Chapter 2, Massachusetts, The Little Road Trip

On May 31, we journeyed up to Massachusetts to visit with Garry's family and to attend the wedding our our nephew Jamie and his bride, Andrea. Garry's hometown, Webster, Massachusetts, is, like so much of the country, seeing tough times. Webster was born during the great Industrial Revolution, and was the location where Samuel Slater established his legendary textile factory. In its heyday, Webster was on its way to becoming a small city, based on its vibrant textile industry. But as factories moved from North to South in the middle of the last century, the lifeblood of Webster flowed away.

When I started going to Webster in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the town and its environs still hummed with a number of major textile factories. In 1984, I began to take up handweaving as an avocation, and with that new interest came a new fascination with the factories in Webster and the neighboring town of Uxbridge. But in the subsequent three decades, those factories too went elsewhere, and with them the wonderful outlet stores that helped me to build my fiber stash -- and, more importantly, the factory jobs that kept so many of the townspeople gainfully employed.

During this visit in late May/early June 2009, I read with dismay the front-page headlines that cried out the sad news that the last of the giant factories, Cranston Print Works, was closing that week. Downtown Webster was a sad place, as so many American main streets are today, with boarded up buildings and vacant storefronts. Cranston's work is being shipped to China. Bad for Webster, bad for America.