So our trip to Slater Mill was very... interesting. It was strange to think that a little 9-year old boy was haunting the two mills there. It's sort-of a creepy old place - it smells, is dark and dank, and probably wouldn't be the most fun place to be as a child with all that dirty, heavy industrial equipment. I kept saying, "Hello, little boy," as I walked through the place, but the more I was there the less I was thinking about the ghost. I was thinking more of how weird the tour guides were, and how difficult it must be to be a not-for-profit historical museum.
We arrived and were greeted by a young girl, maybe 24, who was dressed in colonial attire, complete with white bonnet, who was manning the register. She introduced herself as "Mistress Jen." She took our mill money, which gave us $1 off each from admission (she taped our mill dollar to a piece of paper in a 3-ring binder. This is how they track mill money usage), and told us about three times that the tour was a circular tour, so if you hopped on in the middle of it you could just follow through to the end and then continue through the beginning of another tour, not missing anything. From Mistress Jen it was more like, "... beginnin' of another tour, not missin' anythin'." I wondered if she realized she was dropping the "g"s from her words. We joined the tour with Mistress Vicki, who was this very animated young woman (though older than Mistress Jen) who would every so often toss into her narrative of the mill some kind of morbid fact and then happily move on to another topic. Example: We were standing around some kind of carding machine in the Slater Mill that had hundreds of little spikes coming out of this cylindrical wheel, and the person working the machine (probably a kid of 9 or 10) would periodically have to pull seeds from the cotton being carded on this machine. To do so would mean that the person would have to stick his/her hands into the machine and hope that s/he didn't get stabbed by the spikes, or get a sleeve caught in the machine, otherwise s/he would bleed all over the cotton. Mr. Slater only spun white cotton, you see, so if the person were to bleed all over the cotton s/he would have to somehow clean the cotton and the machine in order to not be docked wages or lose his/her job. Of course, there was always the possibility that the person could die by getting caught in the machine, in which case he/she wouldn't be able to clean the blood. (Big smile and skip of step) "So, movin' on to this machine over here, you'll notice..." I can't accurately describe her mannerisms. They were too unique. But I can say that Mistress Vicki also dropped all of her "g"s, so I've decided that it must be a Rhode Island thing. I bet there are many Rhode Island things, things that would really irritate me if I were ever to move to Rhode Island.
The mills themselves were pretty cool. The place was less of a museum (a look and read kind of place) and more like an interactive workshop. Mistress Vicki showed us how each and every machine worked, and we all got a chance to touch, smell, and use things along the way. One of the mills (Wilkinson Mill) had two purposes - bobbin making and machine repair maybe? I'm forgetting - and the other mill, the Slater Mill, was strictly run to make cotton thread. It's strange to think of how these factories at that time were "modern." They seem very archaic and I can't imagine how anything was mass-produced there. But, I guess mass production meant something totally different in 1810.
All in all, the trip was worth it. We got some good video, which Doug will be posting to The Semantic Mather, and we got some good photos. I thought Mistress Vicki was an excellent tour guide, if only slightly distracting. It's worth the $9 admission ($8 for adults with mill money), even if we didn't get any EVPs or orbs or anything paranormal.
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