Robert Forrant
“No Avenging Gibet”: The 1860 Pemberton Mill Collapse and the Cover Up that Followed
Many know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City in 1911, which cost 146 workers their lives. How many know about a similar occurrence on January 10, 1860, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, when nearly 100 workers were killed in the Pemberton textile mill collapse? The wealthy Bostonians involved in the mill’s construction got a free pass in the cover-up that followed. Instead, Charles H. Bigelow, chief engineer on the mill construction project, received singular blame for the horror at a coroner’s inquest. In the aftermath, efforts to reform worker health and safety in the Commonwealth failed. The deadly event even called into question whether we should be a nation of factories. Why did the mill fall? Could the families of the deceased workers sue the mill owners? Who engineered the cover-up? All will be revealed in this ‘true history detective’ session.
Robert Forrant, PhD, is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Principal historian on numerous projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lowell National Historical Park, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, his newest book, co-edited with Mary Anne Trasciatti, Where are the Workers: Interpreting Labor and Working-Class History at Museums and Historic Sites, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022. In early 2024, he published “‘No Avenging Gibet’: The 1860 Pemberton Mill Collapse” in The New England Quarterly.
