the mills were recruited among the farm girls of the neighborhood, the Immigration Commission has discovered a description of their living conditions "which affords a pleasing contrast with the Lowell of the present." "The life in the boarding houses was very agreeable. These houses belonged to the corporation," i. e., they were "company houses, " in modern parlance. Dr. Sumner, however, in her History of Women in Industry in the United States, written for the U. S. Bureau of Labor, quotes other contemporary testimony less bucolic in character. From the same town of Lowell, complaints were made in 1845 that a dozen or more of the "daughters of New England" were crowded into "the same hot, ill-ventilated attic." The boarding houses of the Tremont mills in 1847 were described in the following extract from a letter:

'T is quite common for us to write on the cover of a bandbox, and sit upon a trunk, as tables or chairs in our sleeping rooms are all out of the question, because there is no room for such articles, as 4 to 6 occupy every room, and of course trunks and bandboxes constitute furniture for the rooms we occupy. A thing called a light-stand, a little more than a foot square, is our table for the use of 6. Washstands are uncommon articles-it has never been my lot to enjoy their use, except at my own expense.

Comparative statistics of house tenancy in Boston in 1855 and 1900 show that in the middle of the nineteenth century the tenement house population was as numerous, in proportion, as in our day. This can be seen from Table 71 on page 242.

Overcrowded and filthy tenement houses were as prevalent forty years ago in Boston, as in New York. There also the conversion of the single family house into a tenement house, where a whole family was jammed in every room, was productive "of filth and grime." An early report of the Massachusetts Labor Bureau, describing the

Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 1, pp. 508-509.

Helen L. Sumner: Report of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, vol. ix., pp. 87-88.

tenement houses of Boston and their surroundings, speaks of "hovels rotting with damp and mould," of "puddles reeking with stenchy garbage," of "putrid cesspools and uncleansed drains, befouled with unspeakable nastiness."

TABLE 71.

PER CENT DISTRIBUTION OF THE FAMILIES OF BOSTON ACCORDING TO NUMBER OF FAMILIES PER HOUSE, 1855 AND 1900.a

The degree of congestion at the close of the '60's is exemplified by the description of a block of tenements consisting of fifty-six rooms which were occupied by fifty-four families, mostly Irish. There were also a few English and colored families among them. The stairways were rotten and dangerous. The ventilation of the rooms was very poor. Washing, ironing, and drying were all done in the only room which was both a living room and a sleeping room.3

The two-room tenements on Meander Street consisted of a living and a sleeping room, both dark and damp and dirty. Other tenements visited were old, rickety frame houses with plastering broken down and full of holes through which rain and sun freely entered. In the summer the houses swarmed with vermin. These houses were occupied by American and Irish tenants.

Another tenement house in Kingston Court was a wooden building consisting of six apartments, some with three rooms and some with only one to each. The living rooms

Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. 3d Annual Report (1871-1872), pp. 437-438.

2 Census of Boston, 1855, p. 11 (percentages computed); XII. Census

of United States. Population, Part II., p. 186, Table XCVIII.

3 Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1870, pp. 164-180.

were 10 by 14; the sleeping rooms 7 by 9. The sun never penetrated the sleeping rooms. Water was obtained from a hydrant in the yard upon which twenty-six families depended. Broken windows patched up with boards and rags, rickety and broken-down stairs were not unusual. We quote the concluding sentence of the report:

We could describe other tenement-house abominations of the same foulness and beastly defilement, but it would be but a repetition of nastiness and negligence, and for which neither memory or dictionary could supply words not yet used, or language adequate to the filthy picturing.'

In the smaller Massachusetts towns, the working people were as badly housed as in Boston. The following is reproduced from contemporary testimony given by a canvasser who went through many of the tenements of Danvers:

Take them as a whole, they are horrid; those belonging to the factory especially. There are tenement houses there that ought not to be occupied. Four families have complained to me, that if they go to bed at night and there comes a shower, they have to rise up and put dishes in different places to catch the water, and that they can't sleep in their beds; and to prove it I went and examined and saw it was actually worse than they had said; one house, especially, where a person came to me, and I saw he did n't look right, and I said, "Are you going to work?" "No," he says, "had no sleep last night." It had been raining and his mother had been baking and preparing things for the house, and, in the morning almost everything had swum off and gone away-in all directions. . . . Another house, I was almost afraid to go into. I could see right through into the cellar; the plastering was entirely off the ceiling and they told me it leaked in just about the same way. There is another house, where there is a yard square without a shingle on it; and then another has an addition to it, and you can put your whole arm right in betwixt the two. It is more like a pig-pen than a decent house. . . when people are in the water-closet, the people on the road can see them. There is not a good tenement in the village.❜

1 Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1871, pp. 517-531.

• Ibid., pp. 442-443.

The same conditions were reported from Salem. The houses were seldom repaired, the plumbing was very poor, and the pump water was often made unfit for drinking purposes by the washings of the yard. The odor in the houses was bad. The following description of a house at No. 18 Lemon Street, is quoted as an extreme case, which nevertheless indicates what conditions were tolerated in those days:

In connection with the kitchen, and only separated by a door was the pantry, quite reluctantly shown us by the mistress. She said that it being very much out of repair, and not fit to be used as such, they concluded it was best to turn it into a cowshed. Here were two cows, and all the accompaniments usually found in a stable, in direct connection with the kitchen, filling the house with its unmitigated stench. In this place pigs and hens were once kept, besides the cow, the former on all occasions making the freest use of the domestic apartments.'

About the same time (1872) shanty dwellers were found among the laborers of Massachusetts. The paymaster of tunnel laborers employed at North Adams in 1872 testified that many of them lived in shanties on the works and even kept boarders. "The miners, rockmen, etc., who have no families, board at the shanties. They are filthy, dirty places. . . ."2

The congestion and squalor of the past were no better than the worst housing conditions that were found by the investigators of the Immigration Commission among the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Yet the tenement-house dwellers of forty years ago were all of Teuton and Celtic stock. As stated in a previous chapter, contemporary observers sought to explain the bad housing conditions of the Irish immigrants by the low standard of living of the people of Ireland. 3 Although living conditions

Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1870, pp. 372 and 380.

2 Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. Third Annual Report (1871-1872), pp. 440–441.

3 Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 459.

in Ireland have greatly improved since those days, yet they still remain far below the average of the most overcrowded sections of the great American cities.

The investigation of the Immigration Commission was confined to "the overcrowded, poor quarters of the city"; in the households investigated, the average number of persons per room was 1.34. In the city of Dublin, according to the census of 1901, four fifths of all tenements consisted of four rooms or less with an average of 2.20 persons per room. More than one third of all tenements had three persons or more per room. Three fifths of all tenements consisted of one or two rooms only. In the whole of Ireland, one third of all families lived in two rooms or less.3 There were 38,086 families of three or more persons living in one room each. These extremes of congestion comprised 4.2 per cent of all Irish families. The details are given in Table 72.

TABLE 72.

NUMBER OF TENEMENTS OF ONE ROOM OCCUPIED BY THREE OR MORE

If it is maintained that the immigrant tends to transplant to the American soil the standard of living of his native country, it must follow from the latest statistics of housing conditions in Ireland that even the present-day Irish immi

Jenks and Lauck, loc. cit., pp. 117, 119.

See Appendix, Table XVI.

3 Census of Ireland, 1901. General Report, p. 112, Table 9; p. 173, Table 49. 4 Ibid., Table 10.