Describe Dolgeville

Almost every new person that I have met in college have asked me where I am from. My response to that is that I am from Dolgeville, New York. I can count on one hand how many people didn’t then ask me where Dolgeville is. It is a small rural town located in the Mohawk Valley of Upstate New York. On one side of the town a small creek known as the East Canada Creek flows along the town border and the other side of town is overlooked by huge wind turbines on top of their hilly thrones. The town is so small that it doesn’t even have a stop light but it does have one weird intersection that can be confusing. It consists of two stop signs, a yield sign, an invisible yield sign and a big white triangle painted on the road. This intersection occurs

The Dolgeville Blue Devils are a perennial small school football powerhouse in New York. If you drive through town on a Saturday during the fall when there is a home football game it would appear to look like a ghost town in one of those old western movies. But if you decided to take a stroll to the school you would find a huge line of cars up the school hill and people parked on the lawn because the parking lots are packed full. The football field is located on the back side of the school in the outfield of the baseball field. The field is also at the base of a small hill which serves as seating for the majority of spectators. On any given home game the hill could be crowded with up to 400 fans. The crowd nowadays is a lot smaller than it used to be. This is due to the fact that the town is a lot smaller than it used to be. Over the course of 20 years, 1990 to 2010, the town went from 4205 people to 3889 people ("U.S. Gazetteer Files"). This loss of over 300 people is partially because of the loss of jobs in the area. Since 1874 the main employer of Dolgeville citizens had been a shoe making Company. In 1874 Alfred Dodge came to Dolgeville and built a factory to make felt footwear. Then in 1894 a shoe making company by the name of Daniel Green’s bought the factory from Alfred Dodge. This company made shoes, more specifically slippers, until 2001 (Crawford). When the factory closed down it eliminated 500

Many of them went to work for a company by the name of Remington Arms. The factory is located right in the middle of Ilion. It is a huge complex consisting of many large brick buildings. It is surrounded by high chain link fences with barb-wire rolls at the top but that is for strictly for security purposes because if you did no previously know, Remington manufactures firearms and ammunition. Remington’s factory is about a 30 minute drive for most Dolgeville citizens. Remington is one of the largest employers in the Mohawk Valley. The thing about Remington Arms is that they have been downsizing their workforce throughout the past five years. At the beginning of 2014 Remington Arms employed 1200 people but in May of that year they laid off 150 people. The reason for their downsizing is because of legislation by Governor Andrew Cuomo, more specifically the New York State SAFE Act (Roth, 1). The SAFE Act tightened gun control laws in New York. It made it illegal to purchase assault weapons and it lower the clip capacity of a firearm to seven. The clip is the part of the weapon in which ammunition is stored. With gun regulations tightening in New York State Remington decided to further develop and enlarge their plant in Huntsville, Alabama. They have been slowly moving some of their factory lines to other plants down south recently including the bushmaster line. This is not good for Dolgeville