Millville’s Carroll leaves many lessons
Former teacher spent her life preserving the history, culture of the town she loved
MILLVILLE — The town may have lost its longtime local historian and teacher Margaret M. Carroll on March 13, but it did not lose the lesson plan she wrote for the area from her well-lived life preserving the highlights of the place she called home.
If you knew Margaret as I did over many years, you know about the list of long overlooked relics of the past that she not only helped cast in a spotlight, but preserved for many generations to come.
They are historic buildings like the Chestnut Hill Meeting House – built in 1769 and still standing in her town – and places like the Blackstone Canal and tow path that opened in 1828. One of its almost perfectly preserved granite locks still exists in the woods alongside the Blackstone River off Hope Street, where Carroll would lead many to marvel at its 19th century technology.
Margaret’s reach as a historic storyteller and preservationist went beyond the town’s borders, as she was a key voice among those leading the
U.S. Congress to establish the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor (“a very long name,” Sen. Chafee used to say) back in 1986.
She was instrumental in preserving historic locations along its course from Worcester to Providence, the route the old Blackstone Canal boats would follow.
What made that all possible, of course, was Margaret’s unparalleled enthusiasm for the area’s history and its people – many of them her friends in the cause – and others she had connected with in some way during her 97 years of living.
She was the Millville Elementary School teacher who opened young minds to life’s possibilities for 37 years before her retirement in 1986, but also a school friend of the town boys going off to fight World War II who wrote a hometown newsletter to keep them informed.
I had the privilege of listening to Margaret, the meticulous historian, as she recounted local facts that would one day end up on many of the information kiosks now found in her beloved Blackstone Valley.
There have been many other area historians I have had a chance to work with while covering the Blackstone Valley over the years, folks like Woonsocket’s Phyllis Thomas, Ray Bacon and Martin Crowley; North Smithfield’s Eugene Peloquin and Irene Nebiker; and Burrillville’s Patricia Mehrtens – and all have done their part to keep history alive for many others.
Margaret was someone who had so many brands in the fire that you eventually ran into her again and again as she pursued another
preservation effort or teaching project.
That might be the discovery of writing on a long-covered classroom blackboard in a historic town school, or a tour of the Blackstone Gorge above the Tupperware property in Blackstone that still looks as it did before the town grew around it.
Early on, it was a tour of the cherished meeting house at the corner of Thayer Street and Chestnut Hill Road. Margaret took me upstairs to see the heavy and wide planks of native trees used to build it. She was a president of the Chestnut Hill Meeting House and Cemetery Association and helped win its designation on the National Register of Historic Places.
She was also my guide on my first visit to the Millville Lock, taking me downslope from a nearby Hope Street neighborhood on a route that was probably another memory from her youth.
The lock was pretty much left to local folks in the years before the Corridor, and abandonment and neglect can sometimes allow a treasure to be overlooked long enough for someone like Margaret to come along and save it.
I remember her telling the story of the no-longer-watered lock as she stood atop its granite block sides and finished with an explanation of why a couple of the stones had been displaced. It turns out, she had learned, a couple of her former students – obviously older and stronger – had done the deed and later admitted it to her.
The stones still remain in the position they were moved and Margaret’s story remains a memorable footnote in the history of the lock.
Another time, Margaret relayed her memory of seeing what may have been the remains of an old canal barge down in a river portion of the canal with her father years ago and helped a group of divers check out one possible location of memory. The divers found a few pieces of wood, likely unrelated, and unfortunately no intact remnant of the canal’s bygone workings.
But with Margaret, there was always something new to pursue – visitor centers, tow path restorations, and more recently even a state and federally funded bike path passing by the old Millville Lock on a section of the Boston & Hartford Railroad bordering Charles M. Hays’ Southern New England Railway line of the Grand Trunk Railroad route in the Blackstone Valley.
Yes, Hays was also among Margaret’s history lessons. When I visited the lock and bike path the other day, I wasn’t surprised to learn a walker heading out with his dog from the parking lot in Millville already knew about Charles Hays and his connection to the Valley.
Hays had planned to build the spur line from Providence through Woonsocket, Blackstone and Millville to a connection in Palmer, Mass. that would continue onto Canada as an alternative to existing competitors.
Margaret loved to tell of Hays’ plans to build above all his competitors’ lines, a plan that included a high-level crossing of the Blackstone River near the Blackstone line and that would use still-existing concrete abutments in Woonsocket – like the one located next to Cass Park and another on George Street. Unfortunately for the local Grand Trunk line, Hays chose the Titanic for his voyage home from a railroad business trip to Europe in 1912 and didn’t survive the fated transatlantic liner’s sinking.
Margaret was also wellversed in the history of Joseph Banigan and his Banigan Rubber Co., which would become the Woonsocket Rubber Company and later a part of the U.S. Rubber Co.
Banigan was a key factor in Millville’s initial economic success and the homes along Hope Street near the lock were built for the workers of his plant as another of Margaret’s historical footnotes.
As with many things that Margaret brought to light over the years, one part of Millville’s history was usually connected in some way to another.
One tour she took me on led us to Millville’s “Field of Dreams,” near where Banigan’s plant had been located off Main Street.
Margaret remembered the field as the Rubber Shop Oval, the place where Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Charles “Gabby” Hartnett of the Chicago Cubs had played with the industrial league teams sponsored by area manufacturing plants.
Hartnett, a Woonsocket native, had family ties to Millville and learned his trade as catcher locally.
When the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians – the team of an another Woonsocket Hall of Famer, Napoleon Lajoie – were to face off in the 2016 World Series, Margaret once again had a story of Millville to tell.
After going off to the Cubs, Hartnett would come back to Northern Rhode Island from time to time and visit with his family in Millville, she related before the World Series.
“Oh yes, my God, everybody in town knew him,” Carroll said. “He was everywhere in town when he came to visit.”
She also recalled Hartnett driving up to her family’s home on a motorcycle one day to talk to her father, Thomas Carroll.
“He was a happy guy, he was a happy man and he always had a smile on his face,” Carroll recalled. When he greeted her father, a longtime friend, she remembers he “wrapped his arm around my father and lifted him off the ground,” Carroll said at the time.
Hartnett never forgot his town and would stop in whenever he was in the area playing games or traveling to New England, she noted.
She also told how Hartnett visited the old Rubber Shop Oval for an old timer’s game in 1946 and was photographed in uniform with his fellow players.
Margaret never lost track of those she knew – as her World War II letter project shows – and she also kept track of the successes of her friends as the years passed.
John J. McNamara, one of Margaret’s elementary school chums, was among Millville’s World War II combat veterans who earned a Purple Heart with the U.S. Marines, and probably read Margaret’s hometown newsletter overseas.
McNamara came home and spent his life with his wife, Evelyn, helping his community as so many of his generation had done.
He was an active member of St. Augustine Parish in Millville, served as a member of the Selectmen and the Blackstone-Millville Regional High School Committee, and helped with many other important projects for his community, Margaret remembered upon his passing October 2014.
What she said then about McNamara, a man she described as “(Walking) like a drill sergeant, and it was all pride in Millville, pride and spirit,” said a lot about herself.
Noting McNamara’s passing, Carroll said she felt as if a void had opened in Millville.
“Oh yes, it is a great loss to those who knew John McNamara,” she said at the time. “But it is an even greater loss for those who never knew him and don’t know what he meant to the town.”
I’m thinking the same thoughts about Margaret and all she gave to her town.