National Park Clean Up
Paterson Falls National Historic Park
They want us to believe national parks don’t matter. That if they’re trashed, abandoned, or underfunded, no one will care. That if they chip away at protections and let pollution pile up, people will stop fighting for them.
They’re wrong.
PROTECT
OUR
PARKS
Paterson Great Falls is a national park, but you wouldn’t know it from how it’s been left behind. This place is a landmark of the labor movement, a reminder of working-class power, and proof that public land belongs to the people. But like so many national parks, it’s been neglected. They let the trash build up, they let the space decay, and they count on no one doing anything about it.
So we’re doing something about it.
We’re pulling up to clean it up and send a message. We take care of what’s ours. We fight for what matters. We’re not letting them erase these spaces while we watch.
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Labor Rights Started Here.
Paterson’s mills ran on the power of the Great Falls, but the workers who fueled the industry were treated as expendable. In 1913, thousands of silk workers walked out, launching one of the largest labor strikes in U.S. history. They gathered at the Botto House, organizing for fair wages, dignity, and control over their own labor.
The same forces that exploited workers then are the ones stripping protections and abandoning public spaces now. This park stands as proof that working people shape history—and that we’re still fighting to protect what’s ours.
— The Botto House, 1913
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn celebrated May Day with Connecticut textile workers on May 1, 1912. This little-known speech was a special moment, uniting the radical idealism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) with the aspirations of an impoverished, powerless working class. Elizabeth Flynn played an important role in the Lawrence strike, helping to organize an exodus of strikers’ children to sympathetic families in nearby states. The desperately poor striking families could not afford to feed or clothe their children, and this gamble, although heartbreaking to parents and children alike, was a success in both practical and publicity terms.
Flynn was born to Irish parents in New Hampshire in 1890. Her very first organizing for the IWW began in 1907 in Bridgeport with the steelworkers strike at American Tube & Stamping Company. The chief of police complained that the IWW “shouldn’t be allowed to import young girls to speak in flowing languages and go out and kill some of our powerful men.” Flynn was sixteen at the time. Now a veteran at 21 years of age, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was one of the IWW’s most potent agitators, crisscrossing the country to speak before crowds of miners and factory workers. She stopped in Willimantic with congratulations and a warning for the future:
“Fellow workers, your victorious strike has been a grand one. You are here this evening to organize. Your victory must be backed up. Unless you keep up your organization you will sooner or later fail.”
