Location
Fisher 138
Start Date
12-4-2014 11:00 AM
End Date
12-4-2014 11:20 AM
Description
During the second half of the nineteenth century fraternal and benevolent associations of numerous descriptions grew and prospered in mining communities everywhere. They played an important, but neglected role, in assisting transatlantic migration and movement between mining districts as well as building social capital within emerging mining communities. They helped to build bridges between different ethnic communities, provided conduits between labour and management, and networked miners into the non-mining community. Their influence spread beyond the adult males that made up most of their membership to their wives and families and provided levels of social and economic support otherwise unobtainable at that time. Of course, the influence of these organisations could also be divisive where certain groups or religions were excluded and they may have worked to exacerbate, as much as ameliorate, the problems of community development.
This paper will examine some of these issues by looking particularly at the role of Freemasonry and Oddfellowry in Cornwall, Calumet, and Nevada City between 1860 and 1900. Work on fraternity in the Keweenaw was undertaken in Houghton some years ago with a grant from the Copper Country Archive and has since been continued by privately funded research in California and other Western mining states. Some British aspects of this research can be found in my article on mining industrial relations in Labour History Review April 2006
Presenter Bio
Roger Burt is a symposium travel grant recipient, funded by The Friends of the Van Pelt Library.
Burt taught British and American economic history at the University of Exeter in South West England from the 1960s until 2008. His research specialty has always been in the area of non-ferrous mining and he has published extensively on all aspects of mining history, from the medieval to the modern period, in the U.K. and overseas. Most recently his attention has been drawn to the role of fraternal and benevolent societies in improving miners’ living standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their role in facilitating internal and international migration.
Some of Burt's latest research pertains to the membership of masonic lodges in the UK, Australia, Africa and many of the western mining districts of the United States, work that is now being extended to all other major international fraternal groups. Burt hopes to find additional material in the Copper Country related to the overall structure of fraternity in the years immediately preceding the First World War.
The Role of Fraternal Organisation in Migration and Informal Labour Organisations in Mining Communities: Cornwall, the Keweenaw, and California Compared
Fisher 138
During the second half of the nineteenth century fraternal and benevolent associations of numerous descriptions grew and prospered in mining communities everywhere. They played an important, but neglected role, in assisting transatlantic migration and movement between mining districts as well as building social capital within emerging mining communities. They helped to build bridges between different ethnic communities, provided conduits between labour and management, and networked miners into the non-mining community. Their influence spread beyond the adult males that made up most of their membership to their wives and families and provided levels of social and economic support otherwise unobtainable at that time. Of course, the influence of these organisations could also be divisive where certain groups or religions were excluded and they may have worked to exacerbate, as much as ameliorate, the problems of community development.
This paper will examine some of these issues by looking particularly at the role of Freemasonry and Oddfellowry in Cornwall, Calumet, and Nevada City between 1860 and 1900. Work on fraternity in the Keweenaw was undertaken in Houghton some years ago with a grant from the Copper Country Archive and has since been continued by privately funded research in California and other Western mining states. Some British aspects of this research can be found in my article on mining industrial relations in Labour History Review April 2006
