Sometime in the late 1830’s Rebecca Ford, the daughter of Asa Ford of Granville, Vermont, crossed over the mountain pass dividing the White River Valley from the Champlain Valley and went to work in one of the textile mills bordering the falls of the Otter Creek in Middlebury. In the late spring of 1841 Rebecca was joined by her sister Caroline. For the next seven years both sisters continued to earn their living as mill workers and for the most of that time they remained in Middlebury.
       Rebecca and Caroline were among several thousand young women from the hill country of Northern New England who, beginning in the 1830’s, said farewell to their families and went to work in one of the many textile factories then operating in small towns like Middlebury as well as in larger ones like Lowell, Massachusetts. The story of the factory girls who emigrated in such numbers to the renowned mills in Lowell is a familiar one to many. Less well known are the experiences of those young women who chose to remain nearer home and work in one of the small Vermont mill towns scattered throughout the state.
       The Sheldon Museum is fortunate to have recently acquired a dozen or so of the letters of Rebecca and Caroline Ford written between the years 1838 and 1848 when the two sisters were employed as mill workers both in Middlebury and in Lowell. These letters provide a rare and personal glimpse not only of the conditions which then existed for female textile workers in Middlebury but of their life outside the factory as well.
       Thomas Dublin in his book, “Farm to Factory”, a collection of letters from New England mill workers of the first half of the nineteenth century, points out that compared to the domestic and restricted life experienced by most women in these years female factory girls led a surprisingly independent life. Although the hours were long and the pay low, the young women who wrote home from their boarding houses in towns like Lowell made it very clear in their letters that compared to the drudgery and isolation of farm life, work in the mills seemed far preferable at least for a time.
       The letters of Rebecca and Caroline Ford show a similar satisfaction with their life as factory girls. Although Rebecca does complain in one of her early letters that she is “getting tired of working all the time” to pay for her board, on the whole she seems content with her lot. When, in April 1843, her mill is closed down for a week or more because of flooding she writes her mother that she hopes she’ll be going back to work soon “for I have got most tired of doing nothing and paying my board into the bargain.”
       The Ford sisters say little about actual conditions in the textile factories in Middlebury, but there are hints here and there in these letters that employment was not as steady here as in the more prosperous factory towns. Mentions of work slow-downs and mill closings attest to this. In Lowell in the mid-1830’s women earned $3.25 per week. Of this $1.25 went toward room and board; the rest could be either spent or saved. Caroline Ford earned $8.40 for the first month she worked in Middlebury and by September 1845 she is making as much as $14.00 in one month. This compares well with what the Lowell factory workers are earning but it may have been a particularly good month for Caroline. When work comes to a halt because of spring floods in 1843 Caroline takes off for Lowell presumably in the hope of finding steadier employment. She doesn’t stay there for very long, however, and by the following winter she is back in Middlebury working with her sister at Davenport & Turner’s woolen mill and boarding with a family close to her place of work. Meanwhile Rebecca writes Caroline in Lowell that she is tending one loom for nine shillings a week besides her board. She mentions having had to do “black work” the previous week but gives no explanation of what was involved except to inform her sister that “the way we look I was a caution to white folks to keep out of such black work.”
       Rebecca also spent some time in Lowell in the early 1840’s and apparently enjoyed herself, at least for a time. In common with other young women from the hill country she did not go alone but was accompanied by two girls from Middlebury, including the daughter of her landlord. Rebecca wrote a sister in Granville that she and her friends were sleeping “like pigs in clover” and went on to describe in detail the kindness of their motherly landlady who plied them with food, including fresh meat, delicious cakes together with coffee and tea three times a day. “Tell mother not to giver herself any trouble about me for I have good food, sleep warm [;] upon the whole I fare as well or better than I deserve.” Although in his letter, written soon after she arrived in Lowell, Rebecca indicates that her work is going well, nevertheless the following year she is back in Middlebury. Perhaps she preferred the familiar surroundings and proximity to home to the excitement of life in a big factory town.
       In common with the letters of mill girls collected by Thomas Dublin those of the Ford girls leave little doubt as to the importance of religion in their lives. When Caroline is considering coming to Middlebury to join her sister, Rebecca reassures the family back home in Granville that her sister can board with her at the Stowes and that they can share a pew in the Methodist church. Frequent mention is made in both girls’ letters of a variety of church-related activities including Sunday services, Sabbath schools, camp meetings and revivals. In order to discover the real value of the letters of the two Ford sisters as historical documents they will have to be looked at in the context of a broader study of industrial Middlebury in the nineteenth century. Not until these letters are examined together with the record books of the mill and compared to other personal documents of a similar nature here in Vermont can we have a clear picture of what life was like for the Middlebury mill girl. But their letters do open a window into what was once a dark and unexplored corner of our local history

-Deborah P. Clifford