Acushnet Mills Housing (Partially demolished)
Shortly before nine o’clock on the morning of February 27, 1897, a 16-foot boiler at Acushnet Mills exploded. Flying debris nearly demolished a building a quarter of a mile away, and a large piece of the boiler crashed through the roof of the south end police station 700 feet away. The sound of the explosion caused panic among the employees of the mill, sending them rushing for the stairways. Two workers were killed in the explosion: Manuel Mendoza, a boiler stoker, and Arthur Aspen, who worked in the loom harness room a short distance away.
According to one account, “a piece of the boiler weighing half a ton released itself from the power house and with a velocity as swift as a cannon ball went flying through the air above the homes of numbers of the mill employees, and found a landing place several hundred feet away.”
The homes referenced in this account were likely the housing that Acushnet Mills constructed for its employees shortly after its incorporation in 1881. Built in two rows of eleven houses with their gable ends facing Blackmer Street, the Acushnet Mills tenements more closely resembled single-family homes in middle class parts of the city than the double-houses or “four tenements” built by Wamsutta and Potomska Mills. The two-and-half story buildings included two apartments of six rooms each. Two additional one-and-a-half story tenements stood around the corner facing Front Street.
At the time of the explosion, Acushnet Mills was operating day and night to fill orders, and the company repaired the damage of the city’s largest boiler explosion as quickly as possible. In the 1920s, Acushnet Mills modernized its operations to counter a regional textile downturn, but in November 1929 the company began to sell its machinery. By 1932, the mill buildings had been demolished.
Only three Acushnet Mills tenements remain: at 98 Blackmer Street, and 424 and 426 South Front Street, the latter one built later than the others, between 1906 and 1911.
Images
