![]() ![]() ![]() They become the moral center of the book,” he said. “They couldn’t vote and their job opportunities were limited, but they made all the big decisions, I felt. Some of the stronger characters in the book are the women, he said, in particular a labor organizer who comes to the city named Sarah Strong. When the Cleveland Mill burned, good men died, and immigrant’s son Joseph Bartlett gained a life of privilege he never wanted.” He frets over the ever-present threat of strikes and factory fires, knowing his own fortune was changed by the drop of a kerosene lantern. Bartlett, a renegade owner, fears the town cannot long survive against the union-free South. Yet as he perches in the grandstand nursing a nagging toothache, Joseph Bartlett straddles the divide between Yankee mill owners and the union bosses who fight them. As described in the official description of the book, “The meticulously planned carnival has brought the thriving textile town to an unprecedented halt rich and poor alike crowd the streets, welcoming President Taft to America’s “Spindle City.” As a fiction writer, I shrunk things down and used composites, but it has such a cinematic feel to it will all those things happening,” said Burrello.Īt the heart of the story is influential, prosperous mill owner Joseph Bartlett. Once he started looking into the city’s history through records at the Fall River Historical Society, Burrello said he realized the Cotton Centennial of 1911 was his gateway into the story he wanted to tell. That’s always been a fascination of mine,” he said. “Those big mills are a constant reminder of the legacy of the city on the Quequechan River. FALL RIVER – “Spindle City” author Jotham Burrello takes readers on a journey that starts at the height of the Fall River’s textile manufacturing days when President Taft lauded its success at the Cotton Centennial.īurrello, born in Fall River and raised in the Midwest with summer visits back to the SouthCoast, said his family’s oral histories of Fall River’s mills inspired him to begin researching the history of the city. ![]()
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