Flynncestry: Ragtime Flynns
Daniel Joseph Flynn goes to Phillipsburg
Daniel Joseph Flynn
(1871-1944)
This account is based on sundry documents in hand and on a transcript of a conversation with Francis Joseph Flynn, Sr (Pop-pop), May, 1976. At the time of the recording, he was 76 years old and was talking about when he was a kid. Those who remember him are welcome to supply his vocal mannerisms and to make metronomic hand-chopping gestures as they read his words.
After John Thomas Flynn was crushed in the railroad repair yards in Washington NJ in 1881, his oldest boys, Martin (12) and Daniel (10) had to go to work to support the family. According to TOF's grandfather, they would hop the freight train when it slowed down through the Yards and ride it through the tunnel to Oxford Furnace, where they worked in the Nail Mill. In the interview taped in May 1976, Pop-pop remembered:
Oxford Furnace, late 1800s
"My dad first worked... he worked in Oxford. They made steel, or rather iron. They cooked up the ore and made ingots, pig iron, until that ore played out. It was the Oxford Iron Mills."
The Merriam Shoe Co. had relocated from New York City to Newton NJ in 1873, and "attracted to the novelty, townsfolk peered inside and wondered at the mechanical wizardry of the modern factory system." Modern, indeed. A steam engine powered the belts that moved the machines. The Sussex Register thought that “the only question that remains to be settled is, will Mr. Merriam be seconded in his efforts by a competent corps of women and children from this county, who are willing to become his employees?” This was just in time for Martin and Daniel to become two of those children, for in...
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