One must not imagine the dark Satanic milk of Olde England. The factories of Port Ticonderoga are situated amid a profusion of greenery brightened with gay flowers, and are soothed by the sound of the rushing currents; they are clean and well-ventilated, and the workers cheerful and efficient. Standing at sunset on the graceful new Jubilee Bridge which curves like a rainbow of wrought-iron lace over the gushing cascades of the Louveteau River, one views an enchanting faeryland as the lights of the Chase button factory wink on, and are reflected in the sparkling waters.
This wasn’t entirely a lie when it was written. At least for a short time, there was prosperity here, and enough to go around.
Next comes my grandfather, in frock coat and top hat and white whiskers, waiting with a clutch of similarly glossy dignitaries to welcome the Duke of York during his tour across Canada in 1901. Then my father with a wreath, in front of the War Memorial at its dedication—a tall man, solemn-faced, with a moustache and an eye-patch; up close, a collection of black dots. I back away from him to see if he’ll come into focus—I try to catch his good eye—but he’s not looking at me; he’s looking towards the horizon, with his spine straight and his shoulders back, as if he’s facing a firing squad. Stalwart, you’d say.
Then a shot of the button factory itself, in 1911, says the caption. Machines with clanking arms like the legs of grasshoppers, and steel cogs and tooth-covered wheels, and stamping pistons going up and down, punching out the shapes; long tables with their rows of workers, bending forward, doing things with their hands. The machines are run by men, in eyeshades and vests, their sleeves rolled up; the workers at the table are women, in upswept hairdos and pinafores. It was the women who counted the buttons and boxed them, or sewed them onto cards with the Chase name printed across them, six or eight or twelve buttons to a card.
Down at the end of the cobblestoned open space is a bar, The Whole Enchilada, with live music on Saturdays, and beer said to be from local micro-breweries. The decor is wooden tabletops placed on barrels, with early-days pine booths along one side. On the menu, displayed in the window—I’ve never gone inside—are foods I find exotic: patty melts, potato skins, nachos. The fat-drenched staples of the less respectable young, or so I’m told by Myra. She’s got a ringside seat right next door, and if there are any tricks happening in The Whole Enchilada, she never misses them. She says a pimp goes there to eat, also a drug pusher, both in broad daylight. She’s pointed them out to me, with much thrilled whispering. The pimp was wearing a three-piece suit, and looked like a stockbroker. The drug pusher had a grey moustache and a denim outfit, like an old-time union organizer.
Myra’s shop is The Gingerbread House, Gifts and Collectibles. It’s got that sweet and spicy scent to it—some kind of cinnamon room spray—and it offers many things: jars of jam with cotton-print fabric tops, heart-shaped pillows stuffed with desiccated herbs that smell like hay, clumsily hinged boxes carved by “traditional craftsmen,” quilts purportedly sewn by Mennonites, toilet-cleaning brushes with the heads of smirking ducks. Myra’s idea of city folks’ idea of country life, the life of their pastoral hicktown ancestors—a little bit of history to take home with you. History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
Myra likes to make presents to me from her stash of treasures. Otherwise put, she dumps items on me that folks won’t buy at the shop. I possess a lopsided twig wreath, an incomplete set of wooden napkin rings with pineapples on them, an obese candle scented with what appears to be kerosene. For my birthday she gave me a pair of oven gloves shaped like lobster claws. I’m sure it was kindly meant.
Or perhaps she’s softening me up: she’s a Baptist, she’d like me to find Jesus, or vice versa, before it’s too late. That kind of thing doesn’t run in her family: her mother Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you’d call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn’t pay to get too mixed up with him. Certainly she didn’t want him in her kitchen, as she had enough on her hands as it was.
After some deliberation, I bought a cookie at The Cookie Gremlin—oatmeal and chocolate chip—and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and sat on one of the park benches, sipping and licking my fingers, resting my feet, listening to the taped music with its lilting, mournful twang.
It was my Grandfather Benjamin who built the button factory, in the early 1870s. There was a demand for buttons, as for clothing and everything connected with it—the population of the continent was expanding at an enormous rate—and buttons could be made cheaply and sold cheaply, and this (said Reenie) was just the ticket for my grandfather, who’d seen the opportunity and used the brains God gave him.
His forbears had come up from Pennsylvania in the 1820s to take advantage of cheap land, and of construction opportunities—the town had been burnt out during the War of 1812, and there was considerable rebuilding to be done. These people were something Germanic and sectarian, crossbred with seventh-generation Puritans—an industrious but fervent mix that produced, in addition to the usual collection of virtuous, lumpen farmers, three circuit riders, two inept land speculators, and one petty embezzler—chancers with a visionary streak and one eye on the horizon. In my grandfather this came out as gambling, although the only thing he ever gambled on was himself.
His father had owned one of the first mills in Port Ticonderoga, a modest grist mill, in the days when everything was run by water. When he’d died, of apoplexy, as it was then called, my grandfather was twenty-six. He inherited the mill, borrowed money, imported the button machinery from the States. The first buttons were made from wood and bone, and the fancier ones from cow horns. These last two materials could be obtained for next to nothing from the several abattoirs in the vicinity, and as for the wood, it lay all round about, clogging up the land, and people were burning it just to get rid of it. With cheap raw materials and cheap labour and an expanding market, how could he have failed to prosper?
The buttons turned out by my grandfather’s company were not the kinds of buttons I liked best as a girl. No tiny mother-of-pearl ones, no delicate jet, none in white leather for ladies’ gloves. The family buttons were to buttons as rubber overshoes were to footgear—stolid, practical buttons, for overcoats and overalls and work shirts, with something robust and even crude about them. You could picture them on long underwear, holding up the flap at the back, and on the flies of men’s trousers. The things they concealed would have been pendulous, vulnerable, shameful, unavoidable—the category of objects the world needs but scorns.
It’s hard to see how much glamour would have attached itself to the granddaughters of a man who made such buttons, except for the money. But money or even the rumour of it always casts a dazzling light of sorts, so Laura and I grew up with a certain aura. And in Port Ticonderoga, nobody thought the family buttons were funny or contemptible. Buttons were taken seriously there: too many people’s jobs depended on them for it to have been otherwise.
Over the years my grandfather bought up other mills and turned them into factories as well. He had a knitting factory for undershirts and combinations, another one for socks, and another one that made small ceramic objects such as ashtrays. He prided himself on the conditions in his factories: he listened to complaints when anyone was brave enough to make them, he regretted injuries when they’d been brought to his notice. He kept up with mechanical improvements, indeed with improvements of all kinds. He was the first factory owner in town to introduce electric lighting. He thought flower beds were good for the workers’ morale—zinnias and snapdragons were his stand-bys, as they were inexpensive and showy and lasted a long time. He declared that conditions for the females in his employ were as safe as those in their own parlours. (He assumed they had parlours. He assumed these parlours were safe. He liked to think well of everybody.) He refused to tolerate drunkenness on the job, or coarse language, or loose behaviour.