How one local museum is weaving Winooski's cultural past with its changing community
Winooskians decorate tote bags in celebration of the Héritage Mill Museum’s 25th anniversary last month, image courtesy of the Héritage Mill Museum Facebook
Margaret Tamulonis sat at a craft activity table during the Winooski Farmers Market last month and encouraged visitors to paint or embroider a Héritage Winooski Mill Museum tote bag.
Tamulonis, a museum board member, hoped to encourage people to recognize the 25th anniversary of the mill museum, which was created to document one of the most significant institutions in Winooski’s history.
“It was pretty amazing,” Tamulonis said in response to the outcome that day. “There were people who were hearing about the mill for the first time, and then there were people who were saying ‘Oh, my grandparents worked there!’ ”
The American Woolen Company’s mill complex that lined the Winooski River with five-story factories was once the biggest employer in Vermont, with close to 1,000 workers in Winooski alone. From 1901 to 1954, when it closed, the mill churned out wool textiles primarily for the military, law enforcement, railroad uniforms and men’s fashion.
The job opportunities drew a massive influx of immigrants to Winooski at the turn of the century. Most came from the French part of Canada, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Armenia, Syria and Lebanon. This explosion of diversity made the small, 1.4-square-mile Vermont city stand out, setting the stage for its current status as the most racially mixed municipality in the state.
Today, Winooski is experiencing another boom of New Americans, many of whom traveled from violence-torn areas of Nepal, Sudan, Myanmar, Rwanda and Congo, among other places.
Now, in its 25th year, the museum is looking to reflect these community changes — as well as help grow and support those changes — outside the walls where it illustrates the immigration story. The museum has initiated several programs that tie the past and the present through the city’s foundation in textiles.
The museum’s new mission is “to weave industrial and cultural heritage with what matters to the community today,” said Miriam Block, the Héritage’s executive director. Newcomers to the city “don’t have that connection, so our new immigrant outreach efforts are really focusing on sharing that history and building new connections.”
Women stitch together as part of the Mill Museum’s collaboration with AALV, image courtesy of Héritage Mill Musem Facebook
The museum has collaborated with the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, or AALV, which serves all the migrant communities of Chittenden County, and partnered specifically with its women-centered support group, Women’s Café. For the museum’s contribution to the nationally organized Welcome Blanket Project, the museum invited AALV participants, local yarn and quilt shops and textile crafters in Vermont and other states to create handmade blankets to give to new migrants in the area.
“Oh, they loved it,” said Irene Kerubo Webster, who goes by her cultural name, Kerubo, and is an AALV caseworker and coordinating leader of its Women’s Café support group.
Many of the women came right from work, Kerubo said. “They felt like it was a place where they can just relax, and knitting is very rhythmic and repetitive, so if you are feeling really stressed about stuff, you can’t help but feel that you are relaxing.”
She added, “They are low-income families, and so they have a bunch of things they have to carry with them.”
The project was so well received that the museum created the Stitch Together Program to support ongoing knitting workshops with Women’s Café.
Executive Director, Miriam Block, sharing one of the museum's educational handbooks made to help teachers build a curriculum around teaching Winooski's textile mill history.
Throughout the years, the museum has built partnerships with multiple educational and cultural institutions. For local schools, it provides free tours to class groups and caters course content to individual curriculums. It has displayed art installations made by Winooski High School students and an interactive weaving prototype by members of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College. The museum also arranged the “100 Faces” project for the Winooski Centennial Celebration and created workshops in weaving and other topics at the Winooski Memorial Library.
This summer, Block brought in two University of Vermont interns to help with an upcoming exhibit on child labor, which they hope to open next year. Now showcased in the museum as a “pop-up” preview, the exhibit places the viewer almost face-to-face with photos of young children as they pose in front of the menacing late 19th-century machines where they worked.
Displays in an upcoming exhibit discussing child labor on both the local and global level
At the end of the wall of vintage photos, a large map of the world dominates one corner of the exhibit, showing “Industries in the Textile Supply Chain That Use Child Labor” as of 2020, with areas coded in vivid colors. The colors overwhelm the map, leaving almost no area unpainted — untouched by child labor.
The end of the exhibit will have cards reading, “How to take action,” so viewers feel less overwhelmed and more empowered, Block said.
“It’s important for all ages to understand where our clothes come from, who is making them, and why,” she said. “If we don’t know what is going on, how can we advocate for change? We can examine our local history to get a better understanding of global labor and manufacturing issues today and learn ways to take action and be conscious consumers.”
Like most small, nonprofit art institutions, the museum’s biggest struggle is obtaining grants and donations to pay for the work it aims to accomplish. To complete the child labor project, Block hopes to hold a drive that will boost support and funds.
The museum’s newest exhibition commemorates its 25-year history.
The mill building has lived many lives since its closure. It was abandoned, then turned into a shopping mall that many locals may remember visiting in the 1980s. Today it hosts local businesses, along with the museum on the third floor.
Faculty from St. Michael’s College alongside educators from the Winooski Historical Society began digging into Winooski’s culturally rich past and specifically the textile mills in 1997. Soon after, the Héritage Winooski Mill Museum came to life, opening to the public in 1998.
The museum grew its collection out of the stories of community members who remembered the mill’s past. The stories of workers and their family members continue to fuel its work.
From New York, Block said she jumped at the executive director position at the Winooski Mill Museum because it aligned well with her textile manufacturing expertise and interest in history. Since she came to the area roughly eight years ago, she has expanded the nonprofit museum’s mission and encouraged its use of technology tools for information, promotion and exhibition. For the first time, the museum developed Facebook and Instagram accounts, made user-friendly upgrades to the website, and — in an effort to gain recognition — established a spot on Google maps.
Block said these digital additions have increased awareness of the museum in town and made it easier for academic, cultural and social groups to collaborate with the institution. The changes aim to address the recent community demand for more interactive exhibits catered to young children.
The musem’s Story Kiosk set up, displaying video clips of community stories as told by Winooskians
Block and board members have implemented a digital storytelling platform called the “Story Kiosk,” which allows people to submit short video clips of themselves sharing a story for other community members. Those who want to contribute their stories can do so via an interactive mode when they visit the museum or from the comfort of their own home.
They can offer a brief memory of the mill’s history, a personal story about their own or a family member’s experience as a migrant, or “words of welcome and advice about living in the U.S.” for newer community members.
“We want the community to see that the mill museum is very consciously reaching out to the community about what matters mean the most to them,” Tamulonis said. “The museum has always been, but even more so under the leadership of Miriam, a labor of love. And it’s taken a lot of entities to become what it is now.”
For more information on the Héritage Winooski Mill Museum, visit www.themillmuseum.org/