They called her Molasses Mae, but only after the flood.
Before that, she was just Mae, a woman surviving the only way Boston let her. She lived near Commercial Street, in a cramped room above a seamstress’s shop, two blocks from the Purity Distilling Company. The rum runners and molasses men came often—workers with sticky hands and thick pay in their pockets, needing warmth, needing relief. Mae gave it, for a price.
She knew the smell of molasses long before the flood—not the sweet kind, but the industrial kind: sharp, fermented, metallic. She joked that it clung to the men like guilt. Sometimes, it clung to her too.
And then, on January 15th, 1919, everything changed.
The tank burst. A wall of molasses taller than a house ripped through the North End at 35 miles per hour. Horses drowned. Children disappeared. Cobblestones cracked. Buildings tore from their foundations. Mae was in the alley behind her building, lighting a cigarette. The roar came first, like a freight train made of syrup and ghosts. She turned just in time to see it coming—not fast enough to run, but fast enough to understand.
It coated her.
Trapped her.
Preserved her, like a relic.
When they pulled her from the wreckage hours later, she was sitting, silent, eyes open, her skin still warm to the touch. Her dress clung to her like she’d been dipped in lacquer. She looked alive—but wasn’t. Some say she suffocated. Others say she had a heart attack from the shock. A few claimed they saw her blinking days later, in a morgue drawer that reeked of liqorice.
But the real tragedy was that no one really knew her name. Her name was Mae.
Molasses Mae – Limited Edition Print
All prints printed on 280gsm smooth cotton rag with archival-quality giclee 9 colour printing.
Non Framed prints come in a finished artwork size of 250mm x 250mm or 500mm x 500mm. Printed to the edge.