Rags! Rags!
He shuffles down city streets and town roads, pulling an old wooden cart weighed down with discarded rags. He might have a horse pulling the cart. One by one residents hear him calling out “Rags!” and they emerge from their homes handing over burlap sacks of rags they had been collecting.
He tosses the remnants onto his large cart.
His name escapes the minds of those today.
They simply remember him as the Ragman.
The Standard-Times recently took to social media and asked about this curious figure going about collecting rags.
Locals who remember the ragman
“I lived in the west end and the rag man there had a horse and carriage,” Wayne Ferreira of New Bedford responded. “When he rode down the streets he would yell, rags, rags. People would come out and fill his carriage.”