Life in the Iron Mills

By Rebecca Harding Davis and Gregory Hadley

Deb Wolfe’s days at the cotton mill are long and hard, often leaving her with little to eat or time to rest. At home she looks after her uncle and her cousin, Hugh, whom she loves without hope, thinking her hunchback prevents anyone from loving her. Hugh strains daily over flames in an iron mill, a hellish landscape. He has the soul of an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inwood Commons Publishing
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780997818710

Rebecca Harding Davis

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) was an American author and journalist widely recognized as a pioneer of American realism. She is best remembered for Life in the Iron Mills. 

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LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS

Inwood Commons Modern Editions

The Inwood Commons Modern Editions gently update out-of-copyright texts by women and people of color for modern readers. Texts are edited for clarity, ease of reading, social mores, and currency values to help you connect to the writer’s message. Correct spellings are used throughout, while retaining grammatical structures in dialog. Best of all, the original texts are included in appendices, so that you may read either or both. Some editions also include essays by scholars to explain context and highlight ideas.

Life in the Iron Mills

Rebecca Harding Davis

Inwood Commons Modern Edition

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ISBN: 978-0-9978187-0-3 (pbk)

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Publisher: Wendy Fuller

Contents

Life in the Iron Mills 1

Rebecca Harding Davis

Rebecca Harding Davis: An Introduction to Her Life, Faith, and Literature 49

Gregory Hadley

Appendix

Life in the Iron-Mills (Original) 65

Rebecca Harding Davis

Life in the Iron Mills

Rebecca Harding Davis

(1861)

Is this the end?

O Life, as futile, then, as frail!

What hope of answer or redress?

A cloudy day. Do you know what that is in a town of iron works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer’s shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing tobacco from Lynchburg, Virginia, in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.

The oddity of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the huge chimneys of the iron foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river, clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house front, the two faded poplar trees, the faces of the passersby. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig iron through the narrow street, have a foul mist hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel, but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere. A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is very old, almost worn out, I think.

From the back window I can see a narrow brickyard sloping down to the riverside, strewn with rainwater barrels and tubs. The river, dull and tawny colored, drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal barges. No wonder. When I was a child, I used to imagine a look of weary, silent appeal upon the face of the river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same daydream comes to me today, when from the street window I watch the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the big mills. Masses of people, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning. Their skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes. They stoop all night over boiling caldrons of metal, and hide out by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy. They breath from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body.

What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive. To these people it is a drunken joke, horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My fantasy about the river is a false one. The river has no kind of such a life. What if it is stagnant and slimy here? The river knows that beyond there waits for it fragrant sunlight; quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple trees, and flushing crimson with roses; air, and fields, and mountains. The future of the Welsh iron puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. He’ll be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard, and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.

Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty backyard and the coal boats below, fragments of an old story float up in front of me, a story of this house into which I happened to come today. You may think it a boring story, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure. I know. Only the outline of a boring life, that long since, with thousands of boring lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost. Thousands of lives, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant rainwater barrel. Lost? There is an interesting point for you to settle, my friend, as you study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way.

Stop a moment. I’m going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed of your clean clothes, and come right down with me, here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul odor. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain silent for centuries. I want to make it a real thing to you. You, with your belief in self-interest as the only motivation, or your belief in the divinity of nature, or your belief that only faith brings salvation. You are busy making straight paths for your feet on the hills, and so do not see it clearly, this terrible question which people here have gone insane and died trying to answer.

I dare not put this secret into words. I told you it was silent. These people, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of society or of God. Their lives ask it. Their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I have a hope and I bring it to you to be tested. My hope is that this terrible silent question is its own reply. That it is not the death sentence we think it, but, from the edges of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Christian Hope to come. I dare not make my meaning clearer, but will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark as this thick mist around us, and as pregnant with death. But if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that will surely come.

My story is very simple. Only what I remember of the life of one of these people. A furnace tender in one of Kirby and John’s iron-rolling mills, named Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the huge order for the lower Virginia railroads last winter. They usually run with about a thousand men. I can’t say why I choose the half-forgotten story of Hugh Wolfe instead of myriads of these furnace hands. Perhaps because there is a secret, underlying sympathy between that story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine. Or perhaps simply for the reason that this house is where the Wolfes lived. There were the father and son. They were both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby and John’s mills for making railroad iron. And Deborah, their cousin, a picker in some of the cotton mills. The house was rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar rooms.

The old man, like many of the iron puddlers and feeders of the mills, was Welsh. He had spent half of his life in the Cornish tin mines. You can pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any day. They are a bit filthier. Their muscles are not so brawny. They stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure, unmixed blood, I imagine, shows itself in the slight angular bodies and sharply cut facial lines. It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived here.

Their lives were like those of their social class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking—God and the distillers only know what. They might spend an occasional night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess. Is that all of their lives? Of the portion given to them and their clones swarming the streets today? Nothing beneath? All? Many political reformers and many private reformers, too, have gone among them with a heart tender with Christ’s charity, and come out outraged, hardened.

One rainy night, about eleven o’clock, a crowd of half-clothed women stopped outside of the cellar door. They were going home from the cotton mill.

Good night, Deb, said one, of mixed race, steadying herself against the gas lamppost. She needed the lamppost to steady her. So did more than one of them.

There’s a ball to Miss Potts’ tonight. You’d best come.

Indeed, Deb, if you’ll come, you’ll have fun, said a shrill Welsh voice in the crowd.

Two or three dirty hands thrust out to catch Deb’s dress, as she groped for the door latch.

No.