If your family has been around North Carolina’s Piedmont for a century or so, chances are some of them earned their living in a textile mill. And they may have started pretty young.

Click to read photo caption. Photos courtesy of the Library of Congress, ©2008 Endeavors.

Twelve-year-old kids (and many even younger) were on the payroll at textile mills all over North Carolina. If an eight-year-old girl claimed in a job interview to be fourteen, she was ready to start earning fifty cents a day — as long as her parents stood nodding behind her.

In the early 1900s, the National Child Labor Committee set out to show the government that the United States needed stricter child labor laws, and that employers all over the country were ignoring the laws already in place. That’s when they hired a photographer named Lewis Hine.

Hine’s most famous shots are of construction workers swinging out over the New York City skyline on beams and ropes, piecing together the city’s skyscrapers. But in 1908, Hine was making his way from Maine to Texas, taking photos of children who worked as coal miners, shrimp sorters, oyster shuckers, cigar rollers, newsies, and factory workers.

In 2007, historian Robert Allen was scrolling through images at the Library of Congress. It was an accident, really, when he happened on the Hine photographs. But when he did, he saw hundreds of North Carolina children toiling away during all hours of the day and night. Hine had stopped and set up his camera at mills all across the state, including the Loray Mill in Gastonia, where Allen’s own grandparents lived and worked. In the 1900 census, Allen found the occupation of his grandmother listed as “a spinner in a cotton mill”; she was eleven years old.

The textile industry needed those child workers, Allen says, and their families needed the income. Wealthy mill owners decided where to build their factories based on where they could find cheap land and a reliable source of water power. The owners often set up shop in unpopulated places, building up the machines before they had anyone to work them. Then they sent messengers into the mountains and the countryside to lure workers with promises of paid work. Times were lean for North Carolina farmers, and hundreds of hungry families were carted to the factories.

But to be allowed to rent a home in the mill town, each household had to provide a certain number of workers. There was a shortage of adult white male workers; North Carolina’s rural population was already sparse, and the population was still lopsided from all the deaths during the Civil War. Mill owners wouldn’t hire black workers to work alongside white workers, Allen says. That’s how women and children ended up on the payroll — they were cheaper to employ, and their low wages helped keep rates low for white male employees as well.

Click to read photo caption. Photo by Lewis Hine; ©2008 Endeavors.

At the time, a seventh-grade education was thought to be plenty for many kids in North Carolina, and those who finished or dropped out of school were expected to earn their keep. Some mill jobs, Allen says, were better suited to tiny, nimble fingers. Adults couldn’t work as fast or as easily with whirring spools and tightly bunched spinning gears, and so doffing and spinning were left to the young. Accidents were common.

During a class Allen teaches on the history of the family, he pulled up the 1910 census enumeration which included his grandfather. Allen realized then that his grandfather had lived only a few doors down from some of Hine’s subjects. That’s when the grim history of Southern mill culture slowly entered his work. He planned to hunt for the descendents of Hine’s subjects using online genealogical research sites such as ancestry.com and Heritage Quest, only in reverse — past-to-present, he says, rather than present-to-past. But his project took on unexpected speed when a story about his work came out in the Charlotte Observer. That’s when those children’s descendents began to contact him.

Allen immediately heard from several different families, he says, none of whom had ever seen the Hine photographs of their kin. Most of the people who contacted him still lived in North Carolina, but some families had since migrated as far as California.

When Alan Hogan, 54, of Richmond County, N.C. saw the photos in the Charlotte Observer, he told the newspaper, “My reaction was, ‘Dear God, that’s my grandfather a hundred years ago.’” Nita Bell Groves, 87, still lives in Gastonia where Hine photographed her father, Eugene Bell. “I’d never seen a childhood picture of my father,” she said.

North Carolina novelist Flora Ann Scearce saw the newspaper piece as well. Her mother worked in the Rosemary Mill in Roanoke Rapids at the age of twelve, and passed on to Flora Ann her diaries, letters, photographs, and a rare time-book kept by the mill overseer. Time-books held records of all the workers’ hours, wages, and deductions for rent, and overseers guarded them carefully to keep secret how much — or how little — they paid their workers. In October 2007, Scearce donated the time-book to Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection.

The rush of public interest spurred Allen’s work. He set up a web site for the descendents to connect with one another, and he hopes to hear from even more families in the coming year.

“The people who were a part of that history are dying out,” Allen says. The memory of North Carolina’s old mill culture is evaporating. The Loray Mill still stands in Gastonia, although it’s just been sold. Soon, he says, it will house condominiums.

Twelve-year-old kids (and many even younger) were on the payroll at textile mills all over North Carolina. If an eight-year-old girl claimed in a job interview to be fourteen, she was ready to start earning fifty cents a day — as long as her parents stood nodding behind her.

In the early 1900s, the National Child Labor Committee set out to show the government that the United States needed stricter child labor laws, and that employers all over the country were ignoring the laws already in place. That’s when they hired a photographer named Lewis Hine.

Hine’s most famous shots are of construction workers swinging out over the New York City skyline on beams and ropes, piecing together the city’s skyscrapers. But in 1908, Hine was making his way from Maine to Texas, taking photos of children who worked as coal miners, shrimp sorters, oyster shuckers, cigar rollers, newsies, and factory workers.

In 2007, historian Robert Allen was scrolling through images at the Library of Congress. It was an accident, really, when he happened on the Hine photographs. But when he did, he saw hundreds of North Carolina children toiling away during all hours of the day and night. Hine had stopped and set up his camera at mills all across the state, including the Loray Mill in Gastonia, where Allen’s own grandparents lived and worked. In the 1900 census, Allen found the occupation of his grandmother listed as “a spinner in a cotton mill”; she was eleven years old.

Click to read photo caption. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, ©2008 Endeavors.

The textile industry needed those child workers, Allen says, and their families needed the income. Wealthy mill owners decided where to build their factories based on where they could find cheap land and a reliable source of water power. The owners often set up shop in unpopulated places, building up the machines before they had anyone to work them. Then they sent messengers into the mountains and the countryside to lure workers with promises of paid work. Times were lean for North Carolina farmers, and hundreds of hungry families were carted to the factories.

But to be allowed to rent a home in the mill town, each household had to provide a certain number of workers. There was a shortage of adult white male workers; North Carolina’s rural population was already sparse, and the population was still lopsided from all the deaths during the Civil War. Mill owners wouldn’t hire black workers to work alongside white workers, Allen says. That’s how women and children ended up on the payroll — they were cheaper to employ, and their low wages helped keep rates low for white male employees as well.

At the time, a seventh-grade education was thought to be plenty for many kids in North Carolina, and those who finished or dropped out of school were expected to earn their keep. Some mill jobs, Allen says, were better suited to tiny, nimble fingers. Adults couldn’t work as fast or as easily with whirring spools and tightly bunched spinning gears, and so doffing and spinning were left to the young. Accidents were common.

During a class Allen teaches on the history of the family, he pulled up the 1910 census enumeration which included his grandfather. Allen realized then that his grandfather had lived only a few doors down from some of Hine’s subjects. That’s when the grim history of Southern mill culture slowly entered his work. He planned to hunt for the descendents of Hine’s subjects using online genealogical research sites such as ancestry.com and Heritage Quest, only in reverse — past-to-present, he says, rather than present-to-past. But his project took on unexpected speed when a story about his work came out in the Charlotte Observer. That’s when those children’s descendents began to contact him.

Allen immediately heard from several different families, he says, none of whom had ever seen the Hine photographs of their kin. Most of the people who contacted him still lived in North Carolina, but some families had since migrated as far as California.

When Alan Hogan, 54, of Richmond County, N.C. saw the photos in the Charlotte Observer, he told the newspaper, “My reaction was, ‘Dear God, that’s my grandfather a hundred years ago.’” Nita Bell Groves, 87, still lives in Gastonia where Hine photographed her father, Eugene Bell. “I’d never seen a childhood picture of my father,” she said.

North Carolina novelist Flora Ann Scearce saw the newspaper piece as well. Her mother worked in the Rosemary Mill in Roanoke Rapids at the age of twelve, and passed on to Flora Ann her diaries, letters, photographs, and a rare time-book kept by the mill overseer. Time-books held records of all the workers’ hours, wages, and deductions for rent, and overseers guarded them carefully to keep secret how much — or how little — they paid their workers. In October 2007, Scearce donated the time-book to Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection.

The rush of public interest spurred Allen’s work. He set up a web site for the descendents to connect with one another, and he hopes to hear from even more families in the coming year.

“The people who were a part of that history are dying out,” Allen says. The memory of North Carolina’s old mill culture is evaporating. The Loray Mill still stands in Gastonia, although it’s just been sold. Soon, he says, it will house condominiums.

Robert Allen is James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies, History, and Communication Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. He’s working with the Gaston Public Library and the Gaston County Museum of Art and History to arrange a centennial commemoration of Hine’s photographs in Gaston County in November 2008.

Lewis Hine’s photos are in the National Child Labor Committee Collections online. If you think one of the subjects may be related to you, contact Allen at 919-962-5165, or email robert_allen@unc.edu.

For more on child labor in the North Carolina textile industry, read Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World by Jacqueline Hall and Jim Leloudis.