Winner of the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award Winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics John Leonard Prize for Best First Book Finalist for the 2021 New England Society Book Award Finalist for the 2021 New England Independent Booksellers Association Award A New York Times Editors’ Choice and Chicago Tribune top book for 2020 “Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling, quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with America’s sins.” —Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland Kerri Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed to its demise. Mill Town is a book of narrative nonfiction, investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with the central question; Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

An overview of life in a nineteenth-century town in which most people worked in the textile mill, including their housing, food, clothing, schools, and everyday activities.

An overview of life in a nineteenth-century town in which most people worked in the textile mill, including their housing, food, clothing, schools, and everyday activities.

How the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company shaped the social, ethnic, and economic existence of Manchester, New Hampshire during America's rise as a manufacturing power.

Absentee owners. Single-minded concern for the bottom line. Friction between workers and management. Hostile takeovers at the hands of avaricious and unaccountable multinational interests. The story of America's industrial decline is all too familiar - and yet, somehow, still hard to fathom. Jamie Sayen spent years interviewing residents of Groveton, New Hampshire, about the century-long saga of their company town. The community's paper mill had been its economic engine since the early twentieth century. Purchased and revived by local owners in the postwar decades, the mill merged with Diamond International in 1968. It fell victim to Anglo-French financier James Goldsmith's hostile takeover in 1982, then suffered through a series of owners with no roots in the community until its eventual demise in 2007. Drawing on conversations with scores of former mill workers, Sayen reconstructs the mill's human history: the smells of pulp and wood, the injuries and deaths, the struggles of women for equal pay and fair treatment, and the devastating impact of global capitalism on a small New England town. This is a heartbreaking story of the decimation of industrial America.

A lavishly-illustrated social history of the manufacture that did most to transform the character of New England and of America.

Author Harriet Robinson (1825-1911), born Harriet Jane Hanson in Boston, offers a first person account of her life as a factory girl in Lowell, Massachusetts in this 1898 work. Robinson moved with her widowed mother and three siblings to Lowell as the cotton industry was booming, and began working as a bobbin duffer at the age of ten for $2 a week. Her reflections of the life, some 60 years later, are unfailingly upbeat. She was educated, in public school, by private lesson, and in church. The community was tightly knit. She also had the opportunity to write poetry and prose for the factory girls' literary magazine The Lowell Offering. When mill girls returned to their rural family homes, she says, "...instead of being looked down upon as 'factory girls, ' they were more often welcomed as coming from the metropolis, bringing new fashions, new books, and new ideas with them."