The Belrockton: where Belding's silk girls slept

A three-story brick building on Hanover Street in Belding once ran on a 9:30 curfew. Lights out at ten. This was the Belrockton, built in 1906 for $30,000 as a boarding house — but not for just anyone. It housed the single young women who came to town to work the silk mills, and it could sleep about a hundred of them at a time.

Belding ran on silk, and silk ran on those women. Three of every four mill workers were female, many of them in their teens and twenties, drawn from farm towns across the region by steady wages. Belding Brothers & Company built three dormitories to house them — the Ashfield, the White Swan, and the Belrockton — and these were not grim bunkhouses. The Belrockton had hot and cold running water, baths, steam heat, electric light, a library, and meals included. The curfew was strict and the company kept a close eye on its boarders, but the rooms were genuinely comfortable for the era, and a good deal nicer than the farmhouse many of the girls had left.

When the mills closed in 1935, the building moved through other lives. It trained workers for the federal National Youth Administration during the Depression, became a recreation center in 1943, and the city bought it in 1950 to use as a community center. Then in 1987 it became the Belding Museum, which it still is — three floors of the town’s silk-era past, plus a hands-on children’s exhibit, inside the one dormitory of three that survived.

The other two are gone. The Belrockton is the last building standing from the days when a whole town’s prosperity walked through its front doors every evening before curfew, a hundred young women at a time.