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Lauren Henley, Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 582–583, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae203
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Bruce Dorsey's Murder in a Mill Town reveals how the murder of Sarah Maria Cornell in December 1832 reflected anxieties about the shifting roles of women, religion, industrialization, and commercialization in American society during the early republic. Set in New England—particularly the mill towns that straddled the Massachusetts–Rhode Island state line—the “social drama” Dorsey weaves convinces readers of the significance of the trial of Cornell's alleged killer, Reverend Ephraim K. Avery (p. 3). Arguing that the stakes of this case extended beyond the courtroom to the everyday lives of people in the early republic, Dorsey uses myriad stories told about and by the victim and the accused to examine the “cultural battles” fought through Cornell's untimely death (p. 4).
Organized around a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue, Murder in a Mill Town pays homage to the plays that were written following Avery's trial, offering a continuous reminder of the dramatic way this case was interpreted in young America. Two of the most important tensions undergirding the text are Cornell's “character” as a factory girl and Avery's as a Methodist “circuit rider” or preacher (pp. 85, 72). In the case of Cornell, a young woman laboring in a cotton mill represented concerns over both morality and female economic independence. The ability to earn wages and reside outside the nuclear household afforded factory girls more autonomy—and also subjected them to more scrutiny—in rapidly industrializing New England. For Avery, the explosive growth of Methodism in the United States offered an opportunity for a “landless son of a landless farmer” to become a recognized and respected clergyman (p. 75). Yet Methodists faced significant criticism for their beliefs and for their reportedly uninhibited camp meetings, representing part of a broader evangelical transformation of American society.
