On September 19, 1874, the Granite Mill in Fall River, Massachusetts, caught on fire. This mill, like so many sites of work in the Industrial Revolution’s first century in the U.S. (and too many places around the world today), had many children laboring in it. Thus, most of the 23 workers killed in the fire were kids.

On that terrible day, work started at 6:30 AM. A mere twenty minutes later, the fire started. Fire was really common in these mills. Basic fire safety did not exist because owners did not care and because there was no legal reason to bother. It’s not like you owed the workers anything, not with courts consistently ruling against injured workers or the families of dead workers that no one made them take that job. They could starve, for example. So it was their choice. Such were the courts of the Gilded Age. It was probably friction from a mule head, which ignited oil covered cotton. Sounds bad. In fact, these fires were expected so there was a bucket of water nearby. But when the bucket of water didn’t put it out, things got real bad. Who could have guessed such things were possible?

The fire spread through the mill. But that not quickly, not at first. Had the mill engaged in a rapid evacuation, probably everyone would have lived. Everyone on the bottom three floors got out. It started on the 4th floor and spread both up and down. But once it hit the 5th floor, the fire started spreading quickly. There was some kind of fire alarm on the 6th floor, but it failed. Meanwhile, no one had bothered telling anyone up there what was up, certainly not the employer. After all, who would give up profit by clearing workers out of a factory on fire when it would probably be put out anyway. Whoops.

Like the Triangle Fire 37 years later, the stories out of the Granite Mill Fire are just awful. People tried to climb down a rope and a few did make it, but then the rope caught on fire. People jumped, but at six floors, mostly splattered on the ground. Some nearby residents stacked some mattresses to help the workers cushion their fall, but they weren’t very big and most of the workers just missed them entirely. Because the alarms in the building didn’t work, the fire department didn’t get its horses and equipment there until it was far too late to do anything useful. One girl jumped and got caught on a ladder, hitting it very hard and killing her. She just hung there until the fire was over and the firefighters brought her down.

People were furious at the failures up and down the line here. Why was the Fire Department so late? A lot of people blamed them, but probably inaccurately given the alarm issue. However, the department did not do a good job of getting its ladders together when it did finally arrive so there was reason for anger around that. Then there was the ownership of the Granite, who of course were responsible, if anyone could get those in power to care.

There was an inquest. There was plenty of blame to go around. The inquest found some fault with the Fire Department but saved its real wrath for the terrible lack of safety at the Granite. But that didn’t give survivors much of a leg to stand on. The children were dead, but would anyone pay for that? The answer was no. Again, the courts were overwhelming defensive of employers at this time. Progress meant that the courts thought they had to protect the larger principles of growth over everything else. As always, the “free market” really means the government enforcing the demands of corporate leaders. So Massachusetts had what was called a fellow servant standard. This was part of the broader “blame the workers for their own injuries and deaths” theme of the era. The idea was that persons engaged in the same economic pursuit were not legally responsible for the deaths of others on the same job. The specifics of the Massachusetts version of this is that owners were also employees of the company and thus legally exempt from punishment for burning children to death! Now that’s American capitalism!

What made this case more interesting is that there was a case. In other words, the courts agreed to even consider the question. In fact, it went all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. So that was something. But then the Court rejected any consequences and there we go. American courts have almost always sided with the capitalists over the people, then and now. The American court system is almost completely captured by the elite and any sense that this nation’s history of the law has anything even remotely approaching impartiality is a total joke, a myth held by liberals as much as conservatives. We like to lie to ourselves. All people do of course, but this is certainly true of Americans, whose imagined community of a nation of fair and equal application of the law has little to no basis in reality.

In fact, nothing really would change from this horrible incident. Fall River remained one of the most exploitative cities in American industry. Juries continued to find for employers for decades. It wasn’t until Progressive Era juries began ignoring these ideas and sometimes giving large damages to plaintiffs that companies responded by lobbying for workers comp laws that would limit their liability. Employers could still kill with impunity though, often through fires in sweatshops with serious safety problems and locked doors that provided no escape route. Triangle made these conditions famous and helped lead to some changes, finally. And children, well they were pretty consistently in the workforce into the 1920s and were not eliminated from workplaces until the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Even then, some children worked on farms and still do today.

There’s actually a song about this incident called “Granite Mills” that Alison Krauss recorded. The death claims are way higher than what actually happened, but looking at songwriters for historical accuracy is not a good strategy.

This is the 613rd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

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