The textile village of Saylesville in Lincoln, Rhode Island, became the center of one of the most violent confrontations of the nationwide General Textile Strike. During the night and into the following morning, striking textile workers, supporters, police, deputy sheriffs, and members of the Rhode Island National Guard fought along the industrial streets near the Sayles Finishing Plants and within Moshassuck Cemetery on the Central Falls boundary. The confrontation represented a critical episode in Rhode Island labor history and demonstrated the severe economic and social tensions that accompanied the decline of New England textile manufacturing during the Great Depression.
Rhode Island had long depended heavily on textile production. By the early twentieth century, communities throughout the Blackstone Valley contained mills, worker housing, commercial districts, and transportation systems shaped by textile manufacturing. The industry's condition deteriorated sharply during the 1920s and early 1930s as production increasingly moved to southern states, mills closed, employment contracted, and remaining workers faced unstable schedules. Rhode Island's number of cotton textile wage earners fell from 33,933 in 1923 to 13,077 in 1933. Workers also objected to the industrial practice known as the “stretch-out,” under which fewer employees performed increased amounts of work.
Federal labor policy contributed to growing union activity. Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 recognized employees' right to organize and bargain collectively. Membership in the United Textile Workers expanded dramatically, from approximately 15,000 members in 1933 to nearly 250,000 in 1934. At the union's August 1934 convention, delegates voted overwhelmingly to authorize a national strike. The resulting General Textile Strike became one of the largest industrial strikes in American history, involving hundreds of thousands of workers from New England through the South.
Picketing spread across Rhode Island after Labor Day. Many mills suspended operations, but the Sayles Finishing Plants in Saylesville continued working. The enormous Sayles complex had developed from William F. Sayles's nineteenth-century bleaching operations into an important textile-finishing enterprise. Its continued operation made the plant a focal point for strikers from surrounding industrial communities, including Central Falls and Pawtucket.
Violence increased on September 7 when crowds near the Sayles property confronted deputy sheriffs and private security personnel. Stones were thrown, riot clubs were used, and fire hoses were directed against demonstrators. As tensions continued, Rhode Island authorities deployed additional police forces. Governor Theodore Francis Green subsequently mobilized the Rhode Island National Guard as disorder intensified around Saylesville and elsewhere in the state.
At approximately 10:00 p.m. on September 11, National Guardsmen pushed demonstrators away from the area around St. Mathieu's Church and toward Moshassuck Cemetery. By approximately 2:00 a.m., several hundred people remained in or near the cemetery. Contemporary accounts described women and young people among the crowd. Demonstrators threw stones, bricks, and other objects, while Guardsmen used tear gas and other methods to disperse them.
The confrontation became deadly as daylight approached. Soldiers opened rifle fire while demonstrators sought cover among the cemetery's monuments and gravestones. Nicholas Gravello of Pawtucket was wounded in the arm. Charles Goroynski, an eighteen-year-old textile worker from Central Falls, was shot in the abdomen, and William Blackwood, a forty-four-year-old unemployed weaver from Pawtucket, was shot in the head. Goroynski and Blackwood later died from their wounds. Bullet damage remained visible on cemetery stones decades afterward, leaving physical evidence of the confrontation within a place originally established for burial and commemoration.
The violence at Saylesville did not occur in isolation. Serious strike disorders also developed in Woonsocket, where clashes between crowds and military forces produced additional casualties and property destruction. Green sought federal military assistance and characterized the disorders as an uprising influenced by communist agitation. Federal troops were placed in readiness, although Rhode Island's National Guard continued to handle the disturbances.
The national textile strike ended later in September after a presidential mediation board investigated workers' grievances and union leaders ordered employees back to work. The strike failed to secure many of the immediate changes sought by the United Textile Workers, but the events in Saylesville remained important within Rhode Island's labor history. They exposed the consequences of prolonged textile decline, disputes over union organization, aggressive industrial policing, and the deployment of military force during labor conflict.
Moshassuck Cemetery and the surviving Saylesville industrial landscape preserve the geographic setting of those events. The confrontation of September 11–12, 1934, transformed an industrial dispute into a deadly encounter involving workers and state military forces. The episode remains one of the clearest local examples of the social instability created by Rhode Island's declining textile economy and the broader struggle over organized labor during the Great Depression.
References / More Knowledge:
Crowley, Patrick. Revisiting Saylesville: A Deeper Exploration of the Saylesville Massacre of 1934. Master's thesis, University of Rhode Island, 2021.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/theses/1947/
National Archives and Records Administration. “The Uprising of '34.” National Historical Publications and Records Commission, April 2016.
https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/newsletter/2016/april
National Park Service. “Labor History.” Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park.
https://www.nps.gov/blrv/learn/historyculture/labor-history.htm
National Park Service. “The Saylesville Massacre and American Tradition.” Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-saylesville-massacre-and-american-tradition.htm
Rhode Island Historical Society. “Valley Talks: The Battle of the Gravestones & The Saylesville Massacre of 1934.”
https://www.rihs.org/event/valley-talks-the-battle-of-the-gravestones-the-saylesville-massacre-of-1934/
Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission. Historic Resources of Lincoln, Rhode Island: National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form.
https://preservation.ri.gov/sites/g/files/xkgbur406/files/pdfs_zips_downloads/national_pdfs/lincoln/linc_historic-resources-of-lincoln.pdf
Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission. Historic and Architectural Resources of Central Falls, Rhode Island.
https://www.centralfallsri.gov/media/11126