One would like to draw conclusions for the rise and fall of Fall River along the grand lines of Gibbons writing about the decline and fall of Rome. The themes however are much more pedestrian. Towns and cities that have been built and then discarded are scattered all across America. In the case of Fall River, location and technology were the salient points for its rise. With changing transportation and different energy sources, the Fall River strengths became weaknesses. The Cape Cod Canal and the improving railroads doomed the Fall River line. As the mills closed, the freight business for the Fall River Line decreased. Failures led to further failures.

In the early days, Lowell, Lawrence and the other cities on the Merrimac River had used the greater water flow of the Merrimac River to power large mills and dominate cotton production. Fall River achieved its primacy when steam power became dominant. Its sea coast location led to cheaper coal and hence lower production costs than possible at the inland Lowell mills.

The mills had drawn successive waves of immigrants. Each wave had started at the bottom doing the scut work with its long hours, primitive working conditions and monotonous daily routines. The immigrant generation was not composed of heroes; it was composed of survivors. In many cases, it was the children and the grandchildren who benefited from the sacrifices of the immigrant generation.

The immigrant waves overlapped. The competition for the same jobs, the differences in language and culture guaranteed that there would be friction between the nationalities. The few who controlled the mills, with a few honorable exceptions, exacted as much money in the form of low wages and stretched out work schedules as possible. The tight fisted policy led to repeated strikes and chronic labor unrest. In the mid 1950s, there were still remnants of the them (the bosses) against us (the workers) attitude that developed in the 1850s.

Twenty six Catholic churches served the religious needs of a total population that, at its highest, reached 130,000. Except for the first wave of English mill workers, the subsequent groups of mill workers, the Irish, the French Canadians, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Polish, the Greek, the Syrians/Lebanese were Catholic, mainly Roman Catholic. The label however papered over profound differences. The Catholic Hierarchy were mainly Irish. Each of the other groups wanted to conduct their affairs in line with their practices and language used in the old country. One result was a clash between the Irish hierarchy and the French the Canadian parishioners of Notre Dame Church ("The Flint Affair"). At one point, the French Canadians sent a delegation to Rome to plead their cause. In the end, the Parishioners were allowed to worship in their own language and conduct their affairs in accordance with Canadian tradition. Today, as the population shrinks, the Catholic churches consolidate.

So, finally, the party was over. There remained a city slowly losing people, with its infrastructure crumbling; a city, located on a ridge along the eastern shore of the Taunton River and of Mount Hope Bay, that had a City Hall sitting atop an Interstate road, and that had gone through bankruptcy in the 1930s. There remained the Public Library, the Boys Club, the high school, the Public Parks designed by Olmstead. All, now becoming more grimy and seedy from lack of maintenance, paid for with mill money. The mills are still there. Today, however, tourists and bargain hunters in sunglasses and shorts walk in and out of the doors that had been used by generations of ill clad, poorly fed and chronically tired mill workers. A few mills harbor sweat shops. They stand mute with windows partially blocked in to conserve heat, with oil soaked floor boards, with thick beams to support the ceiling, with raw granite blocks for the interior walls and with steep stairs that lead to the upper floors.

This site contributes a small voice to break the silence and tell the story of the cotton mills that offered immigrants long hours of monotonous, grinding work at starvation wages in return for a chance to improve the lives of their children and their grandchildren. In many cases, the hopes of the immigrants have been fulfilled.