HGB Ep. 537 - Old Slater Mill and Tavern on Main

 Moment in Oddity - Chachapoya Mummies

In the cloud forests of northern Peru, over one thousand years ago, the Chachapoya people existed. Known as the 'Warriors of the Clouds', the hilltop ruins of Kuelap have been said to rival those of Machu Picchu. Much of the information we have on the Chachapoyan society has been gleaned from archaeological remains located at their funerary sites. In 1997, a Chachapoyan necropolis located on limestone cliffs, overlooking Laguna de los Condores, was discovered. This location was actually overtaken by the Incas when they conquered the Chachapoyan people. There are mausoleum type houses that were built into the rockface, sarcophagi with human faces and all seem to exude the strong independent culture of the people. According to bio-anthropologist Dr. Sonia Guillen, "These mummies are very significant because they are the first to show us how the Incas prepared their dead in the royal way. They cured the skin to preserve it and made it into leather and they extracted the organs through the anus" Their bodies were wrapped in cloths and surrounded with artifacts and offerings. According to Dr. Guillen, "The Inca revered their royal dead because they were still very much part of the world of the living", and "The royal mummies participated in meetings and still held property and made decisions". Keeping the Royals around for meetings and such after death as mummies, certainly is odd!

This Month in History - Smallpox Vaccine

In the month of May, on the 17th, in 1749, Dr. Edward Jenner was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. At the age of 5 little Edward was orphaned and went to live with his older brother. From a young age Jenner was obsessed with with science and nature. By the age of 13 he apprenticed with a country surgeon and began his journey into the medical field. According to historical records, it was at this first apprenticeship that he heard a dairymaid remark, "I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face". In 1764, Jenner started an apprenticeship with George Harwicke where he honed his knowledge of medical and surgical practices. From there he continued to feed his inquisitive nature studying under John Hunter of St. George's Hospital in London. He made various contributions to the medical field and natural science but it was the study of smallpox that gained him the most recognition. Over the years, Jenner had heard the dairymaid's statement reiterated. Always the same, that after suffering from cowpox, dairymaids were immune to smallpox. Jenner surmised that cowpox may be able to be transmitted to another person as a method of intentional protection. In May of 1796, Jenner collected matter from an infected dairymaid's lesion to inoculate an 8 year old boy. Shortly after, the child developed a mild fever and discomfort, later losing his appetite however, ten days later the boy felt fine. In July, Dr. Edward Jenner inoculated the same boy with matter from a fresh smallpox lesion. The boy never developed smallpox and Jenner determined that the child was thus protected from the virus. For some years his discovery was rejected at which point Edward published a pamphlet regarding his findings. The Latin word for cow is vacca, and cowpox is vaccinia; Jenner decided to call this new procedure 'vaccination'. The death rate from smallpox plunged due to his vaccination and Jenner received worldwide recognition and many honors due to his discovery.

Old Slater Mill (Suggested by: Laura Frye) and Tavern on the Main

America's industrial past lends itself to ghost stories. No one can doubt that working in industrial mills was a dangerous enterprise. These mills employed whole families, including children starting at six-years-old. Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island covers five acres in the Blackstone River Valley and is credited with being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in America. There are three buildings on the property and all of them are reputedly haunted. The Blackstone Valley has several haunted locations and we'll also explore Tavern on the Main. Join us for the history and hauntings of Old Slater Mill and Tavern on the Main!

The Blackstone River Valley of Rhode Island was formed over millions of years through volcanic and glacier activity. Paleo indigenous people were the first to live on the land starting around 12,000 years ago. The valley is named for William Blackstone who arrived in 1635. He helped to found Boston before moving on to Rhode Island. The corridor stretches from Providence, Rhode Island to Worcester, Massachusetts with the river serving as a floating highway. The Blackstone Canal would later facilitate the moving of goods and enable the area to thrive with mill activity.

Pawtucket is Algonquian for "river fall" or "at the falls." The first European settler was Englishmen Joseph Jenckes Jr. He had immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647 when he was 19 years old, following his father who had come over to America several years before. Joseph learned his father's trade of iron smelting. In the 1660s, Joseph moved to the Colony of Rhode Island and he eventually bought land on both sides of the Pawtuxet River. He erected a sawmill in 1669. In 1671, he purchased land at Pawtucket Falls and built a forge and sawmill and the village of Pawtucket sprang up from there. Joseph built a forge that was destroyed in 1676 during King Philip's War. The forge was rebuilt and Pawtucket drew many ironmongers and the economy became very industrialized. Samuel Slater built his waterpowered cotton mill in Pawtucket in 1793, the first successful one in North America.

Samuel Slater was born in Derbyshire, England in 1768 and became an apprentice for a local owner of a cotton mill when he was very young. His father had died and he was indentured to work at the mill. Slater worked his way through the mill until he was the superintendent. At that position, he was able to study the inner workings of the mill. The man who had designed the mill machines was Richard Arkwright. Arkwright was a pioneer in using water power to drive machines. He developed the spinning frame, which was originally used to spin thread and yarn from wool and cotton. The same framework was used with water to make the water frame. Arkwright also developed a rotary carding engine that converted raw cotton to cotton lap before spinning.

This kind of technology launched the industrial revolution and Britain was very protective of the information. British law forbade workers in the textile industry to share this information, especially with America and these workers were not allowed to leave the country. That didn't stop Slater. Slater emigrated to the United States in 1789 with the details of Arkwright's machines in his head. He was only 25-years-old at the time. Slater started over in New York City. The echoes of "Slater the Traitor" from the town where he grew up probably made it across the pond, but it didn't matter to Slater. In 1789, he heard that a mill in Rhode Island owned by William Almy, Smith Brown and Moses Brown had bought a 32-spindle frame based on the Arkwright pattern and they were having trouble operating it. He offered his services and in 1790, Slater was in Pawtucket signing a contract with Almy & Brown. Slater built new machinery and water frames and in 1793, Slater and Brown opened their first factory in Pawtucket. All the workers were trained to be skilled mechanics by Slater. 

The system he developed was called the Rhode Island System. This brought whole families into the factory. The first employees were 7 to 12 year-old children. A new kind of family life was developed in the villages with towns growing up around the factories. Basically, an early form of company town. The company provided housing, stores and schools. A unique culture sprang up in the Blackstone Valley as immigrants came in successive waves from Poland, Italy, Portugal, Latin America, Canada and Ireland. A new textile mill was built in 1793 and became very profitable after Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin the following year. Samuel married Hannah Wilkinson in 1791 and the couple would have 10 children. Four of those children died in infancy. Hannah herself died after the final child was born in 1812 from complications from childbirth. She actually was the first woman in America to be granted a patent and this is because she invented two-ply thread. Slater remarried to Esther Parkinson in 1817.

Back to the industrial side of things, by 1798 Slater was moving on from Rhode Island, forming a company with his father-in-law Oziel Wilkinson and opening up mills in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Slater & Company would become one of the leading manufacturing companies in the United States. Factory strikes would come in the 1820s and this would continue a long struggle for rights for factory workers. Slater died at the age of 66 in 1835. He owned 13 mills at the time and was worth over a million dollars and President Andrew Jackson called Samuel Slater "The Father of American Industry." His original mill in Pawtucket became part of the Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park. That site is the Old Slater Mill National Historic Landmark. This Saturday, on May 11th, 2024, the landmark is holding a commemoration of the 1824 strike. Two hundred years ago, this would be America's first industrial worker's strike. 

Regardless of where one stands on the benefit of unions today, they definitely had a necessary place in the 1800s. Working conditions were awful in many industrial factories. Winters offered freezing buildings that would be sweltering in the summer. Workers as young as seven worked from dawn to dusk, some making as little as a dollar a week. The cotton industry had just endured the Panic of 1819 and the Tariff of 1824 and mill owners were seeking ways to keep costs low while increasing production. In Pawtucket, the decision was made to add an extra hour to the work day and cut pay by 25%. We can imagine that this wouldn't go over well. An hour more of work and a quarter of one's pay cut?! It would be the women to take a stand. On May 26, 1824, one hundred women walked out of the mills and refused to work. This forced the mills to shut down. Other textile workers joined them over the following week. They didn't just sit outside the mills. They went to the mill owners' homes and shouted about wanting their wages restored. On June 1st, an incendiary device was thrown into the Walcott's Mill and a fire resulted. The owners had enough and asked the strikers to send a some of their number to negotiate. Unfortunately, no written record was made of the results, but workers were back in the mills by June 3rd. While very little is known about this moment in history, it revealed that laborers were not powerless. Unions would eventually take over doing the negotiating, which for a time was a huge step back because women weren't allowed to join unions early on. Go figure, the ladies started this, but were later excluded.

Slater's Mill is hard to miss. It is a large yellow building. The original building built in 1793 was six windows wide and 2.5 stories tall. Through the years, it was expanded six times. Water power was used to spin cotton here until 1895. The Old Slater Mill Association was formed in 1921 and it saved the Old Slater Mill from demolition. They restored the mill to its 1835 appearance and over the next 100 years, the association expanded the site to include the 1810 Wilkinson Mill, the 1758 Sylvanus Brown House, Hodgson-Rotary Park, and Slater Mill Park. In 2021, the Old Slater Mill National Historic Landmark was accepted by the U.S. Government to formalize the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park. And just this year, 2024, Slater Mill Park was acquired by the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency for use as a riverfront municipal park. The site is open seasonally for touring. Regardless of season, it is closed Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

David Wilkinson was an inventor and machinist who basically became Samuel Slater's right-hand-man. One of his best inventions was the screw cutting lathe, which standardized the cutting of screw threads so just one type of screw could be used on everything when making machines. he also developed steam powered machines for textile production, so that a nearby water source wasn't necessary and eventually he developed power looms. The 1810 Wilkinson Mill was the first mill in Rhode Island to have a steam engine as backup power and the building was made from rubble stone to help prevent fires. This mill is much bigger than the Slater Mill. Pawtucket blacksmith Oziel Wilkinson, David's father, built the mill with the construction of machines taking place on the first floor and textile milling on the two upper floors.

Sylvanus Brown was a skilled woodworker who made full-scale wooden models of patterns of Slater's machinery. He helped Slater to produce mechanized textile machinery and he built water-powered mills. He lived in the Sylvanus Brown House, which was built in 1758, from 1784 to 1824. His wife Ruth would have woven cloth at home for the families use and even for sale before the power loom was invented. The interior still has a loom and spinning wheels from the early 1800s. The house itself looks like a little red barn. It was moved to this location in the 1960s from a location two miles away.

All of the buildings on the property are believed to be haunted. People have claimed to not only feel cold spots, but to be enveloped in them and get a tingling experience as though they are being hugged. Usually at the height of a child. Child ghosts are the ones most often seen and they are usually barefoot because the children worked barefoot. The apparition of Samuel Slater has been seen walking around his old mill. The ghost of a small boy and a shadow person are sometimes seen in the Wilkinson Mill. A small face is sometimes seen in a window at the Sylvanus Brown House. The giggling of a little girl has been heard audibly in the house.

Paranormal investigator and author Joni Mayhan ran the Haunted New Harmony Ghost Walks in Indiana and she shared her experiences at Old Slater Mill on a blog post. In the Old Slater Mill she "detected several ghosts in the building. I felt them lingering at the edges of the room, casually watching us. It almost reminded me of going to the zoo, but in this instance, we were the captive occupants being observed, instead of the other way around. It made for an interesting experience...During our tour, one of the women asked if the little boy was still there. Apparently, she took a tour years ago and saw a small boy run across the second floor. He appeared as real as a live boy. She didn’t think much of it until she realized there weren’t any children on the tour. The staff searched for the illusive boy but never found him. Had she seen a ghost? It’s highly probable. The disembodied voices of children have been heard time and time again at the mill.

Joni volunteered to try giving one of the child ghosts a hug and she wrote, "At first, I was focused on the people surrounding me, watching me foolishly hug the air, but as I relaxed, I began to feel something else. The air inside my arms grew cooler, and I began getting the sensation of pressure. I had my mouth open to tell them that I was indeed feeling something when someone put a K2 meter near me, which immediately began flashing." Joni wrote of the Sylvanus Brown House, "Being the smallest building on the property, it was the also the most fascinating for my friend Sandy and me. We immediately felt the presence of several ghostly inhabitants. While we both felt there was a male and a female entity, Sandy also thought there was a female child in residence. Little did we know how accurate we were. Investigators over the years have determined that the property is haunted by a woman, a man, and a girl, reportedly named Becca."

Demonologist Keith Johnson and his brother Carl have lead ghost hunts at the property for years. Keith told The Rhode Show that he was once climbing the stairs in the mill with heavy work boots on when he heard an audible female voice say, "Quiet!" Carl would host seances in the mill and they would get audible voices and things would move around. The brothers feel that there are both good and bad spirits on the property. They've had many interactions with children and the water wheel is a hotspot. Sometimes boys were asked to get up on the wheels to get them moving and there would be accidents and there was definitely at least one death. Carl said that voices have interrupted their daytime tours with screams, giggles or saying, "Hello." The most amazing thing that Carl ever witnessed was a heavy metal spike being propelled by an invisible force from a blacksmith anvil across the room. Antique crutches also once flew out of a corner at a guest.

Laura who had suggested this location shared the following personal experiences, "I grew up in Pawtucket and my first job at was an assistant summer day camp counselor. One day I was in the upstairs in the yellow building and there was a young girl 7 or 8 who I thought should have been outside with the group. That day we were making a soup outside over the fire. So I went to investigate to be sure she wasn't playing with any of the old doll houses or toys that had been shelved in that building before placed on display in the museum. I walked around a corner and toward the shelves that went straight down to the wall with no other exit. When I saw her by a doll house I went to tell her she needed to be downstairs and before I could speak she wasn't there. I don't really have great words to explain it but it happened and I don't have an explanation. I also stayed on after the summer program to assist others who were moving from a card catalog system to accession files.  I went in one afternoon and by the stairs in the wheel house I heard a short scream. I then listened again and heard running steps and a booming voice and a cry of a boy or young man. It was not long before I just didn't feel comfortable there anymore. I had also been a young teen girl who didn't want to be bothered with such tedious work at the time. So I suppose it was a combination of both."

The Blackstone River Valley has several other haunts and another one is The Tavern on Main, which is located at 1157 Putnam Pike in Chepachet. This could be the most haunted restaurant in Rhode Island. Chepachet means "where rivers meet." The Pequot (pee kwaat) and Nipmuc were the first indigenous people here. Settlers came and eventually this would become a place for the fiercly independent who wanted freedom and supported the Patriot cause during the American Revolution. The Dorr Rebellion took place in the town from 1841-1842. A small rural elite had control of the state government and many residents felt disenfranchised. Only landowners were allowed to vote. Thomas Wislon Dorr led the rebellion, which established a parallel government and wrote a new constitution they called the People's Constitution. This changed election rules, so that white men who had lived in the state for at least a year could vote. Dorr had wanted to include black men, but he was overruled. These parallel state governments both held elections in 1824 and this lead to two men being voted in as Governor of Rhode Island: Thomas Dorr and Samuel Ward King. The People's Constitution beat out a new constitution written by the original state legislature and King vowed to not allow that to stand and declared martial law because he knew the people would revolt. Most militiamen, however, supported Dorr because he got them voting rights. Unfortunately, Dorr's army lost when their cannon wouldn't fire and they retreated. Dorr fled to New York, but returned shortly thereafter with more armed support and they gathered in Chepachet. No fight ensued as Dorr knew he would be defeated, so he disbanded his forces. Dorr had lost the ultimate rebellion, but it forced the hand of the state legislature to make changes.

The Tavern on Main was originally a colonial home built in the 18th century. The interior had a large center fireplace with hand hewn native chestnut and oak lumber for posts and beams as the main structure. The home was later converted into a stagecoach stop and inn opened in 1799 as Cyrus Cooke Tavern. During Dorr's Rebellion, it was known as Sprague's Tavern, named for the owner, Jedediah Sprague. As Dorr's forces were hightailing it out of the village, King's forces were coming and they knew Sprague's Tavern had been a place harboring the rebels, so a couple bullets were fired through the door and a man named Horace Bardeen was hit in the thigh. Sprague jumped outside to calm everything down and save his patrons and so he invited the troops inside. And they helped themselves, much to his dismay. They consumed 37 gallons of Brandy, 29 gallons of West India Rum, 34 flasks of liquor, dozens of bottles of old Madeira and Sherry, 12 dozen bottles of Champagne, 2 dozen bottles of cider, 820 bushels of oats, 17 tons of hay, 50 bushels of corn, 16 bushels of meal, and a quarter ton of straw were consumed. Jedediah Sprague never was paid for anything. 

Over the years, the tavern has seen many incarnations. The building was a forlorn apartment building for awhile and the a billiard parlor, followed by a pub and then a restaurant named Stagecoach Tavern. There are claims that Lovecraft would stop in for a drink anytime he was in Northern Rhode Island. The Tavern on Main opened in 2006 under chef David Lumnah and his wife Kristen who lease it. the current owner is Elias Sleiman. The tavern was recently given a facelift in 2022 to make it look more historically accurate. Lumnah wasn't a believer in ghosts until he started working at the Tavern on Main.

There are said to be at least five ghosts here. Jedidiah Sprague seems to still be looking for repayment in the afterlife. Thomas Dorr might also be haunting the tavern as this was kind of his last stand in the Dorr Rebellion. There is also a female ghost that for years was called Elizabeth until paranormal investigator and author Thomas D’Agostino captured a female voice on EVP saying, "My name is Alice." She has been seen sitting in the back booth. The ghost of a little boy likes to hang out near the ladies’ room or near the oven. The final ghost seems to be attached to the "King’s Chair."

Chestnut Hill Road takes travelers two miles from Chepchet to Glocester (Glawstir) and this is where the Dark Swamp is located and legend claims that it is haunted by a creature called "It." Albert Hicks was one of the first people to claim he encountered the creature. He was actually a pirate looking for buried treasure at night with a group of men in the 1840s. They smelled the creature before they even saw it. They described it as having flaming eyes and clamshells for skin and it made a hideous noise as it breathed fire. They threw down their shovels and ran. In 1896, a man named Neil Hopkins ran into the creature on a road and he ran with the thing chasing him for awhile. A couple people disappeared in the Dark Swamp and this was blamed on the creature. In November of 1923, H.P. Lovecraft and his friend named Eddy got off the stagecoach in West Glocester, had dinner and then set out for the Dark Swamp in what Lovecraft wrote was "a quest of the grotesque and the terrible search for Dark Swamp, in southwestern Rhode Island, of which Eddy had heard sinister whispers amongst the rustics. They whisper that it is very remote and very strange and that no one has ever been completely through it because of the treacherous and unfathomable potholes, and the ancient trees whose thick boles grow so closely together that passage is difficult and darkness omnipresent." Old timers told Lovecraft many stories of seeing It. The story "Color Out of Space" is thought to have been inspired by Dark Swamp.

Are these two locations in Rhode Island's Blackstone River Valley harboring more than just history? Could there be spirits milling about? And what about the Dark Swamp? Was there a creature there called It? Are these places haunted? That is for you to decide!