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  The Groveton Mill Oral History Project began as an assignment in a graduate ethnography course taught by Millie Rahn at Plymouth State University in the winter of 2009–2010. I soon realized I was a willing captive of a far greater project. By the summer of 2013 I had accumulated over one hundred hours of taped interviews with fifty-six individuals who had worked at the mill or grown up in Groveton.

  The transcripts of these interviews fill more than two thousand pages. The careful reader of this book and those transcripts will detect that I have edited the transcriptions to assure greater clarity, to eliminate redundancies and digressions, and, whenever possible, to remove my questions and comments. I have endeavored to assure that the editing process maintained the integrity of the spoken word and kept faith with the meaning and intent of my generous informants. This book would have been intolerably long, and at times confusing, if I had not edited the raw transcripts.

  Sandy White was one of the first women to work on a paper machine crew. In the passage below, she reflected on the mill closing. To demonstrate how I edited transcripts, I supply the raw transcript, followed by the edited version. The retained passages of the raw transcript are shown in italic.

  SANDY WHITE’S RESPONSE TO THE CLOSING OF THE MILL: RAW TRANSCRIPT

  Sandy White (SW): It gives you a sick, sick feeling when any of these mills go down. Of course that one especially. Campbell was bad enough. This one, I think everybody was in total shock when this one went down. And I’ll never understand why. I cannot make myself believe that this mill was not making money. I know better, and so does everybody. I don’t know whether it was transportation, but then rail come in; they built this terminal up here for shipping and everything else, so to me that can’t be the cop-out. Who knows? We’ve got guys out there that are playing God with a lot of lives. I know the paper industry is really catching hell everywhere. But when they send—I think Groveton Paper Board, I think their machine went to Vietnam. I mean, what’s wrong with this picture? Because they can make it for half what we can, apparently. That’s the name of the game. Anybody that can make the most money, that’s what’s going to happen. Never mind the little guy. They don’t count anymore. Haven’t for years. It’s money; the only thing that counts. It makes me bitter, but facts are facts. I don’t know what their real reason was. They could make anything you wanted for paper on those machines and make it well. That I do know. The old guys—they could make paper without all these modern instruments. I don’t know—and the money they put in that mill. That’s another thing that puzzles me. Why put all that money in that mill and then shut it down. It makes no sense. Maybe they can make me understand; I don’t know. But nobody’s offered to [laughs].

  Jamie Sayen: I don’t get a sense that there were a lot of people from headquarters in Wisconsin who spent a lot of time here trying to help us understand it.

  SW: No. From what I understand, they just came in one day and said, “This is it; you’re going down.” No options, no reasons. Nothing. They didn’t give them an excuse or a reason. Something’s wrong with this picture. That shouldn’t be allowed. Even a good lie would have helped.

  EDITED VERSION: It gives you a sick, sick feeling when any of these mills go down. I think everybody was in total shock when this one went down. I’ll never understand why. I cannot make myself believe that this mill was not making money. I know better. We’ve got guys out there that are playing God with a lot of lives. I know the paper industry is really catching hell everywhere. Groveton Paper Board, their machine went to Vietnam. I mean, what’s wrong with this picture? Because they can make it for half what we can. That’s the name of the game. Anybody that can make the most money, that’s what’s going to happen. Never mind the little guy. They don’t count anymore. Haven’t for years. It’s money; the only thing that counts. It makes me bitter. I don’t know what their real reason was. From what I understand, they just came in one day and said, “This is it; you’re going down.” No options. Nothing. They didn’t give them an excuse or a reason. That shouldn’t be allowed. Even a good lie would have helped.

  I HOPE MY EDITS have retained the spirit, intent, and humanity of the storyteller, even though I have had to delete interesting information. I also hope that some readers will be impatient to read the original transcripts or, better yet, to listen to the interviews themselves. They are available in the Northumberland Library in Groveton, New Hampshire; Weeks Memorial Library in Lancaster, New Hampshire; and the Stratford Public Library in North Stratford, New Hampshire. For more information, visit the Groveton Mill Oral History Project website.

  Chapter One

  THE LIFE OF THE TOWN

  FOLLOWING THE CIVIL WAR, as demand for paper products soared, scientists developed methods for the mass production of paper using wood fibers. Investors began to build paper mills in New England towns with access to softwood forests, railroad service, and river power. In 1891, three investors began to construct the Groveton Paper Mill on the bank of the Upper Ammonoosuc River, where two major railroads converged. The mill was part of an emerging national and global economy: it depended on outside investors; it required raw materials from other regions; it needed far-flung markets to sell its paper products; and it competed with other paper mills.

  The village of Groveton is located in the township of Northumberland, lying along the Connecticut River, north of Lancaster, south of Stratford, and west of Stark in northern New Hampshire’s Coos County. For centuries, Abenaki hunters had pursued game in the region, but there is scant evidence that they established permanent settlements. Northumberland was settled in 1767 by two frontier families. When they arrived, the vast old-growth forests of red spruce, balsam fir, white pine, sugar maple, yellow birch, and American beech teemed with moose, wolves, bears, lynx, otters, foxes, martens, mink, muskrats, woodchucks, and passenger pigeons. The rivers and streams abounded with Atlantic salmon and brook trout. Agents of the European fur trade had extirpated beaver in the previous century. Wolverines had also disappeared. By the end of the nineteenth century, land-clearing for agriculture and commercial logging, along with swamp drainage, dams, sawdust pollution from sawmills, and reckless overhunting and overfishing, provoked the Coos County historian to lament: “Coos, from being the finest sporting ground in the world, is now about the poorest.”1

  Eighteenth-century Northumberland farmers built small sawmills and gristmills as soon as they could. The remoteness of the region protected the old-growth forests of northern New Hampshire and northeastern Vermont from commercial lumbering until the Grand Trunk Railway crossed the Upper Ammonoosuc River four miles north of Northumberland village in 1852. The railroad men recognized that the uncleared woodland on the western bank of the Upper Ammonoosuc, about a mile north of its confluence with the Connecticut River, would make an ideal spot for a new village that could supply the steam engines with wood, water, and other necessities. They named it Groveton, in memory of the grove of trees that had been cleared to build the rail depot and village. John Eames, grandson of a leading early settler, immediately began construction of a store and a hotel, the Melcher House, along the tracks just west of the station. The population of Northumberland nearly doubled during the 1850s.

  In 1863, Eames and partner Charles Bellows built a dam and a sawmill on the Upper Ammonoosuc, just south of the railroad bridge. The first house of worship, the Methodist Episcopal Church, was constructed in 1869. That year, Gilbert Soule, a Maine lumberman, acquired controlling interest in Eames and Bellows’s sawmill. Soule and his sons transformed it into the village’s largest manufacturer. Groveton also boasted smaller clapboard and shingle mills and a tannery.

  In 1870, Eames and two partners, the Holyoke brothers, acquired the uninhabited township of Odell, east of the Nash Stream and northeast of Groveton, for roughly a dollar an acre. Lumbermen dammed a boggy area in Odell to create the Nash Stream Bog. From the bog, Nash Stream flows south ten miles to its confluence with the Upper Ammonoosuc about four miles north of Groveton.
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br />   A second railroad line, the Boston and Maine, connected Groveton with Concord, New Hampshire, and Boston in 1872. The following year, George Holyoke sold a huge shipment of lumber to New York City, unwisely accepting housing as security. When the 1873 financial panic wrecked the nation’s economy, Eames and the Holyokes were forced to sell Nash Stream to Gilbert Soule.

  Groveton’s steady growth stalled in the early 1880s, owing to a decline in housing prices. By 1889, the economy had revived, and Groveton’s greatest decade of growth commenced. Investors from Massachusetts sank $150,000 into the construction of the Weston Lumber Company sawmill and a dam half a mile south of the Soule Mill. Weston’s mill burned down in August 1890 and was immediately rebuilt. By 1898 the Weston mill complex included a box factory, a gristmill and grain elevator, a large general store, a wagon and sled construction and repair shop, and a harness department. Weston had acquired two-thirds of Odell Township, and throughout the 1890s the mill sawed approximately twelve million board feet a year. It employed 125 men during the sawing season and 300 men and 100 horses during the winter logging season.

  After 1901, the paper mill dominated the tight-knit, remote community. Most everyone in Groveton shares Hadley Platt’s belief that “the mill was the life of this town.” Kathy Mills Frizzell reflected upon how the Groveton Paper Mill affected her childhood: “There’s the kids’ perspective of growing up in Groveton with the mill here. How you incorporated the whistles, the smells. We had the nine o’clock curfew whistle. We went home with the noon whistle. It was a presence in our lives in many ways—the woodpile. Just what it looked like, and what it felt like being in Groveton from the kids’ perspective.”

  Herb Miles, born in 1920, lived on a farm in Stark, the township east of Northumberland. He recalled there were farms in downtown Groveton in his youth: “A fellow by the name of Swift had a farm right there [in town], a barn, had eight to ten head of cattle. In the summer he drove them up to Moore’s pasture—grazing, and bring them back, milk ’em.”

  Cars were scarce. Miles and his sister traveled by horse: “I remember the gravel streets, the watering troughs. You drove horses in the winter. My sister and I would come downtown to the company store. We were eight, nine, ten years old. We’d hitch up a driving horse, a sleigh. Mother would write out a list. We’d cross the river right there on Brooklyn Street at the far end over to the company store to get groceries.”

  On Saturday nights, Miles went to the movies: “I had a cousin who lived out beyond the Red Dam [a mile upriver from town]. I’d come out and stay with him and then we’d walk over to the street on Saturday night. We would go to the movie theater. The first movies I went to were silent. That’s how old I am. They didn’t have the talking machine, talking movies. Finally they had it; that was something. ‘Squawk, squawk.’ But it talked. George Russ had a diner right there by the theater, and you could buy a hot dog and a bottle of sody pop and go to the movies for a quarter. George’s son would give us a bottle of pop once in a while, and that would give us five cents [extra] to buy a bag of popcorn when we went in the show.”

  Main Street, Groveton, looking north, ca. 1930. At the intersection, just before the nearest car on left, one could make a left turn onto State Street. A right turn onto Mechanic Street led to the mill. The Eagle Hotel, at the north end of Main Street on the right, was demolished in 1999. (Courtesy GREAT)

  Len Fournier, born in 1925, lived in one of the mill tenements: “My father worked in what they called the ‘bull gang’ in the mill. They did everything, moving stuff, unloading. He earned twenty-seven dollars a week.” Len played around the mill: “I can remember when we were kids down here, we used to get ahold of them horseshoe nails and put them on the track and make the train run over them and make a pair of scissors. It would weld them together. Me and the girl who lived a couple of houses down used to go over in the sawmill yard. Sometimes there would be extra long boards sticking out. Boy, they’d make a good teeter board. After we broke off two or three of them, we got driven out of there.”

  Fournier remembered an old man who fished near the mill: “An old guy by the name of McGreavy used to fish out of the river all the time. Of course the sewage used to go into the river down there. He’d pull eel and fish out of there. I don’t know if he ate them or not.” Although Albert “Puss” Gagnon couldn’t swim, he remembered family outings to the river, upstream of the mill: “We used to go out Red Dam, and we’d swim in between the pulp logs. After a while, they put a stop to that. For years my father and my mother would take us out there to that dam.”

  As a boy, John Rich took a hot dinner to his father at the mill: “I could bring my father’s dinner pail in. That’s all my father wanted me in there. There was a lot of places to get hurt there. He’d go to work in the afternoon or the evening; I’d bring it in five o’clock, something like that. He’d have something hot.”

  Shirley Brown remembered walking through the mill: “During the winter, when it was cold, we’d walk to the end of the mill and walk all the way through the mill just to keep warm. It was pretty scary.”

  Coal and chemicals befouled the air around town. Many children suffered from asthma, and when the air was especially bad, they had to remain inside, where there was a good chance someone was a heavy smoker. “But that was part of life back then,” Hadley Platt observed with a fatalism common to natives of Groveton.

  Platt also remembered that people scavenged coal cinders: “Around the mill, there was a lot of free heat because the mill burnt coal at the time. They had coal cinders, and people used to get it by the truckloads, and sift it, and burn it in their stoves. We burned it at our house. We’d go down there with a truck, and load them, take them home, and take them to different people. Then they’d sift it out and put it in their stoves and burn it.”

  The company store near the river, where Soule’s sawmill had stood, supplied most mill workers’ families with necessities during the hard times of the 1930s. “My mother was born in ’27, and my grandfather worked at the mill,” Bill Russ said. “She never remembers them having any money. Everything that they had was purchased down at the store. It was almost like: you worked there, you were rewarded; you get all your food you needed there. Everybody was so happy to have jobs. They could eat.”

  Shirley Brown thought the mill paid only in script redeemable at the company store: “My dad, all the years that he worked in the mill, never got a paycheck. He got a yellow slip. We lived in the company houses; we got our groceries at the company store. The oil and wood was through the company store. If it hadn’t been for the company store, a lot of people in this town wouldn’t have survived. When you went to work in the mill, it was almost a contract that went with it; you deal with the company store. We never got anything that didn’t come from the company store.”

  “The big old company store, we used to buy our groceries there,” Hadley Platt said. “Nobody had any money on payday because they owed it all to the store for groceries. Times were hard. Everybody bought their groceries there who worked in the mill. They were lucky if they got a dollar in change, because most of it went for groceries.”

  A horse named Old Billy Call pulled the company store delivery wagon, Raymond Jackson recalled: “My father used to go round to the houses on Crow Hill. He’d see the woman who’d tell him, ‘I want a pound of hamburger, flour, whatever.’ The next day he’d deliver it to her. [Old Billy] had been on the job quite a while, and my father would go into one house, and he’d go back out and go to the next house, and the horse would kind of follow up the street behind him.” In the mid-1930s, a Model A truck replaced Old Billy, enabling Edwin Jackson to drive to far-flung places, such as Auburn, Maine, for supplies.

  Puss Gagnon remembered that during those years, downtown Groveton was “lively. Goddamn lively. You had one, two, three, four, five beer joints. You ain’t got any no more. That ain’t counting the Moose Club, neither. There was one in the Eagle Hotel. The Tip Top, the next building, that was a beer joint.
[Everett’s] Diner was a beer joint. Dinty Moore’s was a beer joint, and up to the Union Hotel was a beer joint. Liveliest little town you ever see. Deader than a son of a bitch now. Back then, you go down Saturday nights, you never could find a place to park the car anywhere, the town would be so full. Now you go down, there’s all kinds of room.”

  The movie theater had discount nights, Gagnon recalled: “Had movies every night. One night was chum night. I remember when I was too young for anything, go down and stand in front of the picture hall, chum night, somebody would be coming by themselves—they’d haul you in. Two for the price of one. They had one night that was half price. Then they had bank night. They’d draw money, bank night. Quite a nice movie house.”

  After Rosa Gaudette Roberge’s father died in late 1942, her mother was forced to rent an apartment above the recently closed company store down by the mill’s converting plant and print shop. “Our apartment was small,” she remembered. “We were on the opposite end of where the furnace was, and boy, we didn’t get much heat, I’ll tell you.” The apartment had no hot running water: “When us kids would play, of course it was dirty down there where all that coal, soot, and crap. There was a pipe coming out outside of the print shop, and it spit hot water. So we’d take a pail over and put it underneath and get hot water to dump in the tub. We’d go off and play, and when it was full, we carry it upstairs. That was memorable.”

  State Street, looking north, in the early 1940s. The paper mill is behind the photographer, and the Opera House tower with its clock is at the north end of the street. One interviewee recalled running over the traffic dummy at the intersection of State and Main one Sunday morning while hauling a truckful of bark from the drum barker. (Courtesy Becky Craggy)