![]() So the immigrants communicated in a kind of made-up Italian using words from all their separate backgrounds. You probably know that people from different regions of Italy can be divided by dialect to the point where they have trouble understanding each other. I’m leaving out a lot of earlier local history here, including other job opportunities that started attracting Italian labourers long before 1910 - I want to concentrate on the core group of Italians who founded their own little society in Sagamore Village. One contingent, including the Carafolis, came from the vicinity of Bologna. Among them were thousands of Italians who stayed on after the canal was finished to find permanent employment with the biggest local business, a company that manufactured railroad cars. Construction workers poured into the Sagamore-Sandwich area, many coming almost directly from Europe, lured by the prospect of work. The idea was to dig a canal between Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay and open a shorter water route to Boston from points south along the Atlantic coast. Shortly before 1910 a huge construction project was started on what we call Upper Cape Cod, the southern part where the Cape joins the mainland. But before we go further I’d better introduce the village. It was what connected me with our village and part of my parents’ world. The first way I learned to fill in part of what was missing was through cooking. Everything in my life belongs to Before or After. I was almost twelve years old when my mother, my maternal grandmother, and one of my two brothers died in a terrible fire from which I barely escaped. But the second break with our family past may be the reason I’m here today. One - the break between two continents - might have been something I could put in the back of my mind and only think about occasionally. There’s a Before, and there’s an After.Īs a third-generation Italian-American from the town of Sagamore Village, Massachusetts, I experienced this gap of memory in two ways. People whose families came over from Europe may be almost completely cut off from knowledge of anything earlier than some dividing point when another generation reached America. In the United States we call ourselves ‘a nation of immigrants.’ One thing that this means for us is that there’s often a gap, a break in family memories. The plant was demolished in the 1930s, following the second expansion of the Cape Cod Canal.Presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery ![]() In 1928, the company closed after eighty two years in business, and the plant was stripped for materials, after years of being a minor maintenance facility, staffed by a skeleton crew. German prisoners of war then helped to assemble them, placed them onto rail lines, and helped to bring an end to the conflict. The plant also was responsible for the design and patent of the 40-8 boxcar design used by many trains.ĭuring World War I, the plant shipped 40,000 freight cars to Marseille, France, which were built under contract. In 1912, the company was purchased by the Standard Steel Car Company.ĭuring this time, it was a large repair facility for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, as well as possibly being the largest employer on Cape Cod, employing up to 1,400 people at a time. ![]() Following the creation of the Cape Cod Canal, the plant helped to manufacture coffins that would be used to inter recently relocated bodies that were in the path of the canal. In the early 1900s, the plant employed hundreds of Italian immigrants, many of whom lived in the area. The company eventually switched over to manufacturing rail cars, in a plant that stretched about a mile long. The company was founded in 1846 as Keith and Ryder and manufactured carriages, stage coaches, and prairie schooners. Operational between 18, the plant employed up to 1,400 people at a time. ![]() The Keith Car & Manufacturing Company is a former railroad car manufacturing company that was located in the village of Sagamore in Bourne, Massachusetts. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |