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| Taken from Pittsfield Historical Society website |
Sarah A. (Sadie) Cole was the daughter of George W. Cole and Flora A. Parsons. She was born 1 January 1886 and died 25 April 1902 from consumption.
Flora Parsons was Lona Parson's older sister, the sixth child of Benjamin Parsons and Lydia Bennett, so Sarah was my grandmother Emma's first cousin.
Sarah was Flora and George's sixth child, after Linwood B, Bessie J, George H, Henry M, and Ida M. She was probably born in Burnham, Maine. In 1900 she was still living there with her parents and five of her six siblings. Linwood had moved out by then, but to where is not clear since I can find no record of his address at that time. Sarah was in school then, at age 14, but by age 16, when she died, she was working as a mill hand in a mill in Pittsfield.
There were three woolen mills operating in Pittsfield at the turn of the 20th century: Pioneer, Riverside, and Waverly. Pioneer is pictured above, Riverside below.
It's possible her death from consumption (either tuberculosis or pneumonia) was due in part to her work in the woolen mill, but it could also have been from being infected by her brother Linwood, who had died from tuberculosis in December of 1901.
Both she and her brother Linwood are buried in the plot with the parents in Pittsfield Village Cemetery.
Here is a poem written in 1916 by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn, entitled, "The Golf Links":
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
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| Taken from Pittsfield Historical Society website |
