Grain scoopers gathered at St. Bridget's, Louisiana Street, 1899. Photo from the 1900 Buffalo Express Yearbook.
Grain scoopers gathered at St. Bridget's, Louisiana Street, 1899. Photo from the 1900 Buffalo Express Yearbook.
They were grain scoopers, 1,500 of the nearly 6,000 Buffalo dockworkers. They were paid $4.90 per day before their saloon
boss
took his cut and subtracted each
scooper's bar bill, meal bill, and lodging costs, often leaving the scooper with nothing.
But the
reason they went on strike in May,
1899 was because the boss of the saloon bosses, William "Fingey" Connors,
announced that
they would have a pay cut
amounting to 50% of what they earned per day the previous year. The "company
store"
system that
governed their livelihoods
was about to change. The almost-entirely Irish-American scoopers went on strike
early in
May, 1899.
The striking scoopers had two factors on their side: time and Bishop Quigley, head of the Catholic church in Buffalo. By
May 12,
43 ships carrying 3.6 million bushels
of grain were waiting to be unloaded in the Buffalo harbor. The supply was
backed
up also,
with 24 million bushels awaiting
shipment in Duluth in addition to supplies at other ports. The shipper's
association
brought
pressure on Conners to resolve the
issue. Bishop Quigley, himself a former dockworker, opened
St. Bridget's for the
strikers' use
as a headquarters and also assisted
with strategy and public statements calling for all
dockworkers to honor
the strike.
William Conners, who began his career in the lowest jobs on the waterfront, had built a fortune largely through his own talents
and the labor of grain scoopers and packet handlers. Though no longer a force in the waterfront contract labor system, he
had already diversified his fortune
by buying the Magnus Beck Brewery, the Vulcanite Asphalt Paving Company, large tracts
of
land in South
Buffalo
which
he developed as residential neighborhoods, and the Buffalo Enquirer, Morning Record, and
Buffalo Courier. He moved into a mansion on Delaware Avenue and
created the
Courier-Express newspaper which his son
would continue after his death in 1929.
Sign over the entrance to the Union Hall at 110 Louisiana Street, 1998.
As recently as 1940, nine of 10 members of the Grain Shovelers Union Local 109 were Irish-Americans. By 1998, the total
number of members had dwindled to 55 due to lack of work.
The profession of grain scooping, unique to Buffalo, ended by the
spring
of 2003 when the straight deck bulk carrier Kinsman Independent was unloaded of its grain. Grain coming to
Buffalo now is
unloaded by completely automated ships.
More information can be found in the Buffalo News article, "Deadly Strike Made History 100 Years Ago," June 13, 1999
and Buffalo's Delaware Avenue, Mansions and Families by Edward T. Dunn.