The Eighth Tribe, 1979 (6. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1979-05-01 / 5. szám
May, 1979 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page S created a need for more unskilled laborers, but Dayton’s unemployment rate at the time was low. So, Barney & Smith looked to immigrants to fill the need for more workers. And, like other manufacturers, the company hired a foreign-labor agent to recruit employees. The agent's name was Jacob Doffee Moscowitz. Moscowitz was born in Hungary March 12, 1867, and came to America July 1, 1884. His family settled in Maine, moved to Pennsylvania, then returned to Maine. Moscowitz moved to Dayton in 1899. By the time he was hired by Barney & Smith, Moscowitz had considerable experience in recruiting foreign laborers. He had settled some in Pennsylvania's coal-mining region and on Dayton's West Side, where lie worked as a foreign-labor agent for the Dayton Malleable Iron Co. Moscowitz went to work for Barney & Smith in 1906, using his contacts in Hungary, Pennsylvania and \S cst Virginia to bring workers to Dayton. Other immigrants seeking work were drawn to the area hv advertisements in Hungarian-language newspapers. Barney & Smith formed the Dayton Realty Co., which built 40 houses just north of the Dayton city limits for the laborers whom Moscowitz recruited. The settlement included a large building at the corner of Mack and Notre Dame avenues, which contained Moscowitz’ offices, a saloon, a second-story dance floor, a grocery store, dry goods store and butcher shop and, in the basement, an ice storage room. All adult men in the settlement had to be employed at the car works. If a man was fired, he usually was forced to leave the colony. And, residents had to make all their purchases at the colony store. “That was one condition,’’ said Mrs. Ethel Dely, who lives on Mack Avenue. Her family came to America from Budapest when she was 4 and moved to Dayton in 1908, when she was 7. “You were brought here, and you got a job and you had a chance to rent a house, and you had to buy everything (at the store). Most of the people were satisfied with that because they were new people, and most of them probably wouldn’t have known how to go to town to shop.” But, that rule was broken occasionally. The first
