On Sundays from March to the end of July in 1913, thousands of striking silk workers climbed a hill in Haledon, New Jersey, to hear their organizers speak from the second-floor balcony of a house belonging to a family of Italian immigrants. That house, the Botto House, is now the American Labor Museum. Education Director Evelyn Hershey, who spoke with CreARTivity Magazine in place of Museum Director Angelica Santomauro, told us about the house, the woman at the center of its story, and the exhibitions that connect labor history to the arts.

A history that belongs to every family

Evelyn said she hopes visitors leave the Botto House seeing a reflection of their own families. Apart from Native Americans, she said, “we are immigrants ourselves or have immigrant ancestors with their own unique stories.” The silk workers of Paterson came from Italy, from Eastern Europe and from present-day Syria, and together they produced high-grade silk. Evelyn said she wants visitors to appreciate how those newcomers “learned to speak up to protect their families and their rights as workers,” and, in her words, “equally important, to reflect on each visitor’s own immigration and labor story.”

Maria Botto, the story history overlooked

The Botto story is often told through Pietro, but Evelyn was quick to correct that. “Sometimes the women are overlooked,” she said. “Their role in the 1913 Paterson silk strike was quite important and prominent.”

Maria Botto was born in 1870 and married Pietro in 1885, at fifteen, Evelyn said. Both came from the region around Biella, a textile center in northern Italy, and they left to avoid the military draft. Maria arrived at Ellis Island in 1892 at the age of twenty-two, with a daughter of a year and a half. They spent their first sixteen years in America in crowded apartments in what is now Union City, where three more daughters were born. When they could afford it, they put about $4,600 in savings, plus borrowed money, toward a twelve-room house in Haledon, built in 1908.

Maria worked from home, Evelyn said. Relatives brought her bolts of woven silk, and at her dining room table she removed knots and loose ends, painstaking work paid by the piece. She also sold meals to mill workers, looked after tenants on the second floor, and tended a garden, chickens and rabbits. The garden was “basically their safety net,” Evelyn said. There was no unemployment insurance. “And you still need to eat,” she added. All of this work, she said, went unpaid, yet it held the household together. Maria died in 1915, two years after the strike, at the age of forty-five, of heart disease. “She stood by her family and was the backbone of her family,” Evelyn said, and during the strike Maria let her home be used as a haven for free speech and assembly.

Why the strikers came to Haledon

In 1913 the Paterson police padlocked the meeting halls the strikers had been using, including Turn Hall and Salvation Hall near the Great Falls, Evelyn said. The workers needed somewhere to share news and decide what to do next. “We have smartphones, we can text, send videos, communicate in many ways,” she said, “but these striking workers needed to meet face to face.”

Haledon, just north of the city, was ready to welcome them. It had become a bedroom community for silk workers from northern Italy, and its hills reminded them of the foothills of the Alps. “Haledon became like a little piece of northern Italy set down in New Jersey,” Evelyn said. Passaic County had elected several socialist officials, among them Haledon’s mayor, a German immigrant who believed in the rights of working people and agreed to let the strikers meet there. The workers first gathered in an open field, but it was hard to hear a speaker standing on level ground among thousands of people. The Botto House stands on a hillside and has a second-floor balcony, which turned the slope into an amphitheater. “If you stand on the balcony, you could be heard,” she said, even without a microphone. Organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World addressed the crowds in their own languages.

The strike lasted five months, Evelyn said. Its main demand was an eight-hour workday, “which was a new idea in 1913.” She called the strike “a demonstration of great solidarity.”

On view now and coming next

The museum’s largest temporary exhibition, Women in America’s Revolutions 1776 and 1926, opened on January 7, 2026, and marks two anniversaries: the nation’s 250th and the 100th of the 1926 strike in the wool mills of Passaic. Evelyn said it focuses on twenty women, ten from each era, several of them from New Jersey. The second show, Bargaining, Buttons & Banners from the Michael Mulkeen Collection, Part II, opened on September 6, 2026, the day of the museum’s annual Labor Day Parade. Union contracts, picket signs, parade banners and buttons collected by Michael Mulkeen fill the second floor. Evelyn said Mulkeen was a high school business teacher before he became a New Jersey Education Association representative who negotiated some of those contracts himself, and the museum counts him among its most prolific donors. Both exhibitions close on December 31, 2026, and both are made possible in part by a grant administered by the Passaic County Cultural and Heritage Council from funds granted by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

On the first floor, Evelyn said, visitors can see the permanent exhibit on the 1913 strike and four restored period rooms: a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom and a parlor. The Bottos had no electricity but did have indoor plumbing, so they lived better than many families of the time. The museum also has a store, and it presents about three changing exhibitions a year.

The next exhibition is Why We Look for the Union Label, opening on May 1, 2027, which is International Labor Day in much of the world. Evelyn said shoppers have probably seen union labels without noticing: a small shield with the baker’s union initials on a loaf of bread, a mark on a garment, a printers’ union label on a book. Choosing those products, she explained, was a way for consumers to support businesses that treat workers well. “Anyone can use the power of the pocket,” she said. The exhibition will open alongside the museum’s May Day Festival, a day of music with vocalists, instrumentalists, folk singers and labor singers.

Learning with the hands and the senses

To make 1913 feel close, Evelyn said, she starts with the visitors themselves. “All of us have working people in our families,” she said. Hands-on experiences help too. The museum has a bocce court, where students learn the Italian game and are reminded that the Bottos worked Monday through Saturday, a fifty-five-hour week, so a free Sunday was a big deal. Visitors can also hold a loom shuttle like the ones that raced back and forth at twenty-five miles an hour. “It’s sharp on the end,” she said, and it is easy to imagine how a tired worker in the tenth hour of the day could slip. “It makes a difference when you can learn by using your senses,” she said.

Art is part of the museum’s work as well, Evelyn said. Its changing exhibit space often features artists who create work about immigrants and labor, and that work inspires free Saturday labor art classes for third, fourth and fifth graders, sponsored by the Puffin Foundation in Teaneck. They run from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. for twelve Saturdays each fall and spring and combine a social studies lesson with a visual or performing arts project. Adult art programs run separately under different sponsorship. Even the silk itself had an artistic side, since the workers included designers who created patterns for neckties and upholstery. “It was an artistic community in many respects,” she said. Looking ahead, William Paterson University’s Shea Center for the Performing Arts, close to the museum, will host a theater company’s performance about immigrant workers, Layer the Walls, on November 15 and 16, followed by a panel discussion. Evelyn said the production uses puppets, that it is “very creative,” and that public schools attend the second day.

Visiting and supporting the museum

The American Labor Museum is headquartered at the Botto House National Landmark, 83 Norwood Street in Haledon, New Jersey. It is open year round, and visitors are welcome Wednesday to Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m., with no appointment needed, and at other times by appointment. The museum’s offices are open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. To arrange a visit, a group tour for schools, colleges and senior groups, or a virtual tour led with a tablet through the period rooms and second-floor exhibits, call 973-595-7953 or write to labormuseum@gmail.com. Schools, libraries, union halls and senior centers can also borrow portable exhibits called museums in a suitcase. More details are at american-labor-museum.org.

The community can help in several ways: coming to the May Day Festival or the Labor Day Parade, held on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend; becoming a member; or volunteering in the museum’s old-world garden or as a tour guide. And there is the simplest way of all, which is to tell the story. “Their story was largely forgotten until the granddaughter of Pietro and Maria Botto began to give tours,” Evelyn said. “This was her living room.”

This article draws on an interview with Evelyn Hershey, Education Director of the American Labor Museum, on October 2, 2026, and on the museum’s press releases for Women in America’s Revolutions 1776 and 1926 and Bargaining, Buttons & Banners from the Michael Mulkeen Collection, Part II.