Grant awarded to Mill Museum to support Local Refugee Group participating in Welcome Blanket Initiative

Workshop participant at AALV, sharing her crochet skills.

The Heritage Winooski Mill Museum recently received $3,000 from the Vermont Community Foundation’s Spark! Connecting Community Grant to support a series of textile workshops for local Refugee women so they can partake as makers in Welcome Blanket, a grassroots project that’s core purpose is to welcome refugees to America.

Welcome Blanket is a nation-wide project that invites the public to actively welcome New Americans through craftivism. Participants are invited to create handmade blankets that are displayed at a local museum to amplify the message, and then gifted to New Americans as a symbol of welcome.

Grant funds will support the Women’s Café empowerment program at AALV, a Refugee Resettlement organization in Burlington. Participants in the weekly Women’s Café are War Survivors from Congo, who are trying to move beyond trauma, to heal and find their voice, as they face life transitions of living as African immigrants in a safer environment.

The Mill Museum staff have already met with a group of twenty women from the Women’s Café several times to discuss the project. The women have expressed sincere interest in participating in Welcome Blanket and are excited about the workshops. AALV Case Manager Irene Webster, who prefers to be called KeruBo, runs the Women’s Café. KeruBo says the workshops “will be a wonderful, communal, unifying and healing activity.“ Museum Director Miram Block adds “the workshops will give the women the opportunity to learn new skills, and give them a meaningful way to connect to the greater community”.

Some crochet examples from workshop participant.

The workshops will begin in late Sept. and run through Nov. and will focus on teaching skills in knitting, crochet, and felting. Some participants already have excellent crochet skills and will be encouraged to help each other so they can work on the project outside of the workshops. The tools and materials such as crochet hooks and yarn will be supplied. Participants will be able to keep the tools and extra materials to continue crafting beyond the project.

Two seasoned crafters will lead the workshops: Elin Melchior, who is the Study Abroad Coordinator at Champlain College, will teach the knitting and felting sessions. Crochet sessions will be taught by Emily Gauthier, who works and teaches classes at Must Love Yarn in Shelburne. A Swahili translator will be present at each workshop. The Women’s Café group will also be invited to visit the museum, where they can see their completed work displayed in the Welcome Blanket exhibition and have an opportunity to share their immigration stories. 

The Welcome Blanket exhibition will open at the Mill Museum in Dec. 2022. Everyone is invited to participate. People are encouraged to start making blankets and submit them to the museum by Nov. 23rd. Contributors are also invited to write personal messages about their own family immigration story and words of welcome. The blankets and messages will be on display at the museum through Feb. 2023 before distributing them to the local Refugee population. The museum will partner with AALV to distribute the blankets.

Crochet examples from workshop participant.

In addition to the grant funding, the textile workshops are supported by material donations from the following local Community Partners: YarnVT, A Quilter’s Garden, Grand Isle Art Works, Green Mountain Yarn & Fiber, Hermit Thrush Fiber Co, Karen Freeman/SeamWorks.

Update (9/27/22) We are pleased to announce additional grant funding of $1,500 from Vermont Mutual Insurance Giving Fund to support the Women’s Café Textile Workshops! We are truly grateful!

Meet our new summer intern!

Say hello to our summer intern, Joshua!
Joshua is a rising Senior at Winooski High School. Joshua and his family moved to Winooski from Zambia in 2020. He is using his time at the Mill Museum to learn about local history and various ways that a small museum can support and enrich the local community. Today, he learned about waterpower while helping out with a riverfront walking tour. In the next few weeks, we'll take field trips to the Fleming Museum, Middlebury Museum of Art, and the Henry Sheldon Museum to compare different types of museums. Joshua will use his summer experiential learning internship as research for his senior capstone project.

Behind the Scenes: The Making of Mill To Mall

All the research and interviews for our latest exhibit, Mill to Mall: Historic Space Reimagined were conducted by local historian Erica Donnis. Now its Erica’s turn to be interviewed!

Tell us a little about yourself.
I’m a local historian and a native of Essex, Vermont. I’ve had the pleasure of working for the Mill Museum since October on a part-time basis. I also manage the Special Collections program at Champlain College.

What drew you to this exhibition project?
I am passionate about local history and the history of everyday life. Mill to Mall was a wonderful opportunity to combine both of these aspects of my work. I also had a personal connection to the topic, having shopped at the Champlain Mill during its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s. I blew a lot of my allowance on stickers and fancy colored  pens at the Paper Peddler as a tween and bought my high school prom dress at Clay’s.

How did you research Mill to Mall?
Over the course of several months, I did a deep dive into the recent history of the Champlain Mill and its importance to our local community. My work included conducting in depth interviews with almost thirty people, including former Winooski city officials, entrepreneurs who owned businesses in the mall, and some of their employees. I spent hours on newspapers.com reviewing articles and advertisements in The Burlington Free Press to understand contemporary perceptions of the project and verify details of specific businesses. Although the lead architect, James Lamphere, has since passed away, I was able to obtain a full set of architectural plans from his Colchester firm, Wiemann Lamphere. I sifted through correspondence and reports filed at the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation to understand the architectural significance of the building as well as how the mall project was a pioneer for the newly enacted federal historic preservation tax credit program. The City of Winooski’s files also turned out to be a goldmine; they have a trove of images by local photographer Sandy Milens documenting the Mill’s refurbishment and grand opening, which feature prominently in the exhibition.

What was the most meaningful aspect of the project?
I was amazed and touched by all the personal memories and stories we received from the local community. Dozens of people replied to a Facebook post, and others sat for interviews at the Winooski Senior Center. Their stories provide a wonderful window into the everyday life and experiences of the Champlain Mill’s shoppers, diners, business owners, and their employees – one that collapses the distance of the last forty years in ways that continue to resonate.
For example, one contributor wrote about working a part time job at the Have a Heart gift shop when she was a student at Saint Michael’s College. She befriended a University of Vermont student who worked at Chessy’s Frozen Custard, and they enjoyed Diet Coke and Funyuns together on their breaks. I love hearing about the seemingly minor details of everyday life like people’s favorite junk food in the 1980s!

What are you working on next for the Mill Museum?
I am contributing to the research of the Museum’s new permanent exhibition on child labor, which is in the planning stages. I’ve been studying census records to understand the demographics of the local area circa 1910, when photographer Lewis Hine took his famous photographs of children working in the mills and elsewhere in the Burlington area.

Thank you Erica!

Interview with Monica Farrington

by Paige Burton

Martha’s burling tweezers

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Monica Farrington about her family connections with the Winooski mills. Monica was born and raised in the Winooski-Burlington area by her mother Martha Simon (nee Allen), who spent around 25 years working in the American Woolen Mill in Winooski. Martha was a burler. She scanned through fabric for knots and imperfections and pulled them out with tweezers. Monica still has a few pairs of her mother’s burling tweezers and shared photos of them with me.

Monica originally became interested in her family’s mill history while working nights as a camera operator at Channel 3 and meeting people who were researching labor history. She started looking into articles about labor in the area, leading to finding a newspaper article including a photo of her mother alongside a group of burlers in the Burlington Free Press. The photo features Martha and several other women working in the mills, and was part of several stories printed in the newspaper about the mills at the time. Her mother, some of her aunts and her friends’ parents were all working in the mills at some point.

Above: Martha (second from left) and several other burlers featured in the Burlington Free Press, August 17, 1943

Monica tells me her mother was born in Barre on January 5th, 1915, to parents who had emigrated from Lebanon in the late 1890s. She described her mother as “straddling” between Lebanon and Vermont, and only remembers her speaking English. Monica learned Lebanese from her grandmother, who would babysit her while Martha was at the mills.

Portrait of Martha, age 22

The Allens moved between Barre, Montpelier, and Burlington, eventually opening up a store on Howard St. Monica recalls that when Martha was 15, “My grandfather got her a summer job, … they put her in the mill working. She was supposed to leave that fall and go back to school. She would’ve been a junior, and my grandfather wouldn’t let her leave, he was making her work and give him the paycheck.” She had been a good student, and a priest from her school had even come to the house to try and convince Martha’s father to let her quit her mill job, to no avail. She worked in the mills for around 25 years.

Monica remembers her mother “would take the bus to Winooski” every day at around 7 am, and she worked until around 4 pm, making between five and seven dollars a week.  In the summer the mills would get extremely hot, and Monica recalls her mother telling her that the workers would be given salt pills as they walked in to fight dehydration, saying it would help them “weather the heat.”  

Although working at the mill was hard, and the machines were so loud that they couldn’t talk, Monica thinks her mother liked her work. Especially during the war, she told me that “spirits were high. I mean, they took pride in this work, and then during the war they all thought that they were contributing,” by making the wool that became uniforms and blankets for soldiers, who they would call “the boys.”

After 25 years, Martha left the mills and began work at a sewing factory in downtown Burlington on College Street. After the sewing factory she became a tailor at Sears, something she loved to do. Although Martha passed away in 1980, her memory lives on through Monica and the passion she has for this history.

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Monica holding family recipe.

Monica shared her mother’s traditional Lebanese recipe for a dish called Kibbeh. Find the recipe in our blog article “ Lebanese Kibbeh Recipe”.

The Mill Museum would like to thank Monica for sharing her family story. Do you have a mill story to share? We’d love to hear it! Call us or send us a note at: #802-355-9937 or email info@themillmuseum.org

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Paige Burton was our museum intern for the spring of 2021. In May, she graduated from UVM with a degree in History and Environmental Studies. Recently she moved to North Conway, NH and is working as the manager of the Summit Museum at the Mount Washington Observatory.

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Lebanese Kibbeh Recipe

After interviewing Monica Farrington about her mother Martha Simon, Monica sent me a few photos, including one of her holding her family’s old kibbeh recipe. I decided to try it out for myself. Kibbeh is a traditional Mediterranean dish made with spices, beef or lamb, bulgur wheat, and pine nuts. It’s served as either balls or layered in a dish, which I chose to do. I also swapped out the meat for vegetarian ground beef substitute, and removed the pine nuts altogether.

To make the dish, I used Monica’s list of ingredients and did some research online about how to prepare it. I referenced the New York Times recipe - it makes the whole process super simple and I was able to add more spices to it without any trouble, and it had information about bake time and temperature that Monica’s recipe did not have.

I started by soaking bulgur wheat for around ten minutes then draining it, and mixing that in with the veggie ground beef. Then I added salt, pepper, cumin, mint, and allspice. I just eyed the spices and put in about an equal amount of all of them. Monica told me her recipe didn’t have specific amounts and it was more intuitive. This beef, spice, and bulgur mixture makes up the top and bottom layers of the dish. For the middle layer, I browned an onion and green pepper in a pan, and added about a third of the beef to cook for a few minutes. After that, I got an oiled baking dish and added a bottom layer of the beef, then the middle with the pepper and onion added in, then another layer of the original mixture. I’d definitely recommend saving more than you think you would need for the top layer. I ended up not having enough to form a solid top layer and it ended up uneven. The kibbeh cooks for between 35-40 minutes at 350 degrees. I really enjoyed it, and my roommate and I ended up finishing it in one dinner.

             Ingredient List:

•    1 cup bulgur wheat

•    1 lb ground beef or beef substitute

•    1 small onion

•    1 green pepper

•    Olive oil

•    Cumin

•    Mint

•    Allspice

•    Salt

•    Pepper

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Paige Burton was our museum intern for the spring of 2021. In May, she graduated from UVM with a degree in History and Environmental Studies. Recently she moved to North Conway, NH and is working as the manager of the Summit Museum at the Mount Washington Observatory.

Spring Internship Reflection

by Paige Burton

During my last semester of college at UVM, I interned at the Mill Museum. I’m majoring in American History, so I was excited to get some experience working in an environment related to my degree. Through the internship, I was able to complete a few different projects and learn more about what a job in a museum is like.

The biggest project I worked on involved interviewing Monica Farrington about her family connection to the Winooski mills. I was able to meet with Monica a few times over zoom and then write an article about her mother’s experiences working at the mills.* One of the highlights of this project was talking with members of the Vermont Folklife Center. The VFC staff were super helpful and I gained a lot of insight about how to prepare for conducting interviews. Overall, doing research and then writing a news article was a big learning experience for me. I think local history is super interesting, so I was happy to learn and share it with others.

Another part of my internship that I really enjoyed was just being able to talk to people who came into the museum. I met a lot of different people and I was really surprised to learn that many people have personal connections to the mills and local history around Winooski.

Reflecting back on what I’ve done this semester, this internship has helped me get a much clearer view of what I’m looking to do going into the future. I have a job lined up for post-graduation at another museum, and having the opportunity to work at the Mill Museum was what inspired me to pursue museum work as a career. I’m really grateful for this experience, and I’ll carry what I learned into my future.

*Paige’s article about Monica Farrington will be included in our upcoming summer newsletter.

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Paige is graduating this spring from the University of Vermont, with a degree in History and Environmental Studies. This summer, she will be moving to North Conway, New Hampshire to work as manager of the Summit Museum at the Mount Washington Observatory.

Paige: Thank you for the valuable work you have contributed to the Mill Museum this past semester! We are grateful for your commitment and your willingness to take on challenges, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic! Congratulations on your graduation from UVM! We wish you great success in your future endeavors!
– Miriam Block, Mill Museum Director

Thanks to generous support from Physicians Computing Company, the spring ‘21 internship included a stipend. For inquiries about internship opportunities email: info@themillmuseum.org.

The Mill Museum Plants a Garden

by Prudence Doherty, Mill Museum Board Chair

This summer, the Heritage Mill Museum has joined the Winooski Garden Group and the City of Winooski in a project to make downtown Winooski a "garden way." In addition to taking care of existing gardens in Rotary and Winooski Falls Parks, the Garden Group volunteered to plant the median in front of the Winooski Block and the Mill Museum volunteered to plant and maintain three garden beds on the roundabout near the bridge.        

When board member Prudence Doherty brought the idea to Director Miriam Block and the rest of the board, they enthusiastically agreed that it was a great opportunity to contribute to a community project, especially at a time when the museum cannot host visitors. To connect the gardening project to the museum’s mission, Dona Brown and Eliza West suggested that we plant a natural dye garden. Prudence, who is also a member of the garden group, volunteered to take on the project.

Prudence quickly learned about dye plants and filled the beds with flowers, herbs and vegetables whose petals and leaves can be used to dye fabric, including yellow and orange marigolds, red cabbage, blue bachelor buttons, mint, and amaranth. To make a strong visual impact, she used similar plants in all three beds.

Prudence transplanted young amaranth plants from her home garden, hoping that they were red amaranth, which can color fabric in shades of pink. The tall amaranth plants with reddish leaves and striking maroon flowers are thriving, but a vivid crimson variety she recently retrieved from a compost pile at the O’Brien Community Garden and added to the dye garden would undoubtedly produce a stronger color.

Now that the museum has planted a simple dye garden, we are considering a longer-term project with more permanent plantings and community projects that involve harvesting flowers and leaves and dyeing yarn and fabric. There are many possibilities for collaborating with Vermont gardeners, natural dyers and textile artists.

The dye garden complements another museum initiative. With the help of Margi Gregory from Spring Mountain Herbs of Vermont, the museum put together a short “Plant Guide” highlighting herbal plants growing along the Riverwalk path and the field east of the Champlain Mill, including staghorn sumac, barberry, blackberry, goldenrod, dandelion, Queens Anne lace, iris, jewel weed, Japanese Knotweed, mullein, horsetail, and milkweed. The guide is available for download on the museum’s website.

Lewis Hine's 145th Birthday Bash

by Sarah Blow

The 145th birthday celebration of Lewis Hine went off without a hitch last Thursday, Sept. 26th, at the Heritage Winooski Mill Museum. Guests from the Winooski community were invited to discuss the work of author and historian Joe Manning and learn more about Winooski’s history as a mill town. Attendees were amazed at the passion Manning exemplified for his work, asking lively, thoughtful questions about his identification process and his interest in the topic. 

The journey started with one little girl. In 2005, when asked if he would help track down former child mill worker Addie Card, Joe Manning a retired social worker of 30 years said he “would give it a try.” Since that first success, Manning has been hooked on identifying child mill workers featured in famous Lewis Hine photographs. “It’s been fascinating,” states his wife Carole Manning, who often accompanies him to various events and lectures regarding his work. Manning has always been interested in studying people, and sociology, so that initial search left him wanting more, wondering “what can I do next?” He feels somewhat of a responsibility to identify and bring life to the children behind the photographs. When he looked at that famous photo of Addie Card fourteen years ago, the very one that prompted his interest in the process, he recalls thinking of this young child asking “what are you going to do about me?” This call to action has allowed Manning to identify over 300 children featured in Hine’s work. Manning describes his work as “a rewarding emotional process” that has become somewhat of an addiction. Although this process has not come without its challenges. Carole Manning recalls the struggle Joe faced when having to switch from his trusty typewriter, to a modern computer in order to complete his research. “He had to take a leap,” she says. Despite his success in hundreds of cases, he still feels there is work to be done. He states he still has “about 4,000 pictures to go” resulting in a laugh from the group. 

Following the hour-long question and answer session, guests enjoyed refreshments, including a birthday cake for Lewis Hine himself! Although Hine was unable to blow out the candles, he was certainly celebrated. The legacy of Lewis Hine lives on in people like Joe Manning who are dedicated to keeping his photographs relevant and remembered in modern society. Hine’s photographs serve as a reminder of how far Winooski and society have come in such a short amount of time and give us hope for the future.

Sarah is currently a sophomore at the University of Vermont, pursuing a degree in public communications. She has been working as a communications intern for the Heritage Winooski Mill Museum since September 2019.

Thoughts on School Tours

by Meganne Allison

This past spring, I had the opportunity to intern at the Mill Museum to learn more about museum education. My observations inspired my senior thesis on the importance of field trips to enhance student learning. I noticed time and time again that field trips have a direct impact on students and how they absorb material. Taking students out of textbooks and into the field gives them new and different experiences, shaping how they view the world.

During my time at the Mill Museum, I was able to experience the importance of field trips first hand. The museum had the pleasure of hosting four school groups from South Burlington Middle School. The classes that came were currently reading Counting on Grace by Elizabeth Winthrop. The visit helped students connect their reading to the history of the mill and local child labor issues. During the tour, students were able to hear what a mill would’ve sounded like with all the looms going at once. When the students were asked about the dangers of working in the mill, one student raised his hand and began summarizing the “part in the book where the boy lost his finger.”

The highlight of the tour was when students participated in a relay race where they were able to experience what it might have been like to work at a mill. The object of the game was for students to take turns quickly replacing a row of full bobbins with empty ones. Each student would take turns until everyone on their team had completed the task. To make things trickier, students had to use their non-dominant hand, mimicking the same handicap that the protagonist in Counting on Grace had to endure. The students LOVED this activity and the room was overflowing with laughter and smiles from students and adults alike.

It was apparent that these students truly learned a lot on their field trip and had fun doing so. Having the opportunity to observe how these students interacted with the space and the materials has proved to me that field trips are not just icing on the cake of school but much, much more.

 Summer is the perfect time to start planning school trips! Call to book your tour today! 
#802-355-9937 or email info@themillmuseum.org

2019-2020 School year rates:
$75 for a 45 minute tour (15 students)
*additional fees may apply for larger groups or workshops.

In May, Meganne Allison graduated from Saint Michael’s college, where she majored in history and educational studies. She is now living in Florida and plans to start a job teaching Middle School in the fall.  

Updates From the Director

During the Hidden Gems art opening, Winooski High School student talks about his painting with Mayor Lott.

Exciting things have been happening at the Mill Museum! Recently, board members met to revise our mission to better reflect the interests of our diverse community and stress our focus on connecting the past with issues that matter to the community today. Our new vision is to be a social anchor in the community, foster community well-being, and be purposeful in our inclusion and collaboration with the diverse local population.

This past school year, we hosted two art shows with Winooski High School art students. The exhibit in December 2018 featured student photography showcasing a “Slice of Life” in Winooski today. In May 2019, students from a foundations art class painted landscapes of their favorite “Hidden Gems” in Winooski. The project was a response to a 1913 vintage postcard in which the message stated Winooski is “not a very pretty place.”  Both shows gave students the opportunity to connect and share their cultural perspectives with other community members.

During the spring semester, the museum collaborated with a group of students from the Emergent Media Center (EMC) at Champlain College to evaluate our gallery space and permanent exhibits. The EMC students made some proposals for new ways to incorporate interactive technology and make connections to current issues. After evaluating our Child Labor exhibit, one student created a mock-up of a searchable database where visitors would be able to check if their clothing was manufactured in a country where children are exploited and working in hazardous conditions. The database would be a powerful way for the museum to present more current and socially responsible content. We plan to continue evaluating our exhibits and look for meaningful ways to make connections to important current issues.

Currently, we are working on a new exhibit set to open in April, 2020. The show, titled Capacity of Cloth, takes a look at innovative textiles happening today by six artists working in the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster at Concordia University in Montreal. The artwork to be displayed was developed alongside scientists and other technical practitioners to explore new ways of combining textiles and technology. The stimulating exhibit, juxtaposed with historic mill artifacts, will give viewers an understanding of how far innovative textiles have come and spark wonderment of what the future holds.

Your support matters!

We have started a fundraising campaign to help cover the costs of this exciting textiles and technology exhibit. We can only make this amazing opportunity happen with your support! Please help us reach our goal so that we can focus our attention on making Capacity of Cloth and associated outreach programs top-notch.

Contributions can be made at:

www.crowdrise.com/capacity-of-cloth