Rare Cordage tour offers glimpse of ties that bind Plymouth's past
PLYMOUTH -- Mill 2 is like an enormous ghost town. Silent since the Plymouth Cordage Co. closed in 1970, the building's immensity impressed visitors on Saturday during a rare tour of the Plymouth mill complex that once was home to the world's largest rope maker.
Mill 2 features tall ceilings, heavy floors, rows of windows, and the immense engines and boilers that powered much of the complex. It also holds memories for people like Reno Zammarchi of Plymouth, who worked there while in high school. He helped lead visitors through the building Saturday. While the teenage Zammarchi found turning fiber into rope not to his liking, the factory provided a livelihood for his Italian immigrant father.
"It was a very dirty job," Zammarchi, 77, told a group taking the trolley tour. "People used to wear doctor's masks. It was probably the worst job in the company."
Organized by the Plymouth Cordage Historical Society, the tour took visitors through the complex in trolleys while William Rudolph narrated the story of how the sprawling complex operated. About 75 people paid $15 each to take the tour, a fund-raiser for the nonprofit society. It hopes to establish a Cordage museum.
Founded in 1824, the mill was used to make rope out of hemp and manila, and later from artificial fibers like nylon. The mill workers manufactured cordage for ships when New England whalers were its best customers and sails were edged with rope. After the Civil War, as steamships progressively replaced sail, the company made baling twine for Midwest farm production, binder twine for industrial processes, a different rope for oil rigs, and other products for specialized uses, including linen rope for yachts.
Rudolph urged people on the tour to step off the trolley and look inside Mill 2. "You can get a real feel for the mass of the building," he said.
"What did they do for electric lights?" one visitor asked. A few metal lamps hung from the ceiling, but when the mill was built at the end of the 19th century, it relied largely on natural light, Rudolph said.
The mill changed over time and pieces of its industrial operation are gone. Much of the track of the narrow-gauge rail line that moved raw material and product through the complex has been removed or covered up (though the rails are still visible inside Mill 2). A footbridge that carried nearly 1,000 workers back and forth into Mill 2 above the freight line railroad tracks is gone. So is the mill's original rope walk, a long narrow building where workers in the early days of the company wound strands into rope by hand as they walked the length of the building.
But much remains, like the three large mills (numbers 1, 2 and 3) that were built after a fire in 1885 destroyed an earlier building. The stream that powered the early mills still runs into the complex, and Store Pond, where water was pooled to run the mills, remains a North Plymouth landmark. And inside Mill 2, piles of fireproof tiles that lined the mill's boilers remain stacked where they were left decades ago.
Mill 1, which has been renovated for various tenants, such as the Jordan Hospital Rehabilitation Center, once housed an overhead tramway carrying finished fiber to the mill's basement. The mill's spinning rooms turned fiber into thousands of miles of yarn daily in as many as 48 sizes. Finished rope was stored in warehouses that were knocked down about a decade ago to make room for a
Mill 2 is 558 feet long and 142 feet wide, two stories high (plus a basement and boiler and engine rooms). It was built in 1899 for the sole purpose of making binder twine. Its six boilers drove a steam engine, air compressors for the industrial railroad, and provided heat for the building.
Zammarchi worked in the building for three months. "You had to pay attention," he said, otherwise the spool combing the fiber would get caught and stop production. "I did that a couple of times."
Doris Johnson, a historical society member, invited visitors to examine the huge boilers on the second story. "You can look inside and get an idea of what the flame must be like," she said. "These boilers ran 24/7. Can you imagine what it was like working in here on a day like today?"
The tour also stopped at the company wharf, which served what was once the second busiest port of entry in New England.
Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox@verizon.net
