Business: Deserted Town

Oliver Goldsmith sorrowing over the Deserted Village was brought to mind last week when the 8,000 folk of Ware, Massachusetts mill town, looked despairingly at one another. The cause: most of them work in the textile mills of Otis Co., making cotton suitings, awnings, denims, knit goods, stockings and cotton underwear. The company has been in Ware since 1835. Girls and boys go to work with their grandparents. Families live in its tenements. They rent company six-room cottages for $1.50 a week. Otis Co. has been Ware’s maintenance and its culture. Last week company stockholders were planning to move their works to Alabama where “poor whites” work longer hours and for less money than at Ware. Yet factory work pays better than farming, with cotton at 12¢ a pound. Ware hopes that Henry Ford who is re-establishing Colonial industries at Sudbury, Mass., will come to Ware and keep the mills going.