Author’s Note
The city of Ely Falls is fictional. The details of violent labor unrest, however, are culled from numerous incidents in New England and elsewhere during the late 1920s and the early 1930s in which hundreds of striking mill workers and their children were killed or seriously injured by state militias or vigilantes hired by mill owners. As an interesting footnote, the Ku Klux Klan did indeed flourish in northern New England during the late 1920s. Its victims were Catholics, Jews, and ethnic minorities.
The following works were consulted while writing this book:
The Strike of ‘28
by Daniel Georgianna and Roberta Hazen Aaronson;
The Great Depression
by Robert S. McElvaine;
Working People of Holyoke
by William Hartford;
Ordinary People Extraordinary Lives
by Debra Bernhardt and Rachel Bernstein;
La Foi, La Langue, La Culture
by Michael Guignard;
Working-Class Americanism
by Gary Gerstle;
A World Within a World
by Gary Samson;
Ethnic Survival in a New England Mill Town: The Franco-Americans of Biddeford, Maine
by Michael Guignard;
The Great Depression
and
The Hungry Years
by T. H. Watkins;
The Town That Died
by Michael Bird;
The Parrish and the Hill
by Mary Doyle Curran;
Down and Out in the Great Depression: Stories and Recipes of the Great Depression of the 1930s
by Janet Van Amber Paske;
Amoskeag
by Tamara Harveven and Randolph Langenbach;
Gastonia 1929
by John A. Salmond;
Hard Times
by Studs Terkel;
The Last Generation
by Mary H. Blewett;
Saco Then and Now
by Peter N. Scontras; and
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee and Walker Evans.
I would like to thank Jewel Reed and Bill Newell for supplying details of life during 1929 and 1930. I would also like to thank my agent, Ginger Barber; my editor, Michael Pietsch; and my husband, John Osborn, for their support and guidance.