Here, after almost six years, is the answer to Ed's original question.

THE BURNING OF THE GRANITE MILL

In this world with care and trouble
Many accidents occur.
I am going to sing about one
The saddest you ever heard.
'Twas in Fall River City
Where the people were burned up and killed,
Imprisoned in a factory
Known as the Granite Mills.

At seven o'clock the fire bell rung;
The alarm it was too late.
The fire it was a-raging.
It was at a fearful rate.
Men and women were in it,
Children I suppose as well.
They all might have been saved had the truth been known
From the flames of the burning mill.

The first scene was a cruel one.
A girl so young in years,
She was standing at the window
And her eyes were bathed in tears.
She was standing at the window
And she called her mother's name,
"O mother, mother, save me."
And she fell back in the flames.

The next scene was a horrid one
And as she passed my eyes
She was leaping out of a window
And from the roof so high.
There was a poor creature who tried to escape
By sliding down a rope
And when she got about halfway down
Those burning strands, they broke.

Crash, crash she came upon the ground.
She was bruised, burned and killed.
Three hundred people lost their lives
In the flames of the burning mill.
And now I am going to conclude my song
And if you will all agree
I will try and please you one and all
And all this company.

It was my opinion
It is my opinion still
They all might have been saved had the truth been known
From the flames of the burning mill.

[When we have undergone such a terrible scene, I think the singer continues the torture by withholding "the truth"!]

[Recalled later as first half of last stanza.]
I hope her soul has gone to rest
In a place that is dearer still
Above, above in heaven above
And away from the burning mill.

The Granite Mill, in Fall River, Massachusetts, was built in 1863, and was burned on September 19, 1874; the fire started in an unoiled mulehead. It was a five-story building, 378 feet long by 70 wide, with a pitch roof and a tower in the center front. The fire alarm was not sounded for twenty minutes and in the meantime over fifty persons were trapped in the attic, of whom the Boston Traveller of September 20 reported twenty known dead, three missing, and thirty-six injured.
A version of "The Burning of the Granite Mill," with the air, is in
Creighton's Ballads and Songs from Nova Scotia, pp. 257—258.
Many of the employees of the Fall River Mills came from Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. We find the ballad sung, therefore, quite where we should expect to find it, in Maine and Nova Scotia, as well as in Vermont.

A different song, "The Burning Granite Mill," to the air, "Wreck of the London," sung with great applause by Johnny Gibbons, is in Maud Beverly's Don't Leave Your Mother, When Her Hair Turns Grey Songster, p. 23 (Barry Collection of Ballad Prints). We may quote the last stanza:

"Oh! Where is my three children," the widowed mother cried;
"Where is Katy, Maggie, Annie, they were my only pride!"
Thus mournfully the mother wept, as a group moved slowly on
Bearing the bodies of her children from the Granite Number One.

Source: The New Green Mountain Songster (Flanders, Ballard, Brown, Barry, 1939), pp. 229-231

Sent in by Mrs. A.A. Mills, Florence, Vermont

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