The Women Who Baked Me #2
Notes on place and time
Hello, Dear Readers,
This is the second letter in my series on women and bread of the early 20th century. If you missed the first, here it is. There’s a lot of people in this series, so to to keep the people I name straight, refer to the cast list below.
Let’s start in Cohoes, New York, where many of my women were born. Cohoes was a textile town, built on the power of its waterfall. The name of this place comes from the Mohawk people, the Kanienkehaka, who saw a different power in the 1000-foot span of rock on the Mohawk River. They called the falls "Ga-ha-oose,” meaning "the place of the falling canoe,” and this is where the Great Peacemaker convinced his people to stop fighting and form the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee Confederacy with five other indigenous nations.
Cohoes sits where the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers meet. While Europeans began to develop nearby Troy and Lansingburgh as trading sites in the 1700s, Cohoes remained farmland until the early 1800s. As canals secured good shipping routes, local moguls tapped into the hydropower and built factories. The biggest success was the Harmony Mills, where by the late 1800s, most people – including kids — worked. Girls worked in the mills, and/or at home, helping to maintain the factory of the household. When young women married, they made more would-be workers, allowing the mill owners keep their fabric flowing.
Rose Maud Murray, Minnie Emily Greenaway’s mother, started working in the mills as a kid, and when she was in her late teens or early twenties got a bad cold that lingered. The doctor said it was consumption and she had to quit working. In the Marcil family, father and loomworker Anselm told his sons to apprentice themselves to a baker, and do whatever he said, sweep the floors, chop wood, anything. He had come to Cohoes from a farm in Quebec, drawn by the promise of paid work. In encouraging his sons to become bakers, he hoped they’d earn the chance to own their own shop. The trajectory for factory workers was not ownership, just a life woven to dangerous work. Long workdays in very chilly/very hot and humid conditions, where the air was always thick with cotton, wool or linen fluff, shortened life spans, and machines regularly took limbs and lives.
George, Marcel, and Emile Marcil started working for bakers in Cohoes when they were around 10 years old, and by 1921 they had their own business, Marcil Brothers Bakery. Minnie’s father, Will Greenaway, started working young, too, but right in a bakery, with his father.
“Where there were Greenaway bakers, there were Greenaway bakeries, and this had been so for generations,” Minnie wrote in her memoir, All Wool But the Buttons: Memories of Family Life in Upstate NY. Her father had trouble keeping his business solvent, and as the end loomed, he was “haunted by a long line of white-capped, white-aproned Greenaway bakers, all standing in front of their own shops staring reproachfully at him.”
That feeling led to him resenting Minnie because she wasn’t born a boy – two boys had already died in the family – and could not carry on the family profession. According to family history, Minnie wrote, Will Greenaway stared at his third daughter “wishing he could devour me the way a tomcat eats its unwanted young.” The two got over this rugged beginning when she admired how he played baseball and started chasing his affection. She earned his respect by not flinching as he removed a splinter that wedged under her fingernail.
Minnie and her sisters went to elementary school with my grandmother Georgiana and some of her five siblings. The families lived sequentially in the same house, 44 Bevan Street.
This was a clipart house, two stories tall with a peaked roof and white clapboard siding. Why does this shape mean home? I grew up in a house like this, so I know why the shape sits with me, but the association is deeper than my experience. When Ellie was here last week, she said that she drew this shape when she was growing up in Brazil!
Both Minnie and my grandmother chose this house to land their written stories of home, even though neither of them lived there long. The Cole’s and Greenaway’s moved frequently, partially to be near to their workplaces – my great grandfather was a railroad engineer.
Still, the feeling of home moved with these families, and when in middle age, Georgiana Cole Halloran and Minnie Emily Greenaway chose to write about growing up, 44 Bevan Street held their stories.
The house is still on a hill, up from downtown, and the last on its side of the street, with woods, a ravine, and park nearby. The middle school sits across the street, a brick monolith that’s held loads of childhoods, too.
I went to two elementary schools, and the buildings seem like churches, in the quiet way I visit them in my head. These were big spaces, physically and mentally, and I feel small inside them, way under their ceilings, way under the height of the leaders. At school, feels like I spent almost as much time in the vast hallways as I did in the classrooms, and the memory seems quiet, just me and my thoughts. But I know that between bouts of sitting and listening the days were raucous and bright with noise. The scutter of us whispering in line as we went from homeroom to music or gym. Only in the presence of the rare, terrifying teacher were shivery quiet. Still, no matter their demeanor and control, teachers and priests dictated our thoughts, or guided us with stories, lessons and expectations. The world was full of suggestions of what we should feel and be.
I’m fascinated by the differences between those expectations and what my relatives faced. Minnie was born in 1899 and Georgiana was born in 1902. They were kids on the cusp of the century. Reading Minnie’s book and my grandmother Georgiana Cole Halloran’s letters, I have hints of their childhoods, but I can’t compare their minds and experiences to mine. The gulf of progress seems gigantic, so I’m reading up on women of this era, and that’s what the next letter will cover.
Until then, I hope you eat some cake, like I’m going to do this afternoon at a family reunion for the Marcil’s and Cole’s — I’ll give a report on how George’s recipe turned out!
Yours, Amy
Cast List
Minnie Emily Greenaway, a writer I’ve come to think of as a mentor. Her father worked in small bakeries, and I loved what she wrote about him and his thoughts about mixers. He did not like them! Thought they beat all the flavor out of bread. The Greenaway’s lived in a house behind mine in 1924.
My grandmother Georgiana Cole Halloran, born 1902. She wrote for her church newsletter, and nostalgic pieces for women’s magazines and anthologies.
My great aunt Juliette Cole Marcil, who married George. They lived above Marcil Brothers Bakery in Cohoes through the 1920s, until the business closed in the Great Depression. Then, they moved to my neighborhood.
“What Can a Woman Do?” would be a great title for a book (yours!) 😉 I would love to see inside this book
The book! The handwritten recipe! Loving this, Amy.