The year is 1916. You are a twelve-year-old girl, employed at Poe Mill in Greenville, South Carolina. The schedule below is pieced together from various accounts of life working in a textile mill and living in a mill village.
Sadie Pfeifer, six months on the job. Lancaster, South Carolina. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine. Courtesy of Princeton Art Museum.
5:00am: The first whistle blows and you sit up in the bed you share with your sister. She's two years younger than you, just ten, but she'll come with you to the mill and "play" on the looms, learning how to spin. She's being trained now whether she realizes it or not, without pay, and they hide her and the other kids under twelve whenever the inspectors come around. She should be in school, you think, but it's mill school anyhow, and when they need more workers, the foremen will barge in to the schoolroom and order everyone to help out.
5:15am: The second steam whistle sounds. This one means "get up," and so you do. There are no pens for animals in the mill village where your family lives, so when you take your kerosene lantern outside, still wearing your nightdress, you make sure to avoid the cow dung and the neighbors' chickens wandering about.
5:45am: You've milked the cow, fed yourself, and then fed your sister and your two older brothers. Breakfast was milk poured on leftover cornbread. You've tended to the animals and taken down the laundry that got left out on the line the night before. You put on your dress, pull back your hair, and head out for work.
6:00am: You've made it to the spinning room just as the machines turn on for the morning. You see that Hazel, who just had a baby, is already back to work, and she brought her newborn in with her. She lays her in a small box beside her feet while she works, nursing her under a blanket from time to time.
9:45am: Hazel covers you while you run out to use the bathroom. They don't give you work breaks, and you need to be quick. As you walk by, you hear your mother's friend Betty yelling to the foreman that her loom is broken. She's worked at the mill in the same position for 20 years, just like your mother, and is mostly deaf from the noise of the weaving room. You hear her tell the foreman she knows how to fix her broken loom, but he yells back that he'll send a man to repair it when he can get to it.
11:30am: The foreman lets you leave early to get home to prepare lunch for your family. You used to get snacks from the company store on credit, but your family owed them too much money at the end of last year, so your mother says everybody has to eat at home now. The midday meal is the biggest and you have work to do. You don't have electricity yet like some of the other houses in the village do, but it's coming soon, you hope, and will make your life a whole lot easier. You brought a bucket with you this morning, as your water has to be retrieved from the shared pump on the road back home. Now that the sun is high you can see clearly that your house is not going to win first prize for "Best Kept" this year. You tried to plant flowers and a shrub a neighbor gave you out front, but you haven't had time to water them as they got established, and now they're brown and wilted.
12:00pm: The whistle sounds and the machines stop. Everybody has just under an hour to eat and then get back to work. Your family straggles in to eat. Your mother tells you that Betty waited until the foreman was out of sight, went down to the basement for a chain and fixed the loom herself. Your father comes in after everyone else and eats silently until it's time to head back.
12:45pm: The warning whistle sounds. You're running back to the mill after making lunches all around for your family and barely having time to eat anything yourself and clean up.
1:00pm: The final lunch whistle blows and machines start back up for the afternoon run.
3:10pm: You hear screaming and run out from the spinning room to see what's happening. One of the young boys arms got caught in the carding machine. They shut down the machine finally, but his arm is badly mangled. His father finally receives word and comes around. You see him shaking his head angrily and wonder if the father is upset about his son's injury, or the lost wages now that his son won't be able to work, or both.
6:00pm: The last whistle blows. Machines stop and everyone heads home. It's Friday, which means after five days on, you'll have to work half a day tomorrow until you're off on Sunday. You'll make about $3.00¹ for 56 or so hours of work, but all of that money goes straight to your mother and father. It's less than what the older women make for the same labor, but a little more than the doffers—the boys who change out the bobbins—make.
On your walk home along the dusty, unpaved road, you spy the preacher of the mill church sitting on his porch. The mill owner fired him from preaching, you heard, because he wasn't preaching the mill message. You overheard your father saying that in a matter of time, they'll probably evict that preacher from his house, too, and hire someone else who will toe the line.²
9:00pm: You finally head to bed after completing all of your nighttime chores. Your father isn't home yet. He's still out at the company store, "having a taste" and "blowing off steam." You close your eyes and think about the village dance coming up in a couple of weeks. You know you'll get to see your friends, listen to music and dance for hours, and finally get a break from work. You drift off to sleep and dream of Sunday, a day when no whistles blow.
Note: While the events above may not have all happened on one imaginary day, these are all real events that transpired at various textile mills and villages, as told by the people who worked there. Anecdotes used here were all gleaned from the excellent book and resource Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. (FYI, we don't get any money from that link; it's just a great book worth owning.)
It should be noted that Southern mills were highly segregated. Black men were typically only offered lower-end jobs that were physical in nature and paid very little. Black women were shut out of white mills almost entirely. The first Black-owned mill was developed by entrepreneur Warren C. Coleman in Cabarrus County, North Carolina around the turn of the century.
A notice for prizes award for best kept house. White Oak Cotton Mills, Greensboro, North Carolina.
Cotton Mill workers circa 1899. Public Domain.
Notes
¹ The equivalent of about $67 in 2022.
² This really happened at the Poe Mill.
Sources
"Day in the Life of a Mill Child," Child Labor in North Carolina Textile Mills, accessed 2 Sep 2022.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Leloudis, James & Kathryn Walbert, "Life in the Mill Villages." Anchor: A North Carolina History Online Resource, ncpedia.org, accessed 2 Sep 2022.
"Mill Village and Factory," Like a Family (online companion resource), accessed 2 Sep 2022.
Comments