Wealth and Health: Nineteeth-Century Mortality in Emergent New England Mill Towns

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

SES-9910755 Alan Swedlund This research will analyze the local socioeconomic, public health and compositional patterns of mortality and mortality decline in the emergent urban/industrial mill towns of Northampton and Holyoke in western Massachusetts during the late 19th and early 20th century mortality decline in New England. These cities experienced the full force of rapid urban, industrial, and population growth concurrent with sustained high levels of epidemic mortality in the middle of the 19th century as mortality fell elsewhere. It was not until these mill towns had matured into large urban/industrial centers with slower population growth, public health infrastructures, and aging populations that the beginnings of a sustained mortality declined occurred at the turn of the century. This project focuses on the emergent mill towns as a case study in which local socio-economic, public health, and compositional aspects of the mortality decline are expected to be especially salient and more readily discerned than at either a national/regional scale or in large established metropolitan centers, both of which have received greater prior attention. The research uses an existing, NSF funded, database of census information for samples from each town from censuses between 1850 and 1910 linked to corresponding death record information for the two years after each census. The database is extended by linking tax valuation records to individual-level census and death data, and by coding local health improvements which impacted specific community areas. Demographic analyses will address the relative importance and interaction of socioeconomic (e.g., wealth and occupation) differentials in infant, child and adult mortality; the local effects of rapid population growth (e.g., density, relative growth, crowding, housing quality) and specific public health improvements (e.g., water supply or sewage improvements); and compositional cause-specific changes in morality (e.g., age-sex-cause-specific trends, occupational mortality, specific high-interest causes of death). Preliminary analyses with available data have supported some role for each of these conventionally hypothesized effects.