100 Years

by M.E. Burke

The following is an imaginary trip through the history of Main Street, North Adams, through the eyes of the Civil War Statue. It was originally published in The Transcript, April 22, 1978.

I came here as a stone stranger. I represented the loved, the lost, and the unknown.

Those North Adams stone carvers, who tenderly created me just a short pace from where I stood for 100 years, called me the statue of the unknown Civil War soldier.

In uniform, capped and gun bearing, I came to stand at the top of Main Street.

The day I was unveiled on that tree-grown, roundish ground, ladies with hats and flowers on pastry shells stood gawking at me. So did mustached, grave-looking gentlemen and young children peeking between their fathers' knees.

Balloons rose from hands into the air. I saw bluish hills, near mountains, and what I supposed was their Main Street. It was dirt, curving, flanked by wood-frame stores and a few fancy stone buildings and one, The Wilson, a hotel, with turret-top architecture and a 75-horse stable to its credit.

As days passed, talk was plentiful in my small shady park on a knoll. Passersby would unintentionally fill me in on North Adams. I looked to them like a harmless piece of marble on a block of brownstone. I've been fooling them for 100 years.

Then I heard most about household squabbles and listened to birdbath philosophers. But the main things about North Adams were spoken of too. The railroad line from east to west, the Hoosac Tunnel, the Hoosac River, the textile mills. They weren't a rich people. But this definitely was a booming town.

The air was hazy with the smoke from mills.

I counted nine smoke stacks from Monument Square. One day men began laying steel rails, two of them, right down the middle of Main Street. I remember I watched as they moved in a big metal vehicle, a rolling tin can. People climbed into it and disappeared! It was a trolley car. It was electrical. It spooked the horses, upset the carts, tossed the babies, spilled the milkman's wagon. It replaced the stagecoach.

I was on the square every day after July 4, 1878. Talk was that 35 souls in 1879 decided to subscribe into something called the telephone. No sooner had I heard it than the work crews were fighting to erect bizarre wooden poles with crossbars and wires springing out everywhere. Before my eyes Main Street was decked with them. Talk also was in 1884 that a library had been established over my left shoulder in the Blackington mansion. I couldn't verify this, of course.

After 35 railroad workers were injured in a train accident on route to the Hoosac Tunnel from the town popular subscription here established the North Adams Hospital. It was all the talk of 1884. The clanging trolleys came shortly after the arrival of North Adams Normal School's first students.

Main Street becomes vivid and active on Sundays. The citizens pass me and go down the knoll to Main Street where they can eat ice cream and cake in the Miller's Candy Kitchen.

Two gents are walking through my park on a summer's day. I hear one wonder aloud whether or not to advertise this for his business:"The air is cool inside and free of flies." The other man says it's a fine idea. They walk on.

On weekdays, Main Street stays busy. Shoe stores, millinery shops, tailors, and banks are booming. I have a favorite place I'll never visit. It's T.W Calnan's manufacturer of fine Havana cigars. I just wait for somebody smoking Calnan cigars to pass. The whiff of smoke I get up here is paradise. These days get me through the floods and the frigid winters.

In the winters I remember what I've missed in the record snowfall of 1886, for instance. I stood with a stovepipe hat of snow and a chin full of icicles. I wished I'd seen pieces of conversational history: The men I stand for were born before the Hoosac Tunnel was begun in 1851 and died before it was finished in 1875. In fact this Civil War uniform I'm depicted to wear may have been made in this city.

I also think of the 75 Chinese hired by C.T Simpson in 1870 to break a strike at his shoe manufacturing plant. Laborers who had unionized under Knights of St.Crispin were afraid of the mechanized replacements. The shoes kept coming. The cotton and wool goods keep coming. Spring comes back with floodwaters, but the town, a city in 1895, fights back and the smoke rises again from the hills.

The Hoosac Tunnel over my left shoulder is responsible largely for the boom from a 10,000 population in 1878 to twice that in 1895. Wagons now pass loaded with cotton and woolen goods from the mills, and I see far down Main Street the wagons of raw cotton and raw wool traveling from the freight yards to the mills, and from there to print works. There are Arnold Print Works', calicos in the wagons, and Freeman prints. There are Windsor Co. cotton goods milled at Windsor Co., Johnson Manufacturing Co., Dunbar Mills, North Adams Manufacturing Co., Blackington Co., all abroad looms manufacturing cloth, giving life to the town.

Gaslights illuminate Main Street at night. We're headed for the turn of the century. Trolleys clang, horses try to go along their jangling way, bicycles bells tinkle, church chimes boom. How they boom! I'm situated among three, and there must be five more I can't quite see. One Sunday, after men and women and children make their church visits, the city is gathered at my feet. The mayor is saying, "We have one hundred and seventy-four streets, all in good condition," to applause.

The next day, men go back to work and wagonsful of ducks, flannels, percales, sateens, organdies and what-not roll by my feet. In their dust trails, I think: It's booming.

In 1911, word comes that the Hoosac Tunnel has become electrified:

The fumes of coal-burning engines inside the tunnel are too much for passengers and engineers, it is said. The electrical engines will pull the locomotives through safely. In the same years, tourists seem to be discovering these blue mountains and riversides, especially after 1914, when Mohawk Trail is opened. Some folks speak of the vehicular shambles one made of Main Street by auto trolleys, bikes, horse-drawn carts, and now, to top it off, the automobile. In 1916, I was snow-locked again under a record fall. Drifts were 25 feet high. The trolley and the rest didn't fare so well for weeks.

Soon, I saw something dimly personal way down Main Street. Young men were enlisting around the corner of Main and Marshall, above a drug store, I hear. The year was 1917. I'd done my enlisting over a drug store, too, more than 50 years ago.

A column of olive-drab-wearing officers came trodding up Main Street. They'd come from Williamstown through the flying dirt. They'd been Williams College students. Today, they were officers in the U.S. Army. Their dimpled field hats shaded nervous faces from the sun.

Things got quieter on Main Street when the soldiers left for Europe. Every so often for awhile, a drunk staggers by my pedestal, looking stupefied up at me. Prohibition has begun in 1920, but there is no letup in the number of staggerers. I hear talk all the time of bootleg distilleries. Some wander right under my nose.

In 1924, I'm watching Main Street motorize. Traffic lights are blinking multi-colored in my eyes. They don't let up. Tourists are everywhere in humpback cars. Men walk around in golfing clothes and women bob their hair. In 1924, the Hoosac River flood-waters rage and a city panics, fights back, and dries out.

The workers are at their mills, but, I notice there's a lot less information available from Monument Square conversations and a lot more gaiety instead.

The city reels under the stock market crash. Not that it's a city of investors. The depression brings about the failure and migration South of lifeblood: the mills. Floodwaters rise twice again, in 1936 and 1938, while the turret of the Wilson comes down out of old age.

There are counterbalancing factors. I hear in 1930 that Sprague Electric Co., of Quincy, is moving here. Some comfort is sought by the city in moving picture houses. Main Street supports three movie theaters by the end of the 1930's: Paramount, Richmond, and Mohawk.

Tourist trade bucks the downward trend of business here. A memorial beacon is constructed on Mount Greylock. In 1936, I'm nearly tossed earthward by a hurricane and the Hoosac River floods the town. Someone estimates $2,500.00 damage to this city and Adams.

World War II is a bane to man and a boon to business. Women of the households march down to Sprague Electric and file into work there beneath patriotic signs. The men don the olive-drab once again and take the trains to the war. This war leaves a different street scene. The gaslights are replaced by electric lights now shaped like ice cream cones. The telephone lines are modern, sleeker, the crossbar monstrosity is gone.

When the soldiers and sailors return, they find a new pastime: television. Antennas begin rising in the 1950's on Church Street rooftops. Sprague's first $1 million profit is attributed to capacitors produced for television sets.

The damnable parking meter shows up one day on Main Street. The city keeps up its spirit with parades and holiday-time cheer, and movies still flash from neon marquees: "G.I. Joe" with Robert Mitchum and "Flying Leatherneck" with John Wayne.

By the late part of the decade, I discover the citizens have not spent all their time marching, watching television, and staring at the big screen. The city engaged the federal government in North Adams's $2,780,000 action renewal project leveling the south side of Main Street. Meanwhile, a federal flood control program finally tamed the wild waters of the Hoosac River.

I've noticed in the past 15 or more years that cars are getting faster, more reckless. My knoll is getting chipped away.

Times aren't easier either. Or were they ever? I've watched young men go off to Korea and to Vietnam. I've heard the students at North Adams State and Williams colleges call for moratoriums in May 1970 after Kent State shootings and the Cambodia incursion. I've heard bold talk of Sprague putting a time capsule on the moon via Apollo II in 1969.

My nose was chipped too. My position is downright precarious come to think of it. My knoll is a small disc of concrete. Where are the shaded trees I remember so clearly? Bring back the horse, I think sometimes.

I have watched Main Street widened and beautified in the 1970's. Time will tell, I guess, whether the changes are cosmetic or fundamental. But the pride I took in being an All-American City in 1973 can't be that of a stranger, an unknown Soldier brought here hooded. I bristled with a citizen's pride. People are why North Adams is looking up. I hope I last another 100 years.

This driver coming in my direction puts doubts in my mind. If I'm a goner, though, I'm sure somebody will remember to replace me. I've got the best seat in town.