Boston: A Canal Village That Kept Changing Jobs
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Transcript
Boston is one of the oldest named communities in the valley, but its economy changed repeatedly.
Canal traffic helped make it useful.
Later mills and factories gave it new work.
In the early twentieth century, the Cleveland-Akron Bag Company expanded here and employed many Polish immigrants.
Company housing and the mill reshaped the village.
The railroad depot was eventually renamed Boston Mill because the industrial operation had become so important to local identity.
That history survives in the visitor center's former company store.
For Americans, this is a familiar small-town pattern.
A place begins around transportation or agriculture.
One company becomes dominant.
Then the company leaves or the industry changes.
The town either reinvents itself, shrinks or becomes part of a larger metropolitan economy.
Boston experienced several of those phases.
Today, visitors arrive for hiking, the Towpath, the railroad and national-park services.
Tourism and recreation are simply the latest economic layer.
The village did not stop changing when the park arrived.
The park became part of how the village changes.
Polish immigrant labor adds another layer to Boston's industrial period.
Like many American company towns, the workforce was connected to international migration.
Industrial employers needed people willing to take difficult jobs.
New arrivals needed wages and housing.
The resulting community was neither purely “old Ohio” nor separate from it.
This is one reason the valley's human history is richer than pioneer nostalgia.
Every economic era brought different people into the same narrow corridor.