The Satanic Mills & Biddeford, Maine

When I was a kid, a few of the textile mills were still hard at it in Biddeford, Maine but they've been ex-industrial space for a couple of generations now. The textile industry, always searching out the cheapest labor possible, moved South after the war, largely to the Carolinas, but it didn't stay there long before heading offshore. Now most of the textiles we want are made in China, but wages have been creeping up there, too. Where's next? Africa? Viet Nam?  The Biddeford/Saco mill complex, which sprawls over both sides of the Saco River and on an island in the river, is impressive, vast, and a little intimidating. The first labor force in the New England mills were surplus population off the region's hardscrabble hill farms---often farmers' daughters who came down to do a stint and earn a bit of cash to put aside for their dowry. As the textile business grew, around the time of the Civil War, the mills began to rely heavily on immigrants. In New England, that meant Irish and, heavily, French Canadians. There was a big exodus from the stultified economy of French-speaking Canada 1880-1950, heading for work in the New England industrial economy. An often-ignored aspect of Canadian history: Canada was/is a nation of emigrants as well as immigrants---and very often the emigrants were French-speakers from the farms of Quebec and New Brunswick, at a time when the industrial economy in Canada was weak and tiny, and the mills in New Engand beckoned with wages and work. Living and working conditions were often pretty grim in towns like Biddeford, Lewiston, Lowell, Waterville. When I was a kid I thought the mill was a jail, which is probably how it seemed to some of the people ("hands") who worked there