Parked at Home 2026, 4 Frances Perkins Center

Thursday, April 9, was the fourth installment of the 2026 season of Parked at Home hosted by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BRVNHP). Park Ranger Allison Horrocks presented from Old Slater Mill in Pawtucket, RI, and was joined by Amanda Hatch of the Frances Perkins Center, the official philanthropic partner of the brand new Frances Perkins National Monument in Newcastle, Maine.

Ranger Horrocks opened with connections between BRVNHP and the legacy of Frances Perkins. While visitors to the park may not always ask about Perkins by name, their questions often touch on the labor reforms she championed during the 1930s. This was also her birthday week! Perkins spent much of her childhood in Worcester, MA, in the north end of the Blackstone Valley. A branch of the Worcester Public Library is named in her honor. She is best known for her twelve years as Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during which she oversaw federal recovery programs under the New Deal, what Ranger Horrocks called “alphabet soup” programs such as CCC and the WPA. Her other work the National Labor Relations Act and the Bureau of Labor Standards, which put an end to oppressive child labor by setting minimum work ages and maximum working hours.

Ranger Horrocks highlighted some of the WPA’s tangible legacy in the Blackstone Valley region. Plaques from the organization can be found throughout the United States; she pointed to one from 1940 at Pawtucket City Hall, set in a wall right next to the Old Slater Mill parking lot. The program built sewers in Worcester and Woonsocket, sidewalks in Central Falls and Pawtucket, and schools in Uxbridge, Slatersville, and East Providence. Inside the Whitinsville post office hangs a 1939 piece of artwork depicting village founder Colonel Paul Whitin working as a blacksmith.

A shared photograph showed Perkins alongside Louis Metcalfe Walling, born in Union Village, Rhode Island. Wealthy but deeply committed to working-class people, Walling was called a “class traitor” at the time for helping Perkins with the Fair Labor Standards Act. Horrocks also drew an interesting contrast between birthday celebrations of the era: while Perkins’ birthday went largely unrecognized, President Roosevelt’s was celebrated with a “National Birthday Ball”. A 1945 ball held in Pawtucket raised funds for infantile paralysis, the cause that would eventually become the March of Dimes, founded by Eddie Cantor. The event was well attended, including by Pawtucket’s Mayor Thomas P. McCoy, for whom the city’s baseball stadium was later named.

Amanda Hatch then shared her presentation. She works for the Frances Perkins Center, a non-profit organization and the official partner of the Frances Perkins National Monument since 2025. The monument itself is very new, as it was designated by President Biden on December 16, 2024 through the Antiquities Act. It is the thirteenth monument in the National Park System honoring a woman or women’s history out of more than 400 sites, and one of only two monuments in Maine. Its newness explains why I had never heard of the site before this webinar despite its location down the road from Historic New England sites Castle Tucker and Nickels-Sortwell House.

The Center was founded in 2009 by Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, a grandson of Perkins, along with many other supporters. Coggeshall passed away in January 2025, but not before attending the monument’s designation ceremony in Washington, D.C., a meaningful final event for someone who had lived in the family homestead his entire life. The non-profit originally opened exhibit space in Damariscotta, just across the river from the house in Newcastle, in 2012. After years of fundraising, they purchased the homestead from Tomlin in 2020 and later donated the property to the federal government. Hatch and her colleagues are not government employees but continue to operate on-site, so visitors may well encounter them during a visit.

Perkins was born Fannie Coralie Perkins in Boston, MA in 1880, but Newcastle was her ancestral home. The family were historically farmers and brick makers; her father and uncle eventually moved to Massachusetts because the homestead could not support so many family members. Her grandmother lived in the red brick house, and Perkins returned the visit throughout her life. During her time as Secretary, she took a break from August through Labor Day and would go to bed for a week to rest. She is even buried down the road in a private cemetery. The community knew her as “Mrs. Wilson”, although she had kept her maiden name. She was a private and religious person who treasured her time in solitude with one of her favorite spots being Prayer Rock.

Hatch noted that Perkins was confirmed as an Episcopalian and changed her name from Fannie to Frances at that time. As a reminder of her extraordinary legacy: Perkins was the first woman to serve on a presidential cabinet, and she helped create Social Security, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, a 40-hour work week, bans on child labor, and fire safety standards, all of which brought an end to the Great Depression. Ranger Horrocks compared Perkins to Roger Williams, who felt it was “vanity” to have a portrait made and likely would not have approved of having a memorial named after him. Similarly, Perkins was so self-effacing that she would have deflected credit to FDR rather than claimed it for herself, even though she was doing much of the work. Her book, The Roosevelt I Knew, is considered by experts to be the closest account we have of her time at the White House, blurring the line between memoir and autobiography.

The Frances Perkins Center has already welcomed over 4,000 visitors and offers programs, book talks, traveling exhibits, and educational programming for students. Hatch shared a funny anecdote about the park stamp honoring Perkins that she credits with bringing in 2,000 visitors on its own: people arrive with their stamp books, get their stamp, and then ask, “Who is Frances Perkins?” The site is open year-round, with trails running from the house down to the river, just as Perkins herself would have walked them. Snowshoes welcome during the winter, while the buildings are open during the summer. Hatch asked one thing of visitors: please do not put on the famous Frances Perkins hats.