This tragic mill collapse killed mostly women, after industrialists put profit before safety
The Pemberton mill imploded and then caught fire
The Pemberton mill building in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was prone to occasional trembling. On a rainy winter day in 1860, 21-year-old textile worker Rosanna Kenney felt a deep vibration within the five-story, 284-foot-long brick building structure. The next day, January 10, the rocking came again, but this time it was stronger. Around 4:45 p.m., Kenney and other workers were scalded by a burst steam pipe. Olive Bridges was working on the top floor when she felt the structure quake. Sensing the worst, she dashed for the elevator shaft, grabbed the hoisting chain, and descended to the ground. Her swift response saved her life. The Pemberton mill was collapsing.
The fifth floor, made from oak six inches thick, was the first to go. It collapsed from the center, in the direction of the south wall, and fell onto the floor below. The cast-iron pillars and timber supports continued to buckle and snap, bringing down with them tons of machinery, threatening the lives of the 600 workers inside.
Some, like Olive Bridges, managed an early escape. Company owner George Howe fled from the first floor, while others were extremely lucky. A.B. Winne, reported the New York Times, “was on the fifth story when he felt the shaking of the building. He expected to be instantly killed, but went down with the falling mass to the first floor, and walked out of the ruins unharmed. He was obliged to tear away some timbers to get out … the wounded and imprisoned in the vicinity begging him not to move anything for fear the rubbish would crush them.”
Within 60 seconds, the main building of the Pemberton mill had collapsed. Most of the 600 employed in the factory remained dead or trapped, stuck in a pyramid, the Boston Journal reported, “rising over fifty feet.”
It was a tragic consequence of the fervor of the Industrial Revolution.
Lawrence in the 19th century was a mill town, kept running by investor money from Boston and the labor of manual workers from all over. They came from central Europe and nearby New England states, but most were women of Scottish and Irish birth. At the mill, 60 percent of workers were Irish and two-thirds were women.
Designed by architect Charles Bigelow, the central Pemberton mill building was erected in 1853 for $800,000, by industrialists J. Pickering Putnam and John Amory Lowell. The investors sold the building at a significant loss amid the Panic of 1857, for $325,000. The new owners, David Nevins Sr. and Charles Howe, sought to reap the maximum capacity from the impressive edifice, stuffing the ground floor with 400 looms and the upper levels with more textile equipment than intended. At its peak, it produced 150,000 yards of cloth per week, grossing $1,500,000 per year.
The money was rolling in, and concern for the workers was far from the first priority.
Around 6 p.m., on January 10, 1860, the Associated Press sent a cable to notify the world of the news, announcing that “One of the most terrible catastrophes on record occurred in this city, this afternoon.” Rescuers were met with darkness on the winter day, and used bonfires and lanterns for illumination. They found a grisly scene, of “faces crushed beyond recognition, open wounds in which the bones showed through a paste of dried blood, brick dust, and shredded clothing.” Three women were uncovered in a dead embrace. Some of the killed were so mutilated they were displayed for relatives in City Hall and identified by articles of clothing.
For all the gore, rescue efforts were markedly successful. Sections of the lower floors remained intact, while hearty, arch-shaped machinery created coves where survivors could wait and call out to first responders. In the first five or six hours, some 200 workers were pulled out of the wreckage alive.
Then a second disaster struck. Two rescuers were climbing the rubble around 11 p.m. As they entered a crevice, one of their lanterns broke and spilled its flaming oil over nearby debris. The fire had plenty of fuel, in the form of broken timber and oil-soaked cotton from the machines. The collapse had become a conflagration.
There were still people trapped below. Helpers created an access hole where two women were stuck, giving them coffee as they awaited rescue, but the fire, a news report said, “enveloped the poor creatures, who perished before the eyes of their would-be deliverers.” A most gruesome scene involved an overseer named Morris Palmer, who cut his throat with a pocketknife to avoid suffering the approaching flames. He was later rescued from the rubble, only to die from his self-inflicted wound. The Boston Globe described the scene, in which 14 trapped workers were “burned to death in the sight of their loved ones, who were powerless to aid them.”
Despite fire rescue efforts, those trapped in the rubble when the fire struck were killed.
On one hand, that so many survived such a massive building collapse was remarkable. Of some 600 people, over 400 lived by efforts of escape or rescue. On the other hand, that still left many dead, with estimates of the body count ranging from 90 to 145. If the latter, larger figure is true, it would put the Pemberton mill disaster one shy of the death toll in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, which galvanized public opinion in favor of stricter workplace-safety laws.
The Pemberton disaster evoked a charitable response from many. Amos Lawrence, a Massachusetts textile heir, assembled 20 wealthy industrialists to start a relief fund. The mayor of the city sent him an emotional letter about a 15-year-old orphan who worked at the mill to support her younger siblings, “We had nearly extracted her; ten minutes more and she would have been safe” he wrote, “but the flames came.” The fund collected $20,000 from donors wealthy and poor, including churches, synagogues, Freemasons, and the Knights Templar.
The disaster also inspired a small burst of politically minded literature. A poem published two weeks later in Vanity Fair set the blame on the mill owners and other such businessmen:
A curse on ye, ye Millionaires
Who sit at home in your easy chairs,
And crack your nuts and sip your wine,
While I wail over this son of mine!
In 1868, feminist and clothing-reform activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (who was 15 at the time of the collapse) published a short story in the Atlantic Monthly based on Asenath S. Martin, who died in the collapse. She was right to bring attention to gender. Of the 90 dead immediately listed, 65 were women.
A jury was swiftly assembled and came to a decision about culpability. They agreed there was no evidence of criminal intent on behalf of the owners or engineers. But they were alarmed by the thinness of the walls for a structure so large, and the large windows that displaced valuable and necessary structural material. Yet the greatest fault was put on the hollow cast-iron pillars. Photos of a pillar section show the uneven thickness of its walls, the result of a carelessly set mold. Engineering analysts agreed they were also spaced too far apart, and testimony revealed no serious tests or inspection were applied to them. The culpability was found to lie with the foreman of the foundry that manufactured the inferior pillars, as well as Charles Bigelow, the architect.
The jury’s decision led to greater restrictions on factory buildings, and led to the trend of using wooden pillars rather than cast iron, which is prone to subtle defects with every pour.
And while the charitable response was efficient and well-meaning, Jamie L. Bronstein, professor at New Mexico State University, notes that “the distribution of aid was colored by assumptions about class, immigration, and nature of the work.” Heads of household meant the most in windfall, up to $500 for beneficiaries. But when it comes to many of the young women, some not even adults, the allotment had a smaller range. Such life cut short might only garner between $50 to $100.
The mill sprang up again very soon, however, and continued to run for 60 more years.
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