A walk through the Saco Lowell Shops in 1944

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A Newsletter by the City of Saco, Maine	November, 2009	Return to newsletter index

Although the manufacturing of machinery and textiles in the Biddeford-Saco mill district now is completely gone with the closure of West Point Stevens this summer, you can still visit the living mills for one moment in 1944 frozen in time by historian Roy P. Fairfield's newest book, Survival at Work and Home: Saco-Lowell Shops in World War II.

Roy worked on a special project related to costs and price controls that year, just after graduating from Bates, and before he went to graduate school at Harvard. While he was trying to earn enough money for graduate school at the mill, Roy's wife Marylynn worked as a nurse. On Sundays they would dig clams and sell them downtown to add to graduate school fund. Roy worked on and off in high school and college, and after, for a total of about five years at Saco-Lowell.

The costing project gave Roy extraordinary access to the people and processes of the mills. He got to wander from department to department in both cities and learn details about how each part was made and each operation carried. Fifteen engineers especially hired for the task worked alongside Roy to assemble the information that would be needed when wartime production ended.

While there is plenty of industrial history in the book, it's really more about the work life in the mills. As Roy walks through the mills, we walk with him, learning about the people and their work. There are dozens of conversations reported that touch on every aspect of mill life. There are tales of tensions with Jewish war time engineers, and the book briefly visits on Franco-Yankee tensions.

A typical story: Roy's father, who had operated an auto repair garage on Hutchins Street earlier, was working in the mill in 1944. He discovered, to his great embarrassment, that bathroom stalls had no doors in the mills. Roy deployed his female clerks to check out the stalls in the women's rooms. Then he prepared a detailed report which found that over half the men's and women's stalls had no doors. Roy used the report to influence the mill managers to add stall doors as a modest improvement in working conditions. Roy is still proud that he made his father happy and provided a little privacy for hundreds of war time workers.

Another tale is about the recklessness of the transportation department. These drivers were so aggressive in the millyard that there were rumors that they actually provided contract killings for hire. Roy still tenses up today and calls walking in parts of the yard "terrifying." When mill managers learned of the issue they put the department on probation and the problem faded.

Saco has been lucky since 1956 when Roy published the first of many books, Sands, Spindles and Steeples, one of the best of Maine's town histories. His academic career included developing one of the earliest graduate school distance learning programs, which set a model for today's internet based academic programs. Some 63 years after Roy's first book we are fortunate again that Roy has revisited Saco history and told this fascinating tales of life in the mills.

Roy's contributions to Saco's history continue, with his weekly volunteering in the Dyer Library's archives, now called the Roy P. Fairfield History Center. And he has helped raise an endowment to maintain the history center so that generations of historians to come can examine records of the Saco region and tell new stories about old Saco. We hope that their books will be as fun to read as Roy's.

Survival at Work and Home: Saco-Lowell Shops in WW II is available for sale at the Saco Museum and Dyer Library.

-Peter Morelli