Mill life, a dark chapter in North Carolina history

     Life was no picnic for early 20th century mill workers in North Carolina and the Southeast. They lived in four-room houses with no underpinning, heated only by a fireplace. They worked back-breaking shifts for wages on which they could barely survive. Their children learned to spin and spool, but were often illiterate.
     Dr. Roxanne Newton, director of the Humanities and Fine Arts Division at Mitchell Community College, painted a harrowing picture of mill life in her presentation, “Hard Times in the Mill: Working Lives Past and Present,” at Campbell University’s North Carolina Humanities Council annual lecture on Thursday, Nov. 9.
     The daughter of mill workers herself, Newton became interested in the history of mill life through interviews and oral histories collected from friends and family. Her research led to the development of interdisciplinary courses in women’s studies and the lives of working people in America.
     “There are two conflicting ideas about mill life in the Southeast,” Newton said. “One is that the mill housed families in tight-knit communities in which they had a rich cultural experience; the other is that mill workers had nothing to look forward to but hard work, oppression and death.”
     Newton’s research bears out the latter point of view. “The lives of mill workers were excruciatingly hard,” Newton said. “In 1929, the average mill worker made $12 per week and worked a 72-hour week. After working at the mill for only a few years, the workers’ young bodies broke down and became visibly aged.”
     Taking care of children in the mill community was also a problem, Newton added. Many tragedies resulted from long work hours and lack of supervision.
     For example, a child was killed when a young mother was forced to leave her unsupervised between the time she left for her mill shift and the time her husband returned. The child drew too close to a smoldering fireplace and her clothes caught fire. From bleak experiences like this, somber folk songs emerged:

“….To their jobs those little ones was strictly forced to go

They had to be at work on time, thru rain and sleet and snow.

Many times when things went wrong their bosses often frowned.

Many times those little ones was kicked and shoved around…” (“Babies in the Mill”)

     By the 1920s, however, over one quarter of the 420,000 textile workers in the U.S. belonged to unions and roughly one-half of them in the South. Southern workers united across gender and racial lines to obtain crucial advantages in pay and working conditions, while at the same time sustaining devastating anti-union violence. One such tragedy occurred in Gastonia’s Loray Mill when a strike led by the National Textile Workers Union erupted and Governor Max O. Gardner called in the state militia. Pro-union activist and African American Ella May Wiggins was among those shot and killed in that incident. Strike after strike in the South failed, however, and textile workers had trouble ever setting up strong, permanent unions.
     A native of Iredell County, Dr. Roxanne Newton earned a Ph.D. in Educational Foundations and Cultural Studies and a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the recipient of numerous academic and teaching awards and her North Carolina Women’s History Quilt, made by Newton and her women’s studies students, was acquired by the North Carolina Museum of History.
     Campbell’s North Carolina Humanities Council annual lecture is sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council and the Campbell chapters of Phi Kappa Phi and Pi Gamma Mu.


Photo Copy: Dr. Roxanne Newton delivers Campbell’s North Carolina Humanities Council lecture on Thursday, Nov. 9.