A thread to the past

Boston Globe
By Vanessa E. Jones | August 4, 2008

ATTLEBORO - A group of about 17 people carefully traverse the worn wooden floors of the Dodgeville Mill, a 160,000-square-foot textile mill that will celebrate its 200th anniversary next year. The group had just enjoyed a half-hour presentation by Katherine Honey and Gary Demers, who explained their vision of turning part of the site - which houses Demers's rigging company, Demers Bros. Trucking Inc., and 10 small businesses he rents space to - into a museum.

Demers and Honey, cofounders of the nonprofit organization they call Museum at the Mill, guide the visitors through the cavernous, 7,000-square-foot portion of the mill they plan to set up as exhibition space. The pair hope to gather enough research about the mill and the surrounding homes in the Dodgeville neighborhood that developed around the textile industry to receive a designation from the National Register of Historic Places. Demers and Honey show the areas that will become a cafe and a store selling photographs of the mill and American-made products. Exhibitions displayed on rolling metal carts will celebrate the diversity of the mill worker over the centuries.

There are also plans for outside. Water rushing from Dodgeville Pond into the Ten Mile River, which once powered the textile mill machines, will be used to run hydroelectric generators. This spring, Museum at the Mill received a $196,000 grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, the state's development agency for renewable energy, to fund the $706,000 hydroelectric project. In the future, the 26 acres of land surrounding the mill, now used for rigging machinery, will become a parking lot and green space for the public.

Demers thinks the building's classification as a textile mill in a town known for its jewelry manufacturing makes the Dodgeville Mill unique.

"I think of it as almost a phantom mill, as far as its history in Attleboro," Demers says. "It's so overshadowed by jewelry that people don't realize that there was a great . . . pull for the residents of Attleboro in the 1800s to work in this mill. It provided a great source of income for families to grow with. Not that it was easy labor, but it was a job when there just wasn't that many things to do."

Demers, who bought the mill from his uncles a year ago, didn't initially envision creating a museum on the site. He was inspired by his desire to renovate the building and by Honey, whom he met a year and a half ago when she headed the Women at Work Museum. Honey had operated Women at Work since 1996 as a traveling exhibition before finding a permanent space in Attleboro in 2003. When Honey left Women at Work last year, Demers asked her to help him develop the Museum at the Mill. They plan to open the mill museum next year. For the first two years, Demers will donate the space to the museum.

Honey and Demers will rely heavily on volunteers to make the museum a reality. At the end of the mill tour, they asked visitors to help create exhibitions or develop the cafe or store. Among those who signed up was Valerie Dubuc-Silva, a former Attleboro resident who owned a home across the street from the mill in the early 1980s. Dubuc-Silva's ex-husband worked in the building when it was a textile mill. "They were making big rolls of cloth," says Dubuc-Silva. "He used to work in the textile part of it."

Anecdotes such as Dubuc-Silva's are what Honey wants to hear.

"One thing we want to do is work on mill history," Honey says. "We're looking for people who might know of people who have worked here."

Those stories provide details about the mill's history. For the National Register Historic District application the cofounders will need information about the mill's owners, how the mill operated, how it evolved over the years, and the history of the houses surrounding the building. Without grant money to hire professional researchers, the museum's cofounders have had to rely on volunteers, such as Paul Hamilton.

Hamilton shared with the tour group some of the information he's learned. Today there are 39 houses that date back to the 1800s, one as early as 1810, he said; 32 of those homes have 1900 as a construction date. "I think that was . . . for everything built in 1800," says Hamilton, explaining the large number of homes built in 1900, "that they didn't have an exact date for. So there are 32 homes that we still have to look at."

In addition to giving visitors the history of the mill, Demers and Honey also plan to make the hydroelectric generators, set to be installed by 2011, part of the public exhibition space. Their plan to incorporate the hydroelectric power as part of the museum helped convince the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to approve the grant, says Jim Christo, director of the organization's Green Buildings and Infrastructure program.

Demers expects the alternative energy to cover about 85 percent of his electricity bill when completed. It will take about 11 years to recoup the cost of installing the hydroelectric generators, but Demers doesn't see that as a drawback because of the environmental rewards.

"It is a long period," says Demers, "and if I was older I probably wouldn't be doing it. But at my age I can not only see the payback period as realistic, but then I'll be able to absorb the rewards of that for years to come."