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CHAPTER III

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I

ORCROSS is an attractively-located factorytown lying not many miles from Boston at the foot of the Blue Hills, and it draws its life from the great plant of the Norton Manufacturing Company. Not that its population is limited to those who gain their livelihood from this prosperous corporation, for the proximity of Norcross to a great city and its own physical attractions have proved a magnet to other householders who seek natural beauty, fresh air, and an opportunity for expansion in establishing their homes. Still, it is a fair statement that without the physical presence of the great plant the town would still be enjoying the Rip Van Winkle sleep which is the fate of other New England towns untouched as yet by commerce.

Even the business section of the town has not destroyed the beauties which Nature alloted to it with lavish hand. Either by uncanny foresight or fortunate coincidence the early builders of the town planted the rows of elms and oaks straight and well separated, so that the new macadam streets trespassed only upon the broad grass borders of the walks. Now these trees intertwine their foliage, partially concealing the stone

business blocks, and form fascinating vistas, to which even the adopted citizens point with pride. Outside the centre of the town the broad State roads, well maintained, run to the south toward the Blue Hills, the houses on either side being unpretentious but expressive of their orderly, self-respecting owners. To the north, the roads run to the great New England metropolis, and over these arteries one sees a constant stream of motor-trucks and other vehicles conveying produce and production from Norcross to its markets.

The people of Norcross divide themselves into two distinct groups, even as did those of ancient Greece, and they possess many of the same characteristics. Those who would have been Dorians in Athens are the elderly people who still cling loyally to the ancestral customs and the traditions associated with their beloved homesteads. Abandoned by their progeny, which seeks its fortune in the more exciting atmosphere of the cities, the Norcrossian-Dorians, recognizing the hopelessness of opposing modern innovations, gratify their self-respect by accepting new conditions under chronic protest. The Ionic portion of Norcross are the doers, and they, true to their classification, have brought to the town undoubted creative activity which, combined with the expression of their love of arts and letters, gives to it an air of refinement often lacking in more pretentious communities,

II

When, years ago, Norcross received its present baptismal name, James Norton, founder of the Norton

Manufacturing Company and still its autocratic master, confidently expected to have his own family cognomen perpetuated in the lexicon of Massachusetts proper names; but a rival appeared in the person of one Henry Cross, the titular head of a family which had inhabited the town since the Indian wigwam gave way to the Colonial style of architecture. The coming of the great industry to the town had been a heart-breaking blow to the Cross family, which was essentially Doric in birth and inclinations. Until then Henry Cross had been the undisputed squire of the simple, well-mannered New England village, and his women-folk basked in his reflected glory. No family possessed so many broad acres, carefully tilled and productively cultivated. The Cross "mansion" was the finest in the village, filled as it was with rarest Colonial furniture inherited from earlier generations, and decorated with family portraits and New England samplers which successively and chronologically marked the feminine progression of the Cross dynasty.

The coming of the Norton Manufacturing Company not only threatened the supremacy of Henry Cross but promptly eclipsed it. The Norton workmen required homes, and the neighbors of the Cross family sold their farms piece-meal for building-lots at prices which to them made the advent of the new industry a fortuitous act of God; but the Cross acres remained intact, and "No Trespass" signs appeared at every corner. In a single decade the sleepy little farming settlement was metamorphosed into a thriving New England manufacturing town, and James Norton was its

leading citizen. His stone house made the Cross mansion appear insignificant, and was rivaled only by a similar estate developed by William Stewart, Lola's father, who next to Norton was the largest stockholder in the Company. New and modern schools sprang up, the Congregational church now had denominational rivals; a bank was established, with James Norton as its president. The change in the old village was complete, and even Henry Cross realized that former conditions had passed never to return.

Yet this realization could not kill the resentment nor the antagonism which had smouldered during these eventful years, and when James Norton undertook to substitute his own name for the long-respected but noncommittal "Eastham," Henry Cross rose in town meeting and in his wrath to express his ideas in no uncertain phrases. The renaming of the town was the chief topic of conversation for weeks, and the Dorian faction of the townspeople, even though begrudgingly admitting the advantages accruing from Mr. Norton's many activities, ranged themselves against him as an expression of individual rights. The compromise is shown in the name finally adopted. Henry Cross claimed to have won the victory because in "Norcross" the whole of his name was embodied and only a fragrant of his rival's, while James Norton retorted that a fragment of his name more than offset the whole of Henry Cross's, and even at that the fragment was given precedence.

With a name which so well combined the Doric and Ionic styles of architecture, the town again settled down

to its business of growing. The plant grew, requiring more dwellings for its workmen; the families grew, requiring more schools and churches. The farms gradually disappeared, making way for new intersecting streets, new homes, and new public buildings. Norcross had more than reached adolescence before the war came, but with this epoch-making event the town at once blossomed into full maturity. The Norton Manufacturing Company became a war industry, working three eight-hour shifts; and not even Henry Cross would have had the temerity to dispute the universal local conviction that so long as the town of Norcross stood, the Kaiser and his hordes would wage a hopeless strife in their efforts to uproot civilization.

III

If James Norton had been an autocrat before, the war made of him a Czar. To have the orders exceed the capacity of his factory, to find a patriotic response in his men to the demand to rise to every emergency, to have the authority to drive ceaselessly for greater output, represented to him the apotheosis of human satisfaction. Stern, upright, demanding much but never more than he believed himself willing to give under similar circumstances, he represented the old school of industrial leaders who force production by "putting the fear of God" into their workmen.

"You tell the men from me," was his favorite message sent through the superintendent or foremen, "that as long as they play fair with me I'll play fair with them, but"... and he would bring his fist down hard on

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