A generation has fled since a stranger was seen in the streets of New Damascus on an errand of business. The town has nothing to sell except the finest wrought iron in the world. As the quality of this iron is historic and the form of it a standard muck bar for use in further manufacture you order it from afar at a price based on what is current in Pittsburgh.
Sellers of merchandise miss New Damascus on purpose. It is a catalogue town. It buys nothing because it is new, nothing it does not need, has no natural pride in waste whatever.
Strangers are not unwelcome, only they must not mind to be stared at. The town is shy and jealous and has the air of keeping a secret.
There are no sights to see. Once people came great distances, even from Europe, to see the New Damascus blast furnaces. They were the first of their kind to be built in this country, had features new in the world, and made the scene wild and awesome at night. All that is long past. There is only a trace of the mule railroad by which ore came down from the mountains. Where the furnaces were are great green holes. Nature[2] has had time to heal her burns. No ore has been mined or smelted at New Damascus for many years. Yet the place is still famous for its fine wrought iron. The ore now comes from the top of the Great Lakes, stops at Pittsburgh to be smelted, and arrives at New Damascus in the form of pigs to be melted again, puddled and rolled into malleable bars. That may be done anywhere. It is done at many places. But it is so much better done at New Damascus than anywhere else that the product will bear the cost of all that transportation. The reasons why this is so belong to tradition, to the native pride of craftmanship, to that mysterious touch of the hand that is learned only in one place and cannot be taught. The iron workers here, descended from English, Scotch and Welsh smiths imported to this valley, are the best puddlers and rollers in the world. Therefore as people they are dogmatic, stubborn and brittle.
There is the old Woolwine mansion on the east hill, there is the Gib mansion on the west hill. Nobody would recommend them to the sense of wonder. Besides they are disremembered. They were once very grand though ugly. They are no longer grand and have been made much uglier by architectural additions of a cold ecclesiastical character. One is a nunnery. One is a monastery. The church got them for less than the walks and fences cost. Only a church could use them. All that the indwellers knew about them is that the woodwork polishes easily and must have been very expensive. The grounds are still nice.
The river is lovely, but nobody has ever cared for[3] it esthetically. The town is set with its back stoop to the river, as to an alleyway or tradesmen’s entrance, facing the mountains where its wealth first was.
Sights? No. Unless it be the sight of a town that seems to exist in a state of unending reverie. This is fancy. New Damascus appears to be haunted with memories of things confusedly forgotten, as if each night it dreamed the same dream and never had quite remembered it.
In the Woolwine library there is a memory of distinction in sixty parts,—bound volumes of the New Damascus Intelligencer back to 1820. There was a newspaper! An original poem, a column humorous, a notable speech on the slavery question, the secret of Henry Clay’s ruggedness discovered in the fact that he bathed his whole person once a day in cold water, and the regular advertisers, all on the first page. One of the advertisers was a Wm. Wardle, bookseller, stationer, importer of all the current English imprints, proprietor of a very large stock of the world’s best literature, periodicals, and so forth. Wm. Wardle’s name is still on the lintel of the three-story building he occupied until about 1870. The ground floor now is rented to a tobacconist who keeps billiard tables in the back for the iron workers, the upper floors are in disuse, and there is no bookshop in New Damascus. Well, that is a sight, perhaps, only nobody would think to show it to you, because much stranger than the disappearance of that important old bookshop is the fact that no one can remember ever to have missed it.
If you mention this curious fact to the First National[4] Bank president he helps you look at the faded name of Wardle above the tobacconist’s sign and says, “Well!” precisely as he would help you to look at one of the great green holes where a blast furnace was and say, “Well, well!” never having seen it before.
“What do people now read in New Damascus?”
“Magazines,” says the banker. “I find if I read the Sunday newspapers I get everything I want.”
“How do you account for the fact that New Damascus, an iron town, has fewer people to-day than it had fifty years ago?”
“You’ve touched the answer,” says the banker. “It is an iron town. Always was. When modern steel making came in fifty or sixty years ago anybody might have known that steel would displace iron. New Damascus stuck to iron.”
“Lack of enterprise, you mean?”
“Something like that.”
“Yet New Damascus had the enterprise to roll the first rails that were made in this country.”
“Yes, they rolled the first American rails here,—iron rails.”
“And having done that there was not enough enterprise left merely to change the process from iron to steel?”
“Well, there was some reason. I’ve heard it said a committee of New Damascus business men went out to investigate the steel process. They reported there was nothing in it. Then the steel rail knocked the iron rail out completely. There isn’t an iron rail made anywhere in the world now.”
[5]
“And nails. New Damascus was once the seat of the nail industry. What became of that?”
“Same thing. They made iron nails here,—what we call cut nails. The cheap steel wire nail knocked the iron nail out. Then, of course, you must remember that when the Mesaba ore fields were opened we had to close our mines. We couldn’t compete with that ore. It was too cheap.”
“That wasn’t inevitable, was it? Since New Damascus stopped, other towns have grown up from nothing in this valley,—towns with no better transportation to begin with, no record behind them, hauling their raw material even further.”
“Yes,” says the banker. “Well, I don’t know. There’s something wrong in the atmosphere here.”
The banker on the next corner has another explanation.
“It’s the labor,” he says. “People who’ve been around tell me, and I believe it’s true, that labor here is more independent, more exacting, harder to deal with, than labor anywhere else. In other mill towns you’ll find Italians, Hungarians, Polacks and that like. All our labor was born here. Jobs go from father to son. Foreigners can’t come in.”
“That’s strange. One never hears of any serious labor trouble at New Damascus—not the kind of trouble they have in other mill towns.”
“Not that kind,” says the banker. “There’s a very peculiar thing about labor in New Damascus. It can live without work.”
“How?”
[6]
“I don’t know how. It just does. When anything happens these people don’t like they stop work. That’s all there is to it.”
“Is it a union town?”
“They don’t need a union.”
Bankers in New Damascus are like bankers anywhere else. They know much more than they believe and tell only such things as ought to be true. It is scandalous for labor to be able to live without work. That offends the economic law. It ought not to be so. Yet in so far as it is there is no mystery about it. The town is invisibly rich and has a miserly spirit. There are as many banks as churches,—and the people are very religious. The banks are full of money that cannot be loaned in New Damascus. It is sent away to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York to put out at interest on other people’s enterprise. If you ask why that is the answer is cynical.
“Perhaps,” says the banker, “we know each other too well.”
But you see how it is that labor may live without work. Everybody has something by,—a home, a bit of land, a little hoard to sit upon. Spending is unfashionable. Carried far it is sinful. Living is very cheap. Three mornings a week the farmers come in with fresh killed meat, sausage, poultry, eggs, cheese, butter and vegetables and turn the main street into an open air market; and there is an ordinance which forbids the shopkeepers to buy any of this produce before ten o’clock. By that time there is nothing left, or if[7] there is no dealer wishes to buy it, since the demand is already satisfied.
But there is still the question: What happened to New Damascus?
Ask John Tizack, the tobacconist, in the old Wardle building. He meets you with the air of a man of the world and pretends to be not in the least surprised when you say: “I’ve asked everybody else and now I ask you. What’s the matter with this place?”
“Neighbor,” he says, “I was born here, my father before me and his before him. I began as a lad in the mill here. Everything in New Damascus came out of that mill. I say everything. That isn’t exactly right. Them mansions on the hill,—they came out of it. The library, that row of fine houses you may have seen on what we call Quality Street, all the big and little fortunes you see people living on here, came out of that mill. When I was twenty-five I says to myself, ‘I’ll see a bit of the world before I die. Some of it anyhow.’ That was thirty years ago,—yes, thirty-two. I’ve been to New York City and Buffalo and around. Now I’m back. I’m going to die here. This ain’t a bad business if you look at it right. Not so bad. And you want to know what’s the matter with this place? You’ve been asking everybody else. What do they tell you?”
“This and that. No two alike.”
“S’what I thought,” he says. “I couldn’t agree with them. There’s men in this town, merchants, mind you—well, you wouldn’t believe it. There’s not ten business men in this town been as far away as Philadelphia. I know what I’m saying. I won’t mention any names,[8] but I happen to know the president of the biggest bank in town was never in New York City.”
“Is that what’s the matter?”
“Now wait,” he says. “You see the kind of place I got here. No profanity. Nothing at all. I know the boys that come here every night. Iron workers you might say, but they’re gentlemen, in a way of speaking. They play billiards, smoke, talk. Not one of them under thirty. Went to school with most of them. Their fathers was born here like mine. And they don’t get treated right. Now I’m telling you. They’re the best iron men in the country, bar none, and they don’t get treated right.”
“So that’s it?”
“No, that ain’t it either. I’m just telling you some of the things that’s wrong with this place. You asked me the straight question, didn’t you?”
At this point he gives you a piercing look. Are you also a man of the world? He seems to doubt it. You may be one of those people who go around talking just for the excitement of it.
It is necessary to remind him that he was apparently coming to something else,—to the point, perhaps. He waits for you to do so. Then with an air of extreme asperity, meaning that you shall get all you came for, he clears the top of the showcase and leans at you with his bristles raised, looking first toward the back room, which is empty, then towards the street, which is clear, and lastly at you in a pugnacious way.
“You asked me, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
[9]
“Do you happen to believe in any of them unnatural things?”
“Such as what?”
“Such as haunts and spells?”
“More or less.”
“All right,” he says. “Now neighbor, take it or leave it. Suit yourself. I’ve seen my share of this world and I know what I’m talking about. That’s what’s the matter with this place.”
“What?”
“What I’m telling you, and I’m going to die here. There’s a spell on it. Nobody can help it. There’s a spell on it. Now that’s all.”
“Who put it on?”
“Oh, well, n-o-w,” he says, becoming irresponsible. “That’s different. That’s very different again. I’m not telling you anything I don’t know. Who put it on? I tell you frankly I don’t know. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to find that out. To speak the truth, I don’t know as it’s anything I want to meddle with.”
There is a difference, you see, between a banker and a tobacconist. A tobacconist believes more than he knows and tells things that ought not to be so.
Still, there is the fact. New Damascus, having cradled the metallurgical industry, ought to have grown up with it and simply did not. A town that rolled the first American rails smaller now than it was fifty years ago! Why? If it had died you could understand that. But it is not dead. Its health is apparently perfect. There is not a sore spot on its body. It functions in a kind of somnambulistic manner. The[10] last thing you hear as you fall asleep at the old Lycoming House is the throb of its heart. That is the great engine of the Susquehanna Iron Works, muttering—
Wrought iron
Wrought iron
Wrought iron
It never stops.