The Death of an Era
By: Steve Sharp ©2005
The morning was bright and clear and light streamed through the kitchen windows, shining on my grandmother who sat at the kitchen table, thumbing through the morning newspaper.
Without looking up from her newspaper, she said, “They’re tearing down the mill.” I knew in an instant which “mill” she meant. Merrimack Mill was a textile mill that towered, like a brown, man-made mountain behind my granny’s house. Both of my great-grandparents had worked at the mill for many years, as had my grandmother. My father even spent a summer working at the mill, pushing a lunch wagon. I could not imagine looking out Granny’s backdoor and seeing anything but the jutting smokestack standing against a clear, blue sky.
“They’re tearing it down? Why? Isn’t it some kind of historic building or something?” I asked.
She took a long draw from her cigarette and exhaled. “I guess it ain’t old or historic enough. It says here that it was built in 1899. So, it’d only be about eighty years old, I reckon.” She pushed her reading glasses up and continued to read. She had worked in the snack bar at Merrimack Mill for twenty-three years, and although she professed to hate it, I could sense the solemnity in her face as she read.
Some of my earliest memories involve Granny and the mill. When I was four or five years old, I’d ride with my dad to pick her up from work, because it was late at night and she didn’t drive. We’d climb into our blue Beetle and pull up to the big gate and wait for Granny to make her way from the building out to the car.
I hunched down in the back seat and waited for her to climb in and close the door. Without fail, she’d slide into the seat, slam the door, and ask, “Where’s Stevie?”
“I’m right here!” I’d say, straightening up and giggling. It never occurred to me that after pulling this trick thirty or forty times, I wasn’t really fooling anyone. She laughed and handed me a small, brown bag, as she always did, that contained one carton of chocolate milk, one carton of orange drink, and sometimes she included a bag of candy orange slices.
When it rained, sometimes the gate guard would wheel back the tall, chain link gate doors and let us drive up to the building. Dad took me inside, and we walked down the long hallway with a polished floor, past the rackety machinery, and into the snack bar where Granny worked. Her boss, a man she called W. G., always smiled at me and lifted me up to sit on the counter. Before I could say a word, W. G. would duck into one of the three gleaming refrigerator doors and emerge with a carton of chocolate milk and a pack of peanut butter crackers.
“Here you go, buddy,” he’d say, opening the milk carton before handing it to me. At five years old, there wasn’t anything better than sitting on that counter, eating my crackers and guzzling chocolate milk.
Granny always protested. “W. G., he don’t need to be up on that counter. Besides, you’re spoilin’ him rotten.”
“Aw, he ain’t hurtin’ nothing. A little chocolate milk’s good for a young ‘un. Ain’t that right, buddy?” I nodded and grinned at him. The kitchen was so shiny and clean. I had never seen anyplace that gleamed so much. Granny scrubbed the grill and swept while W. G. hurried around the snack bar, stuffing suckers, Moon Pies, crackers and anything else he could think of into a brown paper bag. As we left, he’d discreetly hand me the bag and say, “Here you go, buddy. You come back to see me, okay?” I’d nod and mutter “thanks” as we headed for the car.
On warm, spring
evenings, the gentle hum of the mill filtered through my open windows and
helped me drift off to sleep. The mill
was as much a constant in my world as it had been in my grandmother’s since she
could remember. Still, the mill was something
bigger than our family; the whole community was composed of houses constructed
for mill workers, and many of them were still occupied by retired textile
workers who’d spent their entire working life within the great walls of
“Do you miss working there?” I asked Granny, wondering if she’d get sentimental, or give me the cranky, aggravated tone that she often used when speaking of the days when she worked in the concession stand.
“Well, I miss some of the people. You know, it’s kind of like school. You may not really like school, but you get to liking some of the people and you miss ‘em when they ain’t around no more.”
I understood. By the time I came along, in 1966, time had
moved on, The days of “king cotton,” when
whole communities worked at one of the three cotton mills that were scattered
around
Several months after Granny told me the news, the big, brown building laid silent like a hulking, ancient corpse. The men with bulldozers and wrecking balls showed up and systematically tore the building apart. Except for the tall smokestack, we watched the entire building fell into a pile of rubble in little more than a couple of weeks. Going to the field and watching the destruction became a daily ritual for Granny and me, and it seemed that each day, several more people joined the group of spectators.
“It’s hard to believe how something can stand for that long, and then come down that fast, ain’t it?” Granny asked no one in particular. “It was solid, but I guess it ain’t no match for them modern wrecking machines.” Several times, I thought I saw a tear in the corner of her eye, but she hardly said a word as the roaring machines laid waste to the old mill. Hardly any of the onlookers ever said a word as they watched, but even in their blank expressions, I saw the wistful somberness of their memories; they had years of their lives tied up in the brick and mortar that was falling before them.
When the demolition stopped, bricks were being stacked into neat bundles and hauled away, and it was all over. Finally, a few of the onlookers cried, some hugged each other, others reflected on memories of their working days. The razing of the mill left a big, empty patch of land that had never been barren in the memory of anyone still living. Soon, the dust and rubble were replaced with sod and soccer goals. The place where children once worked had been converted into a place where a new generation of children could play and do the things children should be able to do.
Seeing the death of Merrimack Mill made an impression on me that will never disappear, even if not, perhaps, the impression that would seem most obvious. I thought that the mill embodied the center of the community. I thought that seeing the mill disappear would remove the most important thing that held everything together. Instead, I learned that the community is held together by the people and not the buildings. For those former workers and their families, the old Merrimack Mill may be gone, but the spirit of the community that it spawned will live well beyond lifetime of those who remember seeing that old, brown building with its jutting smokestack turning out miles of fabric each day.