Carolina: Carla Ricci's Story of South County

By BRETT WARNKE

Charming and memorable stories recount the gossip, play, and struggle of small town life in South County in Carla Ricci’s documentary, Carolina. But paralleling this Rhode Island village’s sweet stories are the harsh realities of poverty, industrialization, disease, and the demise of the region’s peasantry. Nostalgia is easy to find in America today; the desire to get back to a “freer” and “simpler” time often takes the place of actual policy discussions. It’s easier rhetorically, especially around election time. Hence the cliché of running a campaign with poetry and governing in prose The strength of Ricci’s film is denying the nostalgic impulse, simplicity, or a mere oral history and instead pushing for a broader exploration of the historical and economic factors that produced Carolina’s stories.

Carolina begins in the midst of a 19^th century cholera epidemic as public health fails to keep up with the rapidity of urbanization. Rowland Hazard, an industrialist whose father had started the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, decided to create a place that was “free from the problems of the city and the poverty of the countryside.” To Ricci he was a “dreamer” with a romantic side. He named his factory “Carolina Mills Company” after his wife, Caroline Newbold Hazard who, like Rowland, was born in South Kingstown.

Hazard blew the breath of commerce into a tiny hamlet 30 miles south of Providence, which necessitated streets, parks, schools, infrastructure, and neighborhoods. Such development was unexpected. Carolina was 30 miles from New London, 155 miles from New York City, and 77 miles from Boston. One resident said pungently, “No one would suppose that any business of any kind would do business within a dozen miles of it.”

Ricci briefly explores Hazard’s complicated biography. The bearded industrialist was a profiteer of poor laborers in the North—workers who feared that their boss’s criticisms of slavery would threaten their own livelihoods. But Hazard was also a philanthropist who built schools for children—the same children who worked in his mill, earning $4.50 a week beside their fingerless fathers.

The complexities continue: Hazard spent his winters in New Orleans courting the puffed-up cotton kings who ruled the southern slavocracy. But he also aided freedmen wrongly imprisoned in the North, advised Lincoln during the Civil War, was a conscientious local representative, and protested against runaway railroad monopolies.

By the 20^th century, according to Ricci, Hazard and his successors Tinkham, Metcalf, and Company had “created an entirely new way of living” for the people who worked in the factory. This experiment in industrialization had turned a backward stony agrarian patch, once populated by goat herders, natives, and peasants, into a hamlet with quantitative material growth. As Eric Hobesbawm writes in his study of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, “For 80% of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s…for since the Neolithic era most human beings had lived off the land and its livestock or harvested the sea as fishers.” Charlie Dyson, a 97 year old yarnspinner who was part of this seismic economic shift. He and others tell the stories of rural austerity and the toil of farm life. “We done the best we could,” he says, “But we were damn poor.”

But southern Rhode Island’s industrial boom ended earlier than the rest of America’s, concluding in 1935. With stiff competition from 2,000 other New England factories, stock speculation, and lax regulation which led to Wall Street’s 1929 collapse, Carolina Mill could no longer turn a profit. It was closed just three years before the infamous hurricane of ’38 further devastated the region.

Ricci’s film moves, if a bit clunkily at times, from decade to decade showing the small town garages, sleepy suburbanization, and local stories that occupy the life of Carolina after its prime. Some stories are interestingly tangential. The shots of Providence and the discussion of 1938 flooding in the city are interesting if not entirely relevant. But do we really need to know about the history of elm tree removal in Carolina? The intriguing investigation of the enormous Wright family—52 of whom lived in the same neighborhood—is a nice touch, but Ricci cuts off the discussion at its most interesting and complex. The ethnic rivalries and religious splintering that some of the Wright girls discuss (the children were barred from marrying someone outside their faith) is left as an anecdote. Why were these small town girls told not allowed to go to Westerly or even Hope Valley? How did small town life impact the view of the larger world of cities and towns? How have these residents since changed or maintained their views about people unlike them? Sadly, none of these questions—which would have contextualized and oriented the viewer to the reality of late 20^th century life in Carolina—are adequately addressed

The goal of a review is not to criticize an artist for what they did not set out to do, but to discuss the merits of what she did attempt. Therefore, as an exploration of Carolina’s ascent and the personal histories of individuals attached to it, Ricci’s film is worth the time of any proud Rhode Islander. Ricci said in an interview, “I wanted to make the history personal and real to the people watching it.” From the notorious Paul Broomfield, a local Grinch, who owned the ruins of the Carolina Mill and superintended the property’s decay to Charlie Dyson’s decision to go to war despite his wife’s reservations, Carolina is a documentary peopled with characters that could be found in the best fiction.