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Some people have questioned the nature of the relationship between the Cheney family and the community of Manchester. I started looking into this question and I found that the question wasn’t exactly answered in the National Registry of Historic Places nomination form, but it was discussed. Rather than try to interpret that, I’m going to simply give it to you from the form.
The Cheney brothers Historic District encompasses approximately 175 acres and includes the 18th-century Cheney Family Homestead, several 19th-century mansions built by the Cheney Brothers and their descendants, some two dozen mill buildings dating from as early as 1886, several schools and churches either built by the Cheneys or situated on land donated by them, and about 210 individual and multIfamily mill houses either constructed or purchased by the Cheney Brothers Manufacturing Company between 1850 and 1920 for use by its mill operatives.
National Registry of Historic Places – Nomination form No. 78002885
Collectively these form what Harper’s Weekly editor Henry Loomis Nelson described in 1890 as “in many respects . . . the most attractive mill village in the country.” Nelson was impressed especially with the community’s park-like surroundings; absence of fences, pigsties, chicken coops, and litter; and rows of neat, well-kept workers’ residences which represented “every phase of the spirit of rural architecture.” 11″ If today he could return to South Manchester, which is part of the town of Manchester, probably he would be pleased that relatively few physical changes have occurred in the historic district. He might not be pleased, however, that the village is considered by many historians, like Ruth 0. M. Anderson, as an excellent example of the “benevolent paternalism” of many 19th and early 20th-century textile mill owners. 12 For while recognizing South Manchester as atypical in beauty and comfort, Nelson applauded the Cheneys as the creators of “not such a model village as a family would erect as a monument to its own benevolence” but “a community of friendly neighbors and good citizens.
According to Buckley, both “welfare capitalism” and “civic responsibility” contributed to the Cheney family’s development of South Manchester. Cheney Brothers Manufacturing Company “decided fairly early in the period of expansion after the Civil War,” he says, “that it had a deep responsibility to the community and that in fulfilling that responsibility it would create the conditions of small labor turnover and employee loyalty which were important factors in achieving business.
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