The Bone Soul: A Story of Mills, Memory, and Belonging

The Bone Soul: A Story of Mills, Memory, and Belonging

​We have forgotten.

We have forgotten who our bone ancestors were, and what they carried across oceans and mountains to give us life here.

We have forgotten that they left one land weeping, their bones crying for the soil they would never see again, and came to another with nothing but their strength and their faith.

And when they reached this new land, they poured their blood, their sweat, their tears into the mills and farms, into the rivers and roads, into the towns that once rang with the hum of looms and the laughter of children.
And when they died, their children cried for them.
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Yet grief did not end there.
For when the mills themselves died—long after those first ancestors had passed—the grief rose again.
The children and grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, all wept at the loss of the very places that had sustained their families..

Across the veil, the ancestors wept with them, for their blood and bone had been poured into the rivers, the looms, and the very soil itself.

When the looms went quiet, their voices rose in mourning.
Their tears mingled with ours, weaving us together across the veil.

Every year at Samhain, we are asked to turn inward and remember that life and death walk hand in hand.

And so we journey into this time through the bone soul.
The bones of the earth show through as the fields rest.
The bones of our ancestors stir in memory.
The bone soul — our middle soul, our middle self — carries our face, our story, our presence in the world.
It is how we meet this incarnation, shaped by the union of our parents and the steps we take along the way.
It holds our personality, our preferences, our memories and knowledge.
It builds our reality, sorts and names it, and becomes as singular as each life we live.

Unlike the blood soul, which flows through ancestry, or the star soul, which returns to the heavens, the bone soul does not reincarnate.
At death, it lingers here.
It abides in the places that mattered most — a graveyard, a window, a tree, a river bend, a stone wall no one takes down because the stones themselves remember.
It may merge with land and become a guardian spirit: a hush in the pines, a spark in the hearth, a warmth at the corner of an old room.

This is why cemeteries hum with company, why childhood streets hold echoes of laughter, why the ruins of a mill still feel alive — the stones keeping rhythm with the footsteps that once shook their foundations, the air carrying voices too faint for the ear but never lost to memory, the very soil breathing with the weight of those who poured themselves into it.

The bone soul lingers in the places where work and memory meet — in mills and farm fields, in kitchens and parishes, in streets where belonging was forged through sweat, sacrifice, and song.
And so I know the bone soul in the towns that made me.

My Italian, German, French, French-Canadian, and Polish, ancestors came to Adams, Massachusetts, leaving beloved homelands behind. 
Some carried the road in their bones: Quebec into Vermont. Vermont into New York. New York into Adams.
Names like milestones their feet still remember.
Rivers and ridges etched into their journey like prayers.  

They came with hope.
They came with desperation.
They sought life in the mills, and in the homes that rose beside them.
They sought community in crowded streets, solace in parishes that rang with mother-tongue hymns, belonging in bakeries, markets, and the simple company of neighbors who understood the same longing.

They came seeking not only wages, but roots — a chance to weave themselves into the fabric of a new land.

My French, French-Canadian and Italian ancestors bent their backs beneath the roar of the Berkshire Mills, while my Polish great-grandfather and great-grandmother built a dairy farm that fed workers and townsfolk alike — bottles of milk left on porches in the cool of morning before the sun had risen.

These were not just jobs.
They were offerings.
They were vows made to a new land with no promise of return.

The mills consumed entire families.
Fathers, mothers, even children.
Children as young as seven or eight stood at machines instead of school desks — small fingers darting between threads, lungs full of dust, feet aching on floors that never seemed to end.
The clatter of looms was their lullaby.
The ache in their bones their teacher.

Education was rare; wisdom was forged in hunger and repetition and silence.
Many of mine could not read or write, but their bodies remembered — how to tie, lift, carry, listen; how to endure.

Inside the mills, men and children learned English because wages required it, but in their homes, the old languages whispered across the table.
Children became American by daylight and kept the music of their motherlands by night.
The mills remade them — in body, in spirit — blending bloodlines and habits, absorbing their stories into brick and timber until the buildings themselves seemed to breathe.

And after the workday, the bone soul of community woke.

Kitchens and stoops filled with voices in many tongues.
Women baked the breads their grandmothers had taught them, steam beading on winter windows.
Men told stories of rivers and fields they missed and of new ones they were learning to love.
Parishes rose that mirrored the ones they had left — bells ringing in mother tongues.
Bakeries, feasts, processions, saints’ days, and summer bazaars.

Little towns inside the town, where memory and faith held fast against fatigue.
Here, belonging was not a luxury — it was survival. In bread and hymns, in neighbors’ voices, in shared devotion, the bone soul of community kept memory alive.

This is how they kept their bone souls alive: togetherness as sacrament, the ordinary as altar.

Down the road, the same story lived in Pittsfield, in a village once called Barkersville.
Barkersville was its own small world — about seventy acres where Cloverdale, Branch, and Church Streets cross today.

There were worker houses, a mercantile, a bank, shops, the stream that powered the looms, and a Barker villa watching over it all.
J. Barker & Brothers anchored the village, their pride the Railroad Mill — wool and cotton turned to satinet, industry singing through the valley.

Older maps whisper another name — Stearnesville — for the land keeps every name it’s ever worn.

Then came January of 1879.
A bitter morning.
The Railroad Mill caught fire.
By noon, it was gone — one of the worst blazes the city ever knew.
Livelihoods vanished with the roof.
Hope collapsed in ash.

By 1890, the hum was nearly silenced.
The village fell quiet.
But the stream kept going — streams always do — and the land, as land does, held the memory.
Even so, the people refused to be erased.
Survivors salvaged what could be saved.
Families endured.
Faith endured.

And in 1910, my home was raised by those survivors — hands that remembered the heat of 1879 but chose to keep building anyway.

The street I live on once bore Barkersville’s name.
The boards and beams around me were lifted by workers who would not surrender, their bone soul pouring into new walls after so much had been lost to flame.
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When I opened a sun-porch wall, I found the ghost of brick where a fireplace once burned.
When I turned the soil, I uncovered the old slate walk, a path that had simply been sleeping.
I gathered dirt from the four corners of my yard and placed it on my ancestor altar, to honor those who built this street and gave Barkersville breath.

This is what I mean by ancestors of place and the bone soul working as one:
the ones who bled here, built here, stayed here,
and by dying here became part of here.
Their bones — or the ashes of their bones, or only the stories of their bones — entered the ground and taught the ground our names.

Ancestors of place are not always kin by blood; they are kin by land.
If blood was spilled on a field, the field remembers.
If a body was buried, the hill holds it close.
If hands shaped a millstone or laid a sill beam, wood and stone keep that touch.
And though towns rise and fall, something endures — the bone of a place.

To connect with the bone soul, you must walk where you lived, where they lived, where your people traveled and rested and worked.
Stand at an old fence. Sit on a step that has been sat on a thousand times.
Listen. Listen from your bone soul.  

Research helps — maps, deeds, ledgers — but your feet must feel it.
You must step where they stepped.

I was raised in Adams — a mill town.
Now I live in Pittsfield, in the old Barkersville neighborhood — another mill town.
Small town to small city.
The circle unbroken.

Adams still stands, learning how to remember itself.
Barkersville is a sign and a stream.
But I live inside its remnant, and the remnant lives inside me.
When I drive these renamed roads, I feel the workers walking with me.
My bones know both towns; my bones are both towns.

And I know what was carried, and what was lost.

For when the mills closed, it was not only wages that disappeared.
It was the bakeries, hymns, and neighborhoods that had been daily communion.
Economic safety was no longer guaranteed.
Roots that were growing deeply into the soil stunted.
What they had built was more than wages — it was belonging, and belonging was the hardest to lose.

Yet nothing freely given is ever lost.

The bone soul remains — calling us to remember, to reconnect, to restore what can be restored.
This is why we ache for communities we never knew.
Why a hymn in a language we do not speak can sting our eyes.
Why the photograph of a mill child—barefoot, steady, too old and too young at once—can stop our breath.
The bone soul is not only memory.
It is a summons.

And because it is the middle soul — the craftsman of connection and communication — it loves the tools that bridge worlds: language and art, story and song.
It loves practical magic and plain devotion.

If you want to meet it, speak aloud the names of your dead.
Tell their stories at your table.
Place a candle in a window.
Build an altar for the season — Samhain’s thin time — with photos and favorite foods and a dish of dirt from meaningful ground.
This is how an ofrenda opens a door.

If you work with cards, call the suits that speak its dialect:
Pentacles for earth and legacy,
Wands for fire and will,
Tarot as a bridge to the middle souls of the dead — guardians in graveyards, along streams, in mills that now sleep.

If you walk with dirt and stone, learn graveyard etiquette.
Offer what you take.
Take only what you can return.

And sometimes the simplest rite is enough:
walk the streets, greet the houses,
thank the trees for remembering.

And I believe animals may carry a bone soul too — especially those who choose us.
My Olde English Bulldog, Roy, has gone on, but I feel him in the corners of rooms and in the cadence of my days.
Some say the middle soul belongs only to humans, but I have seen its glint in the eyes of those familiars who nurture.

At Samhain, when the veil thins, I feel my boy, Roy, and all of my ancestors most strongly.

I feel the workers of Adams and Pittsfield.
The children who grew too soon.
The immigrants who carried homelands in their tongues and poured their lives into the mills.

I feel Barkersville’s stream threading the quiet, Adams’ brick remembering hands, the Railroad Mill’s phantom heat, the will of survivors in the joists of my 1910 house.

They are still here.
Their bones are the land.
Their souls whisper in the wind.

The mills may be quiet now, but memory endures, and through memory we find belonging — to land, to lineage, to each other.

And my work — as a storyteller, as a keeper of ancestral wisdom — is to keep them alive.
Because every bone holds a story.
And every story deserves to be told.

And so I offer this prayer, this mantra, this invocation of soul alignment:
I am of blood.
I am of bone.
I am of stars.
We are one in three — root, branches, and tree.
May this always be.


Author’s note: My ancestors came from Italy, Germany, France, French Canada, Poland, and England; their stories live in my marrow. But this story belongs to many.
If your people worked the mills, kept the farms, baked the bread, sang the hymns — if you feel your own bone soul stir when you walk an old street — write to me.
Share what the land remembers of you, and what you remember of the land.
If this story has stirred something in you — a memory, a longing, a whisper from your own bone soul — I invite you to explore it further with me.

My work as an intuitive practitioner blends tarot, mediumship, and ancestral communication. Through story, spirit connection, and the imagery of the cards, I help you reconnect with the wisdom of your own lineage and the voices of Those who walked before you
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Sessions are available in-person in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, or virtually via Zoom, WhatsApp, phone, or email.

You can learn more and book a session here: Book a Session
Because every soul has a story.
And sometimes, all it needs is to be heard.
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For those who wish to trace these echoes further-​
— The Barker Brothers and Their Village (J. Barker & Brothers; satinet; the Barkers’ role in the village).
-- Lower Barkersville and the Osceola River Flouring Mill, Hungerford St. (maps, siting, the stream, present-day traces).
— Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company, Adams, MA (Berkshire Mills, growth and decline, later transformations).

Berkshire Mill in Adams, MA

Historic illustration of the J. Barker & Brothers Railroad Mill in Barkersville, Pittsfield, Massachusetts,