Digital Extra

  3/04/99
Memories of a mill girl
When a Rhode Islander wrote a play about the textile industry, about mill jobs and mill towns, Patricia Gregson Nugent came to realize something she's always known deep down. She's a mill girl.

By ROBERT L. SMITH
Journal Staff Writer

To step into the old mill today, rising red-brick and brawny along the Woonasquatucket, is to walk into a sound as old as industry.

The THUMP, THUMP, THUMP of the looms echos like mallet strokes off the oak floors and runs up every oil-stained hallway. It's a noise as heavy and rhythmic as the clickety-clack of a rushing train. Except this train never passes by. It runs on and on as it has for the last 80 years.

Patricia Gregson Nugent heard that old, familiar roar for the first time in years recently and drew a sharp breath. She heard the looms not at The Worcester Co. woolen mill in North Providence, which her father ran and which her grandfather founded, but in the pages of a new play.

She was reading Mill Girls, Eliza Anderson's portrayal of the young women who carried New England into an Industrial Revolution. The script calls for stage effects to recreate the heat, the monotony, the pounding certainly known to the girls who staffed the mills of Greystone, Richmond, Pawtucket and Lowell.

Gregson Nugent can testify to the playwright's effectiveness. As she read the words, she was carried back to a building as big as a castle, a little girl blocking out the noise with her palms, riding gaily upon a conveyor belt until her father shooed her away.

The playwright saw something different.

"I immediately said, 'I don't want my name involved in a play that depicts the poor, hard lives of the mill workers," she said.

Tomorrow, when Mill Girls opens at All Childrens Theater in Providence, the Gregson name will appear on the program. The theater company needed $25,000 to produce the play, an original work commemorating Women's History Month. Patricia Gregson Nugent, drawing upon a family foundation, okayed the check.

A mill girl in Scituate

As the local trustee of the Gregson Foundation, a trust established by her grandfather and her great uncle, Gregson Nugent reviews numerous requests for financial aid each year. She follows a few guiding principals. She says she tries to keep the money in Rhode Island, as her family did with the mill. She prefers local projects, like the library and school in Harmony Hill, near where she grew up. And she likes ideas with a dash of energy, like herself.

She's a young-looking 52, a mother of three children, the youngest 14. She speaks in theatrical bursts, her voice rising and falling in a single sentence as she grows excited about a subject, like textiles. A sunny smile softens the dialogue.

Usually, Gregson Nugent pours her energies into her family and her home, an 1840 farmhouse beside a mill pond in northern Scituate. It's been years since she worked at the mill. Her husband, John Nugent, is a facilities supervisor there, but she suspects few people know him as the last link to the founders. The present owners, out-of-state investors, she never met.

"It's not even 'We' anymore," she said. "It's just my husband's paycheck."

Yet she quickly names the designers using Worcester wool fabrics. She can tell you the complex is 500,000 square feet, equipped with computer-driven looms, and she does not sound far removed when she adds, "We have a sales office in New York."

When a Rhode Islander wrote a play about the textile industry, about mill jobs and mill towns, Gregson Nugent came to realize something she's always known deep down. She's a mill girl.

Brothers from Britain

The Gregson brothers, Edgar and Herbert, started Worcester Textile in Worcester in 1919. Edgar, a weaver, and Herbert, a yarn spinner, had arrived from England a few years before. When they moved the company to the Greystone section of North Providence in 1939, they felt right at home. The working-class neighborhood was heavily British.

"They were old English people, very upright and proper, with a real Protestant work ethic," said Robert Patenaude, a Worcester employee of 42 years and today director of product development. "The brothers" ran a paternal company, he said, finding work for their employees in good times and bad.

When Edgar Gregson's son, Raymond, assumed control in the 1960s, he kept the faith.

No one had to worry about Raymond Gregson taking jobs south, said Ann Adams, a mender who started at the mill 33 years ago. "He was beautiful, she said."

At times, the mill employed 900 people, and five generations of families worked inside. It was a constant in Gregson life, even for Raymond Gregson's children.

"I remember as a kid, Dad would always wish every shift Merry Christmas. And there were three shifts]" Patricia Gregson Nugent said.

Fire was a constant fear. Fads, too. Passersby saw a sturdy brick colossus. The Gregsons saw a shaky foundation.

"Double knits come in and we're making worsted? Those leisure suits, thank God, weren't around too long," Gregson Nugent said.

As a young woman, she worked in the design office, accounts receivable. But she remembers best the needle skills of the menders, the steamy heat of the dye rooms, the thump, thump, thumping of the looms.

When Raymond Gregson died in 1990, his employees owned the mill. Last year, an investment firm bought 80 percent of what is now called The Worcester Co.

Employment is down to 500 mill workers. But it is a prideful 500, servicing a high-end fashion market with a thoroughness few can match.

The 80-year-old company stands as New England's last "vertical mill," producing fabric from start to finish, from raw wool to finished clothing for Jones New York, Liz Claiborne, Evan-Picone. It stands, too, as the last working link to the mill girls.

A wage for women

Eighty years before the Gregson brothers opened their mill, Octavia Brown, 16, hugged her parents good-bye and left the family farm for a growing mill town. The character, like the town, stems form Eliza Anderson's imagination. But the life Octavia led was real in 1840 Rhode Island, historians say.

Before waves of immigrant workers arrived, mill owners recruited young farm girls to spool yarn and tend their looms, said local historian Louis McGowan. Boys had grander ideas: they might one day own the farm or go to college, McGowan said. But to women, only the mills offered a wage.

And so Octavia worked a 12-hour day at a hot, noisy, dangerous job that paid her pennies a day while the mill owner grew rich. She boarded with other mill girls, one of whom was killed by a loom, and saved her pennies toward her dream of one day attending Oberlin, an Ohio college that accepted women.

Anderson, a Wakefield playwright and a student of New England labor history, said she purposely did not focus upon a specific mill or town. Nor did she want to point an accusing finger at the textile industry. Who was not exploiting women? Mill girls were sending money home to parents who used it to send brothers to college. Most industries, including farms, treated workers poorly, she said.

In the context of the times, mill jobs were not untypical and they offered women a foot in the door of the working class.

"For the first time, girls had access to an actual wage," Anderson said. "It opened up the door to women's independence in a big way in this country."

That's what Gregson Nugent saw in the play, eventually.

At the IGA in Scituate one day last winter, she ran into Emily Westcott, All Childrens Theater's marketing director, whom she knew from childhood. Soon after, she had a script. Slowly, she read.

At times, it was painful. At times, it seemed too real. Eventually, she decided it was a story that must be told.

"Yes, it shows the deplorable conditions, but it also shows the beginning of industry."

Her industry.

"It's where it began, and women could finally earn a paycheck."

She's sitting in her house in a kitchen 150 years old, looking out a window toward Peep Toad Pond and the woods beyond.

"I think I like the reality of it," she said of the script. "These woman had to work in deplorable conditions, but it didn't break their spirit. I really don't think it did. And I think that's true of women today. We're still probably underpaid. It didn't break our spirit. We're still out there, fighting for our positions."

Nearly a century separates Worcester textile from the mills of Octavia Brown's generation, and Gregson Nugent insisted the theater note that in the program. But she sees the connection, too, the common thread across the generations. And she sees her fading role.

"Textiles has been my whole life. And how long will it be here? We're practically the last one," she said. "I still have a lot of pride when I go down to the mill. It's still home to me."

A home with heroes. Once upon a time, they were called mill girls.

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