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| Josephat (Joe) Adams (left), 10 yrs old, North Adams, Mass, August 1911. Photo by Lewis Hine. |
On right hand is Richard Fitzgerald, 53 Montgomery St., works in twisting
room of Eclipse Mills, No. Adams. On left hand, Joseph Adams, 107 Front St., works in twisting room of Eclipse Mills,. Location:
North Adams, Massachusetts, August 1911, Lewis Hine.
"He always had a radio in his ear, listening to the
baseball games. I'll never forget when they came out with transistor radios. He got one, and he would sit in his recliner
and listen. Then later on, when the games were televised, that was his pastime. I can still hear him. If the Yankees screwed
up, he'd mumble under his breath, ‘Those stupid...should've been a double play,' and stuff like that. He'd be in his
recliner with his eyes closed, and I could swear he was sound asleep. But if you asked him the score, he'd tell you."
-Peter Levesque, nephew of Joe Adams
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"While they stated this afternoon
that something would probably be done within a few days about the situation on Front Street where washouts in the flood of
four weeks ago and landslides since have carried away sections of the road and threatened to cause the collapse of houses,
city officials had not yet decided just what that something would be." "Whatever is done now is not expected to be final or a complete job. The city faces the alternative of putting
in a retaining wall at a cost of $100,000 to restore the road to its former condition, or of buying all the property on the
street, tearing down the buildings and abandoning the thoroughfare, but it has not the money at the present time to do either.
Whatever is done next week will probably be of a temporary nature to protect the houses that now appear to be endangered,
and to stop further sliding away from the land." -excerpted from North Adams Transcript, December 2, 1927
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| House at 105-107 Front St (beige house, 2nd from left), 2002. |
Front Street in North Adams is just across the Hoosac River
from the Eclipse Mill. A row of almost identical houses, built around 1890, are lined up along the narrow, dead-end street,
the only space between the houses and the river. Before the Army Corps of Engineers constructed flood chutes in the early
1950s, there were a number of devastating floods in North Adams, and this was one of the city's most vulnerable areas.
Josephat (Joe) Adams, who lived his whole life at 105-107
Front St., almost lost his house in one of those floods. He was born on May 25, 1901, in Saint-Jacques-le-Mineur a parish
municipality in Quebec, about 25 miles south of Montreal. He was the youngest of nine children of Napoleon and Eugenie (Brosseau)
Adams. When Joe was just a baby, he and his family came to the US (1902), and settled on Front Street in North Adams. They
rented the house from Arnold Print Works, the largest cloth printing mill in the US at the time. Their biggest facility was
on 12 acres near downtown North Adams, and later was occupied by Sprague Electric Company, until it closed in 1985. The complex
is now occupied by the huge Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. In the early 1900s, Arnold owned part of the Eclipse
Mill. In 1911, the house was purchased by the Hoosac Cotton Mill, and they owned it until 1934, when Joe Adams and his wife
bought it. In the 1910 census, Joe is listed
as living with his parents and five siblings. Most of the family was working in the mills. The census incorrectly listed the
surname of the Adams children as Goodrum, which was the surname of the husband of the oldest daughter, who also lived in the
household. In the 1920 census, Joe is living with his father, already 74 and retired, and Joe is working at the Hoosac Cotton
Mill (Eclipse Mill). In 1930, Joe is living with his widowed mother and still works at the mill. Joe married Lillian Levesque on June 20, 1932, and did not have any children. He
passed away in his Front St. house on February 9, 1984, at the age of 82. Lillian died on October 15, 2001, at the age of
95.
Interview with Joe's nephew, and more photos
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