Slatersville: America's First Mill Village
SLATERSVILLE: AMERICA'S FIRST MILL VILLAGE is an Emmy and Telly award-winning series. This historical documentary is told across eleven episodes and has taken over a decade to produce. It retraces the two-hundred-year history of the first industrialized mill village in America, located in the Blackstone Valley of northern Rhode Island. Filmed across seven states and the U.K. SLATERSVILLE is directed, produced and edited by award-winning filmmaker Christian de Rezendes, a native of the village. The series is educating and entertaining a wide range of audiences around the globe.
- 2022-2024
- 2 seasons
- Rhode Island PBS
- Documentary
SLATERSVILLE: AMERICA'S FIRST MILL VILLAGE is an Emmy and Telly award-winning series. This historical documentary is told across eleven episodes and has taken over a decade to produce. It retraces the two-hundred-year history of the first industrialized mill village in America, located in the Blackstone Valley of northern Rhode Island. Filmed across seven states and the U.K. SLATERSVILLE is directed, produced and edited by award-winning filmmaker Christian de Rezendes, a native of the village. The series is educating and entertaining a wide range of audiences around the globe.
Season 2 Episode Guide
3 Episodes 2024
Episode 6
They Will All Be My Friends
Near the turn of the 20th Century, Henry Plimpton Kendall, a young mill owner from Walpole, Massachusetts descends upon Slatersville and purchases the village to expand his operations, only to find the morale of its workers bottomed out. Kendall recruits employees from the greater Boston area to live and work in the village and raise its productivity as well as its spirit, much to the challenge of its highly skeptical workforce. Tensions throughout the surrounding Blackstone Valley culminate as rioting from the Great Textile Strike of 1934 push Depression-era changes that force Kendall to resolve matters in his own village.
Episode 7
The War Years
December, 1941. America responds to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor by entering World War II. Like all mill villages across the Blackstone Valley, the Slatersville Mill, a division of the Kendall Company, shifts 100% of their manufacturing to meet the demands of the U.S. military. As the village becomes "manless," its youth escape through life on the reservoir in camping, skating and the love of hockey, before they too would grow old enough to enter the war themselves. The origins of the North Smithfield VFW are explored as the stories of four men killed in battle are forever honored, and the letters written home by a young Navy man are preserved and voiced as the brutal war comes to a victorious but costly end.
Episode 8
The Power of Nostalgia
In the Slatersville of the 1950's, there were four distinctive groups of people. First, there were the Protestants who were the managers of the mill, and they lived in the nicest houses. Then there were the immigrants of French-Canadian and Azorean Portuguese descent. These were the laborers who lived in the tenement houses. While mill employees ran fund-raising causes for the less fortunate, their lives outside of its walls were broken down by social barriers. Then there were the Curliss's, the only family of Native and African American heritage that had called the village home since the Civil War. With the town's Caucasian population, the segregated worlds of classism, religion, and race are explored in this powerful chapter.