Labor Day is MoWC’s big day
City’s museum celebrates holiday that celebrates the workers
“These are memories that should be preserved for all time because they tell the story of the people who powered the city’s mills. If we don’t preserve and share them they will be forgotten.” —Museum of Work and Culture Director Anne Conway
WOONSOCKET — Whether you want to have your photo taken with the newest character from “Sesame Street,” record your history as a mill worker for posterity, or reflect on the origins of the region’s only institution dedicated to chronicling the story of the people who powered the Industrial Revolution, the Museum of Work & Culture is the place to be on Labor Day.
The only nationwide holiday homage to America’s working class is always a big day for MoWC, but it’s bigger than usual this year because the museum is marking 20 years in operation, says Director Anne Conway.
With admission waived – as usual on Labor Day Open House at the MoWC – visitors can celebrate by exploring an audiovisual retrospective of the museum, from its origins to present-day operations. To tell the story, Assistant Director Sarah Carr pored through the museum’s scrapbooks of newspaper clipThe Call pings and photographs – many from – turning them into beautifully designed wall- hangings.
Students from Riverzedge Arts also created a short video featuring interviews with volunteers, boosters and political figures who helped turn an idea into MoWC. Situated in an old textile factory, the museum has been telling the story of the epic migration of French-Canadians to the boomtown Woonsocket of the 19th century – bustling with new technology for spinning cotton and wool into thread – to vistors from all over the
world since 1997.
The new workers from the North were at the epicenter of what came to known as the Industrial Revolution – a new lifestyle unhinged from the small farms and agricultural economy they were born into. For them, the move to the city’s factories was culturally transformational, and not always easy – central themes MoWC has strived to preserve in permanent exhibits and oral histories of mill workers.
Fittingly, MoWC celebrates Labor Day with a special appeal to anyone who ever worked in a mill to drop in to make a deposit in the “The Mill Memory Bank.” No, the museum doesn’t want money – it wants memories – personal recollections of those who worked in the city’s textile factories.
Normally, the opportunity to deposit a photograph and a short biographical profile in The Mill Memory Bank costs $35, but it’s free on Labor Day. All the museum asks is that donors fill out a form with details ahead of time, and bring a photograph when you come – no sooner than 1:30 p.m. The form can be filled out online by visiting www.labordaymowc.org, or visitors can fill it out at the museum.
Conway says there are about 200 entries already on file in the Memory Bank, one of the easiest and most immediate ways of bringing the region’s mill heritage to life. Visitors can search the database by mill or an individual’s name to call up images of workers and hear them tell the stories of the jobs they did in the mill, where they came from, why they did it and how much they earned.
“These are memories that should be preserved for all time because they tell the story of the people who powered the city’s mills,” says Conway. “If we don’t preserve and share them they will be forgotten. Like the veterans of World War II, every day we lose more of them.”
The Mill Memory Bank has unlimited storage potential, and Conway hopes to fill as much of it as possible because the bank is to be a central feature of a new exhibit – still a work in progress – that MoWC will unveil on Nov. 4 as part of the 20th Anniversary Gala. Dubbed “Mills Along the Blackstone – Locally Made, Internationally Known,” the exhibit will feature an interactive, digital “touch table” where visitors can take a visual tour of the city’s mills and industrial heritage.
The new exhibit will also include a video projection of Thundermist Falls – all of it in a portion of the MoWC second-story quarters that will be redesigned with architectural features inspired by real mills. The Scituate, Mass., consulting firm Content Design is handling the project, according to Conway.
But there’s another component of the Labor Day celebration that underscores an often-overlooked aspect of the MoWC’s mission, and that’s educational outreach to children who are on the autism disorder spectrum.
Under Conway, who has an adult brother in Canada with autism, MoWC has aggressively embraced programs that make the museum friendly to children like him. Project Autism, an Ocean State nonprofit, has provided training to all volunteer guides, and the museum has a longstanding Made-to-Order Monday program for autistic children, offering education and therapy built around art and music.
On Labor Day, MoWC teams up with the Rhode Island Public Broadcasting System to bring the legendary “Sesame Street” program’s newest character – Julia – to the museum for a meet-and-greet with children of all ages on the autism spectrum. On TV, Julia, the first new character to join the “Sesame Street” cast in many years, is a tiny Muppet with autism.
She’ll arrive at the museum as a fully-autonomous, life-size being officially known as Walkaround Julia, who’ll stand for photos and mingle with human peers and their families. She’ll do so for maximum of 75 families, broken into three small-group visits at 10 a.m., 11 a.m. and noon.
While MoWC has won awards for its other “low-sensory” program tailored for visitors on the autism spectrum, Walkaround Julia will appear in a normal setting at the museum. However, staff from the Rhode Island Consortium for Autism Research and Treatment will be on hand to assist visitors with hands-on activities and other services to help things go smoothly.
Pre-registration for a visit with Walkaround Julia is required and can be completed online at LaborDayMoWC.org. As of Wednesday, more than half the spots had already been reserved.
“Right now we’ve been reaching out to families and the schools to let them know there’s a place they can come that’s judgment free and offers programs that are tailored for them,” says Conway. “We hear from the teachers that the students have a very good experience.”
The museum director is pleased to have Walkaround Julia help celebrate Labor Day, but she says it would have been impossible without the cooperation of the New York-based Sesame Street Workshop and Rhode Island PBS – especially David Peccerelli and Debbie Hall of WSBE-TV.
If Walkaround Julia, free Memory Bank registrations and a museum retrospective aren’t enough to get you to MoWC on Labor Day, come for the hot dogs. They’re free, and a crew of volunteers from Up With People will be dishing them out until they’re gone, starting at 11:30 a.m.