When I was a kid vacationing with Mom and Dad in Maine — we moved there when I started fourth grade — our ride home to the Big City was punctuated by a stop at the Bates woolen mill, in Lewiston, Maine. The mill on the banks of the Androscoggin River was where Mom picked out fabrics that would keep her sewing machine busy making clothing for her family.
Back in the day, a person could save a ton of money by purchasing stuff where it was made; why pay transportation costs when you were making the trip anyway. In particular, that mill was what turned Lewiston from an agricultural town to a fabrics manufacturing center.
About 40 miles north of Lewiston, and closer to the town in which Mom and Dad had purchased the land on which they would build their retirement home — and where I would plant the seeds of my love and interest in the natural world — sat G.H. Bass shoe factory, where area residents hand-sewed footwear for farm and outdoor use and eventually the first penny loafers, an outgrowth of the reputedly long-wearing and suitably highly priced footwear known as Bass Weejuns.
One may still purchase a reduced line of fabrics, bedspreads and related wares at the Bates Mill Store in nearby Monmouth but the mill in Lewiston has replaced fabric-making machinery with office and residential quarters.
Bass Weejun shoes now are primarily manufactured in El Salvador but also are made in the Dominican Republic and Mexico.
There was a time in more recent memory when a fellow named Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas. He grew that store into national empire by the 1980s. I recall television commercials featuring truckers in Walmart rigs bragging about hauling American-made products to American purchasers in American Walmart stores.
There are still American-made products on the shelves of the local Walmart stores but they are not always easy to find.
Meanwhile, industries that benefit from the cheap foreign labor fill the reelection war chests of politicians who decry the “competition” and then do nothing to thwart it.
We The People are not totally innocent. We have been eager to purchase products at the lowest price, not including the cost of our allegedly lost jobs. And amid the talk about all those jobs being stolen, our unemployment stays fairly stable at about four to five percent.
If we are going to have borders, whether between us and our nation-neighbors or between us and passersby on the street by our home, we should make them clear and enforceable.
But let’s don’t pretend it’s about protecting domestic jobs.
Text and Images ©2025 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com
