Tricnit Industries
New Ipswich Historical Society
The Fire
Tricnit was located on Tenney Road. It burnt to the ground on August 5, 1978. The town and fire chief were named as defendants in two suits brought on by the Aetna Life and Casualty Insurance Company. Aetna claimed that the fire department was negligent in their duties which led to a total loss. Later the suits were dropped.
I remember seeing all the sewing machines and other equipment at the town dump which used to be located on Page Hill Road. I still have a number of metal stands that must have held the spools of thread for the looms.
Missing History
The New Ipswich Historical Society has very little information about this mill but it was a major employer when I moved to town in 1974. These are the only photos we possess but nothing about the actual operations or personnel.
On this day - March 16, 1912
James Roger diary entry
16th March 1912
Still thawing, snow going very slowly but surely; wind variable, mostly northwest. David cleaning out hen houses, etc. I fixed Church fires. Not letter from Alice; one from May.
In reply to Bill Thoms; As I recall, around 1972 Mascenic science teacher T.M. decided to take his science class down to Tricnit and document their dumping of chemicals into Furnance Brook. They then wrote up a report about it which caused a big uproar in town. Pollution of local streams was a common practice in those days as the Nashua River in Fitchburg was noted for changing colors whenever the dye of the day was used at the local paper mill. Furnace Brook was basically the town's chamber pot for an untold number of years.
The famous 'Darned Tough' brand of socks made in Vermont actually has its origins at Tricnit. Well sort of anyways. My father worked as a mechanic in Tricnit from about 1946 until it went bankrupt so I'll relate what I can recall. The company ebbed and flowed with the general economy after WW2. The wages were never good, but just enough to keep the locals employed there. I recall my parents relating to me how hard the French-Canadiens, mainly from Greenville, used to work. In the early 1970's the owner decided that he could expand and he hired several 'MBA' consultants (those were the days before MBA's became a ubiquitous degree) to expand the company and build a second factory in Laconia, NH if I remember correctly. For those of us old enough to recall, the early 1970's were the time of rising inflation due to the mass expansion of welfare programs and funding the Vietnam War. So one of the government's response to inflation was to begin to open up the US markets to cheaper foreign textile imports. According to a former Tricnit office manager with whom I had a detailed conversation, the combination of cheaper imports that undercut Tricnit's bottom line plus the cost of the MBA's expansion plans in Laconia finally drove the company into bankruptcy. In addition, my father related to me how the quality of finished products had declined costing the company even more as there was now such a rush to turn out products that quality control was being ignored and large amounts of finished material had to be thrown away. It finally showed up in our home in 1973 when my father and other workers went to cash their paychecks and they bounced. The owner told the flustered workers to wait one week and the cash would be there as he was due payments on receivables. This cycle of bouncing paychecks continued for several more months with the company teetering on insolvency. Marc Caron who eventually started Darned Tough, was some kind of textile consultant hired by Tricnit's owner. Apparently, he saw enough of Tricnit's books to realize that the company was in a terminal state of decline. He began to quietly try to recruit the current workers telling them that he was going to open up a new textile mill in Vermont and he was onto something big. However, I do not know if anyone ever to Marc up on his employment offer but I do remember him trying to hire my father. Finally, one day my father went into work and he was given a final paycheck and told to go get his toolbox and that was the end of Tricnit's operations. The factory sat there full of equipment but empty of workers with many of them still pining for the day that the plant would re-open and that their work routine and friendships could be renewed. Anyways, several years later a former co-worker of mine at Vanguard Manufacturing related to me that he was outside doing his chores like he did every day as he had a few animals he was tending to. He noticed a strange pickup suddenly start up in Tricnit's empty parking lot and race up the road taking off away from town which struck him as very odd. A short while later he noticed the flames and fire engines. The accumulation of dust and oil and the failure of the sprinkler system, from what I was told, were the ingredients for an inferno. In the end there was just a charred mess left. In 1980 I saw Tricnit's owner approach Seppala and Aho Construction with some preliminary plans to rebuild the company but nothing ever came of it. Meanwhile Marc Caron started his Cabot Industries plant but he was also subjected to imports and the rising costs of doing business. According to their website, his son finally hit a home run by going with the 'Darned Tough' upscale brand of socks and clothing and they continue to expand to this day.