Hanford Wesley Tracy (1903–1962)
A Maritime Heritage in the Industrial Age
Let me tell you about Hanford Wesley Tracy, a boy from a seaside village who grew up to run the machinery that kept a city cold. He is your great-great-grandfather: his older daughter, Phyllis, was your great-grandmother, and Phyllis’s daughter, Candace, is your grandmother.
Early Life in St. Martins, New Brunswick (1903–1921)
Hanford was born on February 16, 1903, in St. Martins, a small seaside village within the Municipality of Saint John County, New Brunswick, Canada. He was the first child of John Edward Tracy, who was twenty, and Elizabeth Jane Scott, who was twenty-seven. The family thought of themselves as British, with German and Irish ancestry, and they were Anglican, which means they belonged to the Church of England. Their faith shaped their moral and social life in a tightly knit coastal community.
Picture St. Martins at the turn of the century. It was a picturesque village perched above the Bay of Fundy, known for its rugged coastline, its covered bridges, and its deep roots in shipbuilding and lumbering. The great shipyards of the previous century had declined by 1900, but the sawmills and the timber trade still gave steady work to local families like the Tracys.
Hanford grew up there, and his father worked in the lumber industry. By his late teens Hanford was working in a sawmill too. That job taught him the mechanical knowledge and the discipline that would shape his whole career.
Marriage and Immigration to the United States (1922–1929)
At nineteen, Hanford immigrated to the United States on October 14, 1922, and arrived in Boston, Massachusetts. Like many young men from New Brunswick’s coastal villages, he was looking for greater opportunity in the mills and factories of New England.
He later settled in Providence, Rhode Island, where he kept up his friendship with Florence Gladys McDonough. He had known her back in St. Martins, and they shared the same Maritime upbringing and the same Anglican faith. The two were married in September 1929, just weeks before the onset of the Great Depression.
Life and Work in Rhode Island (1930–1950)
By 1930, Hanford and Florence were living with her widowed mother in a rented home on Waverly Street in Providence. Hanford was working as an engineer at the Bowen Ice Plant, a modern industrial facility that made block ice for refrigeration, back before home freezers became common.
The Bowen Ice Plant mattered a great deal in the Providence area. It supplied ice to homes, markets, hospitals, and factories. Massive compressors and ammonia-based cooling systems froze big slabs of water in steel molds, and the slabs were then cut and delivered by truck. Running that kind of machinery took precision and constant watchfulness, because any failure in pressure could cause serious damage or injury. Hanford’s training on sawmill machinery carried over naturally. His quiet professionalism soon earned him a reputation for reliability and skill.
Their first daughter, Phyllis Jean Tracy, was born on May 1, 1930.
What Starting Out Together May Have Looked Like
The records give us dates and addresses, but they don’t tell us what those first years felt like for Hanford and Florence. So here is a little of the world they walked into. Think of what follows as the backdrop of the times, not a record of the two of them. Where I say “may have,” I mean it.
They were married in September 1929, and within weeks came the stock market crash of late October. Rhode Island would not have been taken completely by surprise. By 1923 it already had the highest unemployment rate in the country, and its factories had been closing since before the crash. For a Rhode Island couple, the Depression may have felt less like a sudden fall than like a hard stretch that kept getting harder.
For many young couples, the first question was whether there was a paycheck. Textile work, the backbone of the state, was hit hard. Forty percent of the state’s textile workers lost their jobs in the first two years of the Depression, and those who kept their jobs earned, on average, less than nine dollars a week. By 1932 about 115,000 Rhode Islanders were out of work. The jewelry trade was a mixed picture. Fine jewelry is a luxury, and the Depression stopped new building in Providence’s Jewelry District for years. Yet many of the same shops turned to cheap costume jewelry, and firms like Coro and Little Nemo grew. The ice business was changing too. Across the country, ice sales fell to about sixty percent of their 1929 level by 1935, as electric refrigerators went from about 8 percent of American homes at the start of the decade to about 44 percent at the end. We don’t know how the Bowen Ice Plant fared in those years. We do know that Hanford is placed there in both 1930 and 1940, and if his job stayed steady through the lean years, that alone would have set a young household apart from many of its neighbors.
Many couples in those years shared a roof to make ends meet, and some families crowded two households into one. Marriage itself was put off: across the country, the marriage rate dropped by about a fifth between 1929 and 1933. Young couples who did marry may well have done it the practical way, moving in with a parent, pooling the rent, and making one kitchen do for two women. Many wives brought in money by taking in sewing or laundry or boarders. In the 1920s Providence averaged nearly 16,000 people per square mile, in the most densely populated state in the country, so a crowded household like that would have been an ordinary sight. Hanford and Florence’s 1930 home with her widowed mother may well have been this kind of arrangement, though the records don’t say why.
Help was thin at first. The Salvation Army opened Providence’s first soup kitchen in September 1930, and by Christmas of 1931 about five hundred people a day lined up at Catholic Cathedral Hall for shoes, coats, and sweaters. In the fall of 1931 the city borrowed money to start a work-relief program. The New Deal then brought more. The Civilian Conservation Corps put young men to work building roads and trails at places like Burlingame State Park starting in 1933, and Works Progress Administration crews poured sidewalks like the ones that still wind around Prospect Terrace in Providence from 1935 to 1939. A young couple in those years may have known neighbors or cousins who got a job that way.
There were scares, too. In March 1933, just after the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, every bank in the country shut its doors for a bank holiday that began on March 6. Providence banks began reopening within about a week. Couples with a little money saved may have wondered whether they would ever see it again, and couples with none may have felt it less. In September 1934, the textile workers’ general strike spread across Rhode Island. There was violence in Woonsocket and in Saylesville, the governor called out the National Guard, and the strike ended about three weeks after it began. Even a family with no one in the mills would likely have read about it every morning.
Through all of it, ordinary life went on, and it is not hard to imagine what that looked like: careful budgeting, hand-me-downs, church on Sunday, and the pleasure of a first child. Some economists who have studied the period note that marriages begun in hard times were more likely to last than those begun in good ones. That is a fact about couples in general, not about the Tracys. It is a nice thing to think about, all the same.
Citizenship, Cranston, and a Second Daughter
On April 22, 1935, Hanford became a naturalized citizen of the United States, formally renouncing his British nationality. By then the family had moved to Cranston, Rhode Island, and settled at 147 Paine Avenue. The 1940 U.S. Census lists Hanford, then thirty-seven, as Chief Engineer at the Bowen Ice Plant. It marks a steady rise in his profession, built on experience, reliability, and technical skill.
A second daughter, Maitland F. Tracy, was born on October 29, 1936, in Massachusetts. She was delivered by her aunt Maitland at her medical facility in Hopedale, MA.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, the Tracys built a comfortable and stable life in Cranston. Hanford’s work at the ice plant kept the region supplied with safe refrigeration through the Depression and the war years. That was a vital service at a time when mechanical cooling was still a luxury in most homes.
Later Years, Masonic Service, and Legacy (1950–1962)
By 1950, Hanford was still working full-time as an engineer and kept his home in Cranston. He was also deeply involved in Masonic service, where his leadership and integrity were widely respected.
Mr. Tracy was a 32nd Degree Mason in the Scottish Rite, and he belonged to several Masonic bodies, including:
Rising Sun Lodge of East Providence
Calvary Commandery, Knights Templar
Tall Cedars of Lebanon, Rhode Island Council
Solomon’s Lodge of Perfection
Council of Princes of Jerusalem
Chapter of Rose Croix
Rhode Island Consistory
Within the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, the 32nd Degree, “Master of the Royal Secret,” is one of the highest honors a Mason can achieve. It recognizes a man’s steady moral character, his intellectual curiosity, and his long-term commitment to the principles of faith, integrity, and brotherhood.
Those who knew Hanford remembered him as a particularly kind and pleasant man, and he was well liked wherever he went. He had a special soft spot for his granddaughter Candace, whom he adored, and he made time to spend with her.
Hanford’s parents, John Edward and Elizabeth Jane Tracy, stayed in St. Martins all their lives, and both passed away in 1956.
After a year-long battle with cancer, Hanford Wesley Tracy died in August 1962, at the age of fifty-nine. He was buried at Pawtuxet Memorial Park in Warwick, Rhode Island (Section NPC,H, Lot 22, Grave 6).
From the sawmills of St. Martins to the humming compressors of the Bowen Ice Plant, Hanford’s life reflected the quiet dignity of early-twentieth-century Maritimers who looked for steady work, family stability, and purpose. His Masonic service and professional achievement leave a legacy of faith, craftsmanship, kindness, and community leadership that goes on across the generations. That includes you.
Conflicting records
- Wedding date: the exact day is unresolved. Two pages on this site give different dates in September 1929 (the 9th and the 12th), and no marriage record has turned up yet. The 1930 census gives his age at first marriage as 25, which is a bit earlier than 1929 would suggest, but census answers like that are often unreliable.
“GET A HOT WEATHER PICTURE FOR PAGE ONE.” Requested the Picture Editor of Photographer Joseph Arsenault. Here’s the pictoral evidence that not everybody suffered from today’s high temperature. Hanford W. Tracy, chief engineer of the Bowen Ice Company, picks a cool spot to do some figuring. The Evening Bulletin, Providence, Friday, June 25, 1943, “Hot? No, I Haven’t Noticed It!”
Hanford’s mother, Elizabeth Jane (Scott) Tracy, with her great-granddaughter, Candace Hansen, about 1954. Family album.