Photograph of Lena Etta (Bower) Graf of Manchester NH. Back of photograph states: Lena E. Bower, wife of Eddie Graf, 1904.
Lena Etta Bower was born in Manchester, New Hampshire in 1881. Her father was from England, having immigrated in 1855, arriving in Boston Massachusetts. It was a time when skilled textile workers from England were being sought to work in the growing mills in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. By 1900, her father was a dresser tender, considered an essential, skilled job, and living at 42 Stark Street, mill worker housing. In fact, most of her life revolved in some way around the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. Lena is representative of many Manchester women whose families built the city through their labor.
Lena attended the local schools, possibly even those owned and run by Amoskeag. According to the 1940 US Census, she had completed high school, so possibly she graduated from Manchester High School. The photograph shown, taken at the WR Call studio in 1904, was only a few years after her high school graduation and two years before her marriage. Her husband Edwin Graf, also worked for the city’s mills, being a “section hand” at the time of their marriage, and later becoming an overseer. Continue reading
