collected from Tom Henneberry, who learned this song in the 1890s, says it describes a fire in Fall River, New York, of about that time. The locking-in aspect is reminiscent of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City. RG

Link to lyric site.