with the head of the family and anybody else that happened to want to go back and
 spend a week down there. There was a lot of business conducted on that train.

 This was the first train in that part of the country (or as far as I know anywhere else)
 to have a train schedule set up to go like that--bang--up on Friday and--bang--back
 on Monday morning, so that these people could commute. These people were really
 ahead of their time. The commuters out of New York into Connecticut had not even
 started at it, and here we were way ahead of them.

CJ: How did East Flat Rock get its name?

RJ: The local people were so frozen out as to having any voice in government and that
 sort of thing, over in the Flat Rock area, that my father and a group of other men
 moved over about two miles east of the Flat Rock. And not having any better
 imagination, they named their little community East Flat Rock. That actually was
 where the Flat Rock depot for the railroad was located; [it was] where all of the
 commuters ended up. But they established a little community over there.

 Eventually a textile firm came up in the late 1800s and started manufacturing men's
 hosiery. At one time they employed as many as oh, I suppose 300 people. It was
 most interesting when I was a boy to go down to the Chipman-LaCrosse Hosiery
 Mill. They had these wide, tall windows that they would just open up. It was
 fascinating to watch because they had these old stationary engines in there that
 furnished the power. Now, this was in the early 1920s that I saw this. They had
 these pulleys that had big flapping belts on them. These stationary engines were
 back in one end of the place and they transferred that power by pulley the whole
 length of the mill. It was very, very noisy and very, very dangerous, because these
 belts that they used would flip off once in a while. If you were not careful--if it hit
 you--it would just cut you in two. But they had these old engines that had the big
 flywheels on them. They used oil (kind of like diesel oil) to burn. There was no
 steady firing of the engine because, as it called on for more power, the engine had
 to speed up. And the engine would go: "Putt! Putputt! ... Putt!" You did not
 have the timing that you have on a regular engine now.

 Of course in the late 1920s they converted to electric power, but they still had to
 have steam power for a lot of things. This was the principal employer in the area
 and, needless to say, they had a large community of mill houses. Actually, they
 would have two families living in the same house--one on each side. I suppose they
 probably had fifty houses in a little community that was gathered right around the
 hosiery mill.

CJ: If that was the case, then did the citizens who created East Flat Rock succeed in
 gaining power or political control?


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