North Adams strike  The North Adams strike was a strike in 1870 by shoe workers of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, against Calvin T. Sampson's Shoe factory, in North Adams, Massachusetts. The strike itself was broken when Sampson imported seventy-five unskilled male Chinese strikebreakers, from California. The craft union itself was eventually defeated by mechanization, although a decade later only five immigrants remained in North Adams. Those that did move out eventually moved to Boston to found their Chinatown. The United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, further restricting immigration to the country and continuing the gender imbalance that started with the laborers for many years to come.