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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
H-0167, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Eva Hopkins is a third-generation cotton mill worker who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. This interview includes her observations on what the Charlotte mill communities were like and why so many families worked together in the mill. She traces the tasks required in millwork through her experiences and those of her mother, then describes social activities like church, parties, movies, and swimming. Her earliest work experiences happened during the Depression, so financial need kept her on the job until federal policy forced her to leave for a year. She remembers occasional union activity though she did not join the local union. She also recalls some health hazards presented by the cotton lint in the mill and conditions in mill housing.
Eva Hopkins worked in a cotton mill from the 1930s until 1952 and recalls various aspects of millwork, union activity, social activities, and life in the mill villages.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
The reason I went to work in the mills when I was fourteen, quit school, my daddy got sick, and he had to go to the sanitorium.
Did he have tuberculosis?
Un-huh.
That was a pretty common disease back then, wasn't it?
So then I went to work. I quit school—that was during the Depression.
What year was that?
I don't know. He went when I was seven years old to the sanitorium. Then I quit school when I was fourteen. I don't know what year that was.
So you were born in 1918. Nineteen-thirty-two then.
My dad and mother, they lived in New York, they lived in Massachusetts. Back then, mills would hire people, they would send you money to move up to come. Work, it was hard to get people up north back then.
Where were your mother and father born?
My mother was born in Asheville, up around Asheville, and my dad was born
in Monck's Corner, South Carolina, near Charleston. My dad's daddy died
before he was born, and he was a preacher and a farmer. My mother's
people, her daddy and mother and all of them, they were originally, his
dad and granddad and all of them were from Holland, I think. They would
have been Dutch. [Interruption]
They came to the cotton mill in Asheville when my mother was about seven years old, and they went to work in the mill. It was bad back then because the children worked twelve hours a day.
She was seven?
She was seven years old. They worked twelve hours a day, then they would
go home for lunch. Then they would go back to work
So I worked until I met my husband, we married. He worked at another mill. I worked at the Mercury Mill, used to be the old Mecklenburg, but it was Mercury when I went to work in it.
How many brothers and sisters did you have?
I had one brother and one sister. My brother was a merchant marine sailor. He went when he was seventeen years old to join the merchant marines. My sister worked in the mill too until she married, and she moved into South Carolina. She didn't work for a while. Then she came back, and she worked at the mill off and on. At different times, she worked at different jobs. She worked at stores, and she worked at Belk's, and she worked different places. But you make more money in the cotton mills. They can say what they want to about cotton mills, but you do really make more money there than you do in these stores, clerking in stores. She went where the money was. She quit Belk's and went back to the mill.
You seem to know how it was when she (your mother) was working in the mill. Did she talk about that?
Yes, she said the overseers and the section men—they had what
they called section men—they could whip the children back
then. If they didn't stay on the job and do the job, they could spank
them or whip
Do you remember what she did in the mill?
Yeah, she was a spinner. She ran what they called sides—to sping the yarn on. After she got older, she grew up and married, she ran warpers, and she could spool. Usually, if you worked in the spinning department, you learned to do most anything in that department. In the spinning department where I worked, there was spooling, winding, and spinning, and twisters. I learned to run all of them except warpers, creel warpers. I didn't ever learn to spin. I would have liked to because I thought I would like that better. I didn't ever learn to, I learned to do a little bit, but I couldn't run a set. They called them sets of sides. You wound by the pound, production. You'd wind these threads on these cones, take them off, and put them up. Then you put new pasteboard covers over them and wind more yarn on them. Have you ever been in a mill?
Un-uh.
Bobbins thread, and you put them down on the spindle, and you pull it up through there and you tie it with a knot. It runs on this cone. When it gets full, you take it off, and you finish putting your cones on there. That's what you creel in what they call a ball warper. Had ball warpers and beam warpers. I creeled both. I never did learn to run them; my mother ran them.
Did you say it was her father who had been a farmer?
Un-huh.
What kind of farm did he have?
I don't know. They were in the mountains. It was up above Asheville, up in there. I know I've heard her talk about my grandmother taking the baby out and putting it under the shade tree and having one of the bigger children to watch it while she worked in the field with him. So evidently, they had kind of a truck farm. I don't know. But he did own a lot of property up there at one time. Things got bad, times got hard, and he sold off a lot of it. Then that's when he came to the mill, when the children were bigger.
He went to work in the mill in Asheville.
Asheville, North Carolina.
Do you know what he did in the mill?
I think he—they had a elevator—he ran the elevator. You had to pull it up and down by ropes back then.
No buttons then?
No buttons. You pulled it with ropes, and I think he took bobbins from one department to another on that elevator. He never did learn to run a machine. He didn't ever do that. He died in a soldiers' home in Columbia, South Carolina.
How long did your mother work in the mill?
My mother worked till she retired, till she was sixty-five.
When did you all move to Charlotte?
When I was nine years old.
Why did you decide to move?
My daddy fell off and got sick. He was in the sanitorium in Columbia,
South Carolina. We lived in Rock Hill at that time. My dad and mother
both working at one of the mills in Rock Hill. I can't remember just
which one because they worked in two. They worked in one called
Why did they move from Asheville down to South Carolina?
Well, after the children all got grown, they moved first from Asheville. I think they moved to Charleston, South Carolina. That's where my mother was married, in Charleston, South Carolina. Then, they just scattered, how people will do. They would get offers from another mill. They would see advertisements in the paper about it. They would want the help at another mill. They would send a fare and even pay for the freight on the furniture to have it moved. I know my mother and daddy, when I was a baby, they lived in North Adams, Massachusetts, they lived in Utica, New York. Every place they would offer more money, and they would go.
Do you remember how much they were making?
No I don't, but they paid more up there than they did in the south, and
that's why they went. One time, daddy and mama lived in Ontario, Canada.
They worked over there in
Was that pretty usual that people would travel that way?
Oh yes, they moved from place to place. Every pasture was greener. They'd
go there because they'd make more money. They always came back down
south. They wound up back down here. They came back home. I was born in
Columbia, South Carolina, and my husband was born in Greenville, South
Carolina, so we're South Carolinians.
That's a roundabout way of getting to Charlotte. When you were growing up, did anyone come in to take care of you and your brothers and sisters while. . . .
Like I said, my brother was seventeen years old. He joined the merchant marine. He was twelve years older than I am. My sister's six years older than I am, so when I was six years old, my sister was twelve. I had some aunts and things, different relatives around that would look in on us and everything, but we pretty much took care of ourselves. When I went to work out here at the Mercury Mill, I worked twelve hours a day, and then the NRA came in, and they wouldn't let me work anymore until I was sixteen. I was off work a year, then when I was sixteen, I went back to work. Then I got married when I was seventeen.
When you were a child, what kind of games that you all play to amuse yourselves? Did you have to help around the house too?
My dad stayed in the sanitorium so many years, he was
Did you enjoy school, or was it a frightening experience?
I didn't care too much for school, that's why I quit. I did fine in school in everything except math, arithmetic. I hated that with a passion, and I never did very well in it.
I sympathize with you.
Otherwise, I got good grades in school. I could have gone on to school.
My mother wanted me to go on, but I wanted to quit and go to work. We
moved right out here on the corner next to the mill. At that
Did each mill have its own village
Where I live is the Mercury. These are Mercury houses, and from here on down that way, they're Johnson mill houses. Down farther on the other side of North Charlotte where those store buildings are, that's the Highland Park village. Each mill had its own village.
Did you visit in each other's villages, or was a village off limits?
Oh no, no, everybody knew everybody. We'd know people from the Highland Park, but mostly, the Highland Park, I didn't know too many people down there because North Charlotte kind of divided. We call it North Charlotte. All of those stores and drug stores and everything right in the center between the two villages.
When your father was in the sanitorium, did you go visit him?
Oh yes. They didn't let me go in where he was until I was about twelve
years old. He got better and was up. He never was so bad until he
couldn't get up. He was up. They collapsed one of his lungs after I was
married, and he got better. He came out of the sanitorium. He wasn't
able to work again in the mill because on account of that cotton lint
dust. He worked as a watchman for a while at different places. Then he
worked at Ivey's. They called them floorwalkers. He just never did go
back to the
Do you think she enjoyed her work?
Well, she must have. She worked always; she didn't know anything else because she went to work when she was a child and she didn't know how to do anything else. Back then, children didn't get to go to school too much. They put them to work in the mills when they were so young. But my mother could read and write, and my dad had a good education. He was really much more educated than mama because he went to school, went to night school and paid for it after he got old enough to go to work.
He was working in the mills and going to night school?
Un-huh.
Did he pay for that himself or did the mill?
No, he paid for it himself.
That's real interesting to be able to work all day and. . . .
My grandmother, my mother's mother, she went to singing school when she
was a girl. I heard mama talk about that. They had to pay for that back
then. I never heard mama talk too much about her mother's people. She
talked more about her daddy's family because some of them lived up there
in the mountains near them. She said back when they had slaves, back
there in slavery times, my granddaddy's cousin—his
uncle—he had so many slaves, he couldn't count them. He didn't
know how many he did have. Of course, the war came along and all that
was lost. They're still some of them up there, round the mountains, up
around
Did you have any younger brothers and sisters, or were you the baby?
No, I'm the baby.
So there were three children?
Un-huh.
Did your mother belong to any organizations like women's clubs, or was she able to get outside the home and outside of working?
No, because when I was little, until I was sixteen years old, you worked twelve hours a day. You worked from six in the morning till six at night, then the third shift—we call it now; they didn't call it third shift then, they just called it the night shift—they would work at six at night and work till six in the morning.
So just two shifts where today you'd have three shifts?
Yeah, un-huh. At different times, she has worked both of them. At different times, she has worked both of them. For a while, she worked first shift, then after I got older, she—she did work at the Highland Park up here near Sixteenth Street, that park—she worked at night. I stayed with the ladies downstairs at night. We lived upstairs in an apartment. Ladies downstairs let me stay down there and sleep at night with them because mama didn't want to leave me at night by myself. I was only about ten years old. So I slept down there at night. She really had a hard life because she had nobody to help her. My dad's sick all those years. She didn't have a chance to go anywhere and join any kind of clubs because you worked six days a week. The only thing she belonged to was church, and she did go to church every Sunday and took me too. She didn't send me, she took me. We went to church and Sunday School every Sunday, but that's about the only recreation or outlet that she had was church because she had to work.
Apparently she enjoyed church.
Oh yes.
Did you enjoy church, or were you sometimes frightened by the sermons?
No, I was never frightened by the sermons. We belonged to the Methodist Church. They didn't get up and beat their breast and pull their hair, and preach this hell fire and damnation stuff as bad as some of these churches. So, no, I was never frightened in church. I loved Sunday School.
Was your church near your home? Was it in the village itself?
We walked. Nobody had cars back then when I was a little girl. You went to the church that was closest to you. I think that's the Methodist Church when we moved to Charlotte. I went to Ebenezer Methodist Church in Rock Hill when I was a little girl. After we moved to Charlotte, we went to Duncan Memorial up on Brevard Street. Then we came back here and moved back here to what we call North Charlotte, we went to Spencer Memorial. I don't go there now, I go to Whiting Avenue Baptist. I've changed denominations.
Why did you do that?
Well, I don't know, I went down there to visit, and I liked the preacher. I liked the sermons he preached better, and I enjoyed the Sunday School class and the teachers, the way they taught and all, more. I just really enjoyed it more, so that's where I went.
Did a lot of people who you worked with also go to your church?
We lived on Sixteenth Street, and my mother worked in Highland Park. That
was #1, Highland Park #1. It was near town. Just about everybody that we
knew went to the Methodist Church, everybody that we knew around there
where we lived went to the Methodist Church. Some of my little friends
that I went to school with went to the Episcopal Church, Chapel of Hope,
and I did go up there and visit sometime with them. Just about everybody
went to Duncan Memorial. A lot of the women that my mother went with,
back then, all of them just about had to go to work when they were small
children. A lot of them didn't get to go to school, and didn't have an
education. My mother was secretary-treasurer of Sunday School class
Do you remember who the Sunday School teacher was? What kind of people would be the Sunday School teacher?
People that worked out there where she did. See, they would have a
teacher, someone that could read and write, and they had an education
enough to read and write, had to study the Bible and understand it,
could teach it. There were some of them.
Why did you decide to quit?
I had two babies at once. They were thirteen months apart, the two first
ones. Then I went to work when the youngest one was five months old.
Then I worked until I had the next one which was eight years.
Where does he work now?
He works at Mineral Springs. He works in the carding department. He's
overseer in the carding department at Mineral Springs. They ran cotton;
when I was working it was all cotton. Then this synthetic came in after
I quit, and he had to work with that. He knows all about that synthetic
stuff.
Do you remember your first day at work?
Oh my goodness, do I! I got so sick smelling that oil and that cotton and stuff. I just got nauseated. I remember my first day
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I had been in to see my mother; they'd let you go in then. They wouldn't let no children go in, but if you were twelve or older, they would let you go in. I had been in to see her, but the cotton bothered me so much around my nose, it would bother me. Then the oil, you could smell the motors. Ran belts and things that pull the motors, naturally, you had to oil them. That oil would get hot, and I could smell it, and it made me nauseated. In fact, one day I fainted. I got so nauseated at my stomach, I fainted. Everybody didn't do that, that was just me. I just couldn't stand that scent till I got used to it. After I got accustomed to it, it didn't bother me.
Had your mother taught how to do things that she let you help her do her work in the mill?
No.
So how did you learn your job?
They let me go in and stay with a lady that knew. I learned to spool which I think was the easiest thing to learn back then. They let me go in and stay with her until I learned how. They didn't pay me to learn, they just let me go in and stay with her.
How long did it take you to learn?
About a week. I was a fast learner. They spooled by the box. They called them a box, they were bobbins that came off of the spinning frame. They put them in a box, measured them up in a box which was a big box. They put that in a—you had metal troughs that ran along underneath the spindles—they put the bobbins in that, and you had to pick that up, then put it on the spindle, tie it up with a knot to the spool. Then when spools got full, you took them off, put them up on the top of the shelf—had a shelf up, you put up over there—they paid nine cents a box when I went to work.
Were you doing piece work then?
Um-hum. Nine cents a box. You had to spool nine boxes a day.
So that means you were making less than a dollar a day.
Un-huh. When I went to work, I was making less than a dollar a day. I worked lots of days when they would be short of yarn, didn't get as much off the spinning frame? I'd work lots of days for eighty cents. Now that was back in 1933, probably, wasn't it?
Um-hum. Did that upset you that because the yarn wasn't coming in that you weren't able to get your. . . .
No, not really because I was young and I was glad to get through and get out. When I'd get through—they call it catching up with your yarn, spool all that you had there—and you weren't going to get anymore the rest of the day, you could go home. I was young enough that I wanted to get out and have a good time with the girls and boys.
Was there a lot of line floating around then?
Yes, and they didn't have air conditioning in the mills. They had
windows, and if you'd raise the window very high, air would come in, it
would make the ends come down. It was terribly hot. They wouldn't let
you raise the windows very high. Sometimes they'd let you raise them and
prop a bobbin under them. I'd put the window up at the end of my frame,
then here'd come the section man along and take it down. When he'd leave
and go on off, I'd raise it again [laughter]
Would he get angry at you if the window was up?
No, they'd just come by. If he'd gotten angry at me, I'd of gotten angry back at him.
Were most of the people you were working with women then?
Yes, all the spoolers and spinners were women. In the spinning room back then, they had what they called people that tied on bands. They had to put bands around the bottom of the spindle in the spinning room? Also on the spoolers, they had a band, leather band around. They had men that did that, and men that ran what they call run the section. They were kind of underneath the overseer. They had men doffers that took the bobbins off the spinning frames.
How did you have fun in the mill to sort of pass the time. . . .
Well, you worked on the frame with somebody. You could talk through it, you could see through it. You worked in the alley—they call them alleys. There was a lady in this alley with you, and then there was one on the other side of you on the other side of the frame. Well, there was two that you could talk to. Then they'd have a lunch break. They had what we called a "dope box," a "dope wagon." It was a cart on wheels, and they had all kinds of things—sandwiches, and drinks, and cokes—it came through twice a day. You'd all go up there and get something, refreshments, or a sandwich, or whatever you wanted and sit down and eat. You could talk then.
Did you eat in the same room, or did they have a lunch room?
Un-huh. No, no, they didn't have a lunch room. You had to sit out at the end of your frame—they had little benches you could sit on.
What did you all talk about?
We talked about how bad we hated to work, and how tired we were, and how
little bit we were getting paid, and we wished we were somewhere else,
doing something else. There were a few younger girls that worked up
there, and we would talk about our dates, and the parties we went to.
Then, most of the time, the people would have parties on
Who was driving the truck?
They would have somebody to drive it.
Is that the mill would have somebody to drive it or who?
I don't really know. I never did go into that to find out who. I just
know it was a man driving it, and it had a truckload of teenagers. So
evidently, it was somebody that had gotten somebody maybe from the mill
to drive it. I never did find out who the driver was. I think he was
from Highland Park. We lived out on Mercury then. There was really lots
of . . . we had good times, but it was nothing like it is now. There was
no cars or anything. On Sunday afternoons, we'd take walks, we'd take
Kodak pictures. We'd walk up to the school house where there was a
pretty landscape, and we'd take pictures. You could see boys and girls
out walking holding hands on Sunday afternoon with a camera. It was
really lots of fun, much more I think than girls and boys have this day
and time because there's so much going on now that's
How much of your pay did you contribute to home. . . .
None of it. I kept it all.
Did that mean that you had to buy your own clothes then?
Yeah, I would buy my clothes. That was one reason I wanted to go to work, to have my own money because my mother—like I said it was during the Depression—she had to keep up the house. Nobody working but her, she had to keep up the house. I never knew my mother not to have some money, she was never broke. She always had a little bit of money.
She must have been a good budgeter.
Since it was only just the two of us—my older sister was
married. She was married, she was gone for years, then she was
divorced—she came back home and worked a while, stayed with us
until she married again. But I had my own money that I made which wasn't
much, but you could get a pair of nice shoes back then for a dollar,
$1.98. You had a real good pair of shoes for that. You could
get a decent looking dress for three or four dollars. So I had some nice
clothes. I saved my money, bought my own clothes. No, my mother didn't
take my money, and she didn't charge me any board like I charge mine
[laughter]
But none of my children worked in the mill. My oldest son, he doesn't
live in Charlotte. This younger son, he's the only one that stays home.
He works at the Charlotte Memorial Hospital; he's data processing
technician. Then my other son, he's a policeman, and my daughter's a
supervisor at were Studios. So none of them
Well, it was hard work. After a while, they brought the pay up until they made fairly good wages, but still it was hard work, it was hot—even with air conditioning it was still hot—it was still that cotton. You've heard about brown lung. My husband works in the carding department, has since he was a boy. He has emphysema. He doesn't have it real bad, but he has it. We just didn't want them to go in that. I thought they could find something better to do. You always want better for your children than you had yourself. It was hard. It was a hard life. A good life in some ways, but hard work.
Were there other entertainments that you had when you were a child in the village? Was there a recreation center or anything like that?
Yes, they had a park. They had a ball park where they played ball. Our Sunday School class, every once in a while in the summer time, they'd take the children swimming, take them out to the swimming pool. We didn't have a "Y." They built this Johnson "Y" down here. When my children were small, they went to the "Y" all the time. They had Johnson "Y" which was real good.
I came by that, and I was wondering how old that was.
My oldest son and my oldest daughter, they went down there. They was down
there when they were growing up. My next son, the baby one, they wanted
him to join the swimming team. He could dive so good. He would dive down
so deep, then his nose would go to bleeding, so he couldn't do that. But
it was really a wonderful thing, that "Y" that they
built out here, for the children around here. They didn't have things
like
Didn't you tell me before that you met your husband at a ball game?
At a ball game. It was right up here at Spencer and Herring Avenue. The ball field's still up there.
Do you remember what position he played?
He wasn't playing ball. He was a spectator, and I was a spectator. I was watching him more than I was watching the ball game, and I think he was watching me more than he was watching the ball game. So that's how we met, and we started dating.
What would you all do for dates? Did you go with other kids?
We would go to parties. They ran on the village, they would have parties.
Different people would have parties on Saturday nights. Through the
week, you didn't go much of anywhere because you were too tired because
you worked. Mill work is hard work. We would go to parties. We would get
the streetcar and go to town to a movie. Then on Sunday afternoons,
you'd get out when the weather permitted. Other times, you stayed home
and listened to the radio, sat in the parlor and listened to the radio
[laughter]
Do you remember what you listend to? Was it music, or. . . .
On Staurday nights, we would listen to the Grand Old Opry. That's when it first started playing, got realy popular back then. Through the week, we would listen to the programs, "Mert and Marge," and "Amos and Andy," and all those things.
My mother talks about listening to the radio when she was growing up.
We had a Victrola, the kind you wind. When I was small, we had a Victrola
that you wind with your hand and records. We got along
Did you all have your own garden by any chance?
Yes, after we moved out here where we had a plot, but when we lived up on Sixteenth Street, we lived in an apartment, and we didn't have a place to have a garden.
Did you also have chickens or animals?
No.
Did anybody in . . .
I don't know. There's some had a few chickens, I think. The mill village
wouldn't allow it, smell to bad. Not at Mercury. They had men from the
health department that came out. He brought
Did people from the mill come through too to look at the houses or was it just somebody from the health department?
He worked with the mill, but he was from the health department, but he
would come out and go over the village, then he would report back to the
mill office anything he found that wasn't up to snuff. They'd make them
clean it up—shape up or ship out—they'd fire them.
They had to move. Now you can't get the real estate company to make them
clean up around their house. We have so many around here, it's just
terrible. We have a North Charlotte Action Committee. We have meetings
every so
Is that like a neighborhood community. . . .
It's out in here, where they sold these houses.
How old. . . .
This house that we live in, it's almost one hundred years old.
Well, it didn't look like this when we bought it. We've done so much work to it. These other houses around here don't look like this, because they haven't done anything to them. A lot of them did inside, but this was huge back room back here. My husband, he knocked this wall out here in that living room. He re-finished all the floors, lowered all the ceilings, put in new windows, just really underpinned it. We just really did a lot of work.
This is the church that I go to down here. That's Whiting Avenue Baptist. It started in a one room cottage down at Highland Park Mill. I was going to show you. There used to be a mill pond, Mercury Mill Pond out here, right around the corner from Davidson. This is the first church they built. It's been bricked up now on Thirty-sixth Street.
That's still standing. It's a really elaborate and beautiful looking church.
There was a Mercury mill tank. You saw that big tank out there. Then they
had a big pond out there; it was a muddy pond—huge thing. Two
little boys got drowned in it. They didn't have a fence around it. They
tried to get them to drain it then, and they wouldn't do it. So across
the street from me over here, this lady had a little boy, two years
Were these people who worked in the mill, and they sued the company?
Yeah, um-hum.
That must have taken some guts to sue one of your employers.
They sued them and they made them drain that pond. They told them to put
a fence around or drain it. They told them they wanted to drain it.
I'm Methodist.
I was sprinkled in the Methodist Church [laughter]
When did you buy it?
In 1952 they sold them, didn't they? Because he was born in 1954.
When you were working, do you remember people getting hurt on the job?
Yes, there was a boy got his finger cut off in a machine out there at the Mercury Mill. They brought him out. I saw him when they brought him out with his hand wrapped up. They put him in a car and took him to the hospital. He seemed to be all right. They put him on the operating table to operate on that finger, to sew it up, and he died from shock. Then I saw a belt broke out there one time and hit a man in the head. His head was real bloody. He lived; he had some scars.
Did you ever get hurt?
Oh no, I was always careful. I never got hurt. The only thing that hurt
me was hurt my feelings had to go to work [laughter]
Did you have to wear a knotter on your hands?
Un-huh. I wore a knotter. The faster you could put that bobbin on there, and get that thread over that knotter and get it tied onto that cone on the winder, or either on the spool on the spooler. When you creeled twisters, you had to tie the string from the bobbin up over the thing. So I used a knotter, and when I creeled warpers, I had to use a knotter. I used a knotter for just about everything I did but spin. You don't use a knotter for that.
Were there certain jobs in the mill that were more desirable than others, or did everybody think their job was the best job? Did you try to move around?
I don't know. I always wanted to learn to spin, but when I went to work,
the spinners had so much to do, so much detail to it, so many
Did things change a lot while you worked? How many years total did you work?
I went to work when I was fourteen, I worked until I was fifteen, which was a year. Then NRA came in, and I had to quit for a year. I went back to work when I was sixteen, and I worked till I was about nineteen because that was when my first baby was born in the spring. I quit then. I didn't work anymore till the next one was . . . I went back to work then in 1940. I worked from then on until 1948. Then I went back to work in 1950. I worked about two years, and then I haven't worked any since.
Did things change a lot from the first time you went into the mill?
The wages did. When I went back to work when the children were small, they had these blowers. They had gotten these to suck some of that lint up. So much of it would get in your nose and your throat.
When you were married, did you have to get your mother's permission to be married?
No, I just told a lie about my age. I just said I was eighteen [laughter]
You were really seventeen.
I was really seventeen. My husband was almost twenty-two. He's six years older than I am.
Where did you go get married?
We went to York, South Carolina.
Did a lot of people go down there? I talked to somebody else who had gone down there.
Yes, um-hum.
So they believed that you were eighteen?
Un-huh. Yeah, I told them I was eighteen.
Were you able to go on a honeymoon, or did you have to come back?
No, had to come back. We got married on Saturday night, and we came back, and we went to work Monday morning. We didn't have a honeymoon.
Where did you live?
We lived out here on Mercury Street on the corner, right across from the Mercury Mill.
Did you come back and live with your parents?
My mother. Yeah, we lived with my mother for a year, then we got an apartment. She was all alone, and I didn't want to leave her. She went to live with my sister in South Carolina after we got married, after we got an apartment. She stayed down there for about a year, then she came back to factory work. She got her own apartment then.
At that time were you all working in the same mill or two different mills?
No, I was working in the Mercury Mill, and he was working in the Johnson Mill when we got married. After they closed the Mercury Mill, I went to work when my son was five months old in 1940, I went to work at the Johnson Mill because the Mercury Mill was closed.
What was your husband doing at that time?
When we got married? He was a comber tender. Then later on, he got promoted up to section man, and then later on, he got to be an overseer.
Was that a real desirable thing to do?
Oh yes, very. And the salary was desirable too.
Were there often conflicts between overseers and the people they were overseeing?
Not him, no, because he's very easy to work for. Everybody that's ever worked for him—he's been overseer for thirty-two, thirty-three years or more—no one that I've ever talked to that has ever worked for him said they had never worked for anybody they'd rather work for. He's real easy going, he's real fair to the help. He could see their point of view as well as his. He worked with the help. He didn't work against them. He didn't work just for the company, he worked with the people.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
The mill village was isolated. You hear that people called cotton mill workers lintheads and that type of thing. What was your response to something like that
Nobody ever called me that. Nobody ever called me a linthead. My response
would have been . . . I don't think I'd want to put it on tape because I
had been told, some of the people, some of them
Why do you think that happened, that sort of flip-flop, that now looking back, you have this image of a cotton mill worker that wasn't there then?
[comments that cotton mill work did not have the stigma now attached to it when his parents were working in the thirties] I'm not sure, really. I think it is just like most people tend to think of working class southern people anyway like something out of Tenessee Williams. They're greasy-headed, they wear white socks, they're rednecks, and all like that. A lot of people don't realize that when the mills first came to Charlotte, in particular, a lot of these people in 1900 or so, a generation or two back, had been very wealthy landowners, and had lost just about everything they owned in the Civil War.
That's just like my grandfather.
So there were a lot of rural folk that came in to work in the
All of his family, all of Paul's family, his daddy's family, they were all well to do.
His mother, and one or two other relatives are the only ones in his immediate family, other than another brother, who worked in the mill. They were cotton planters. They were very wealthy. In fact, some of his family built three large mills in Greenville at one time.
Greenville, South Carolina?
Un-huh. They were very well to do on his side of the family way back. But
through the years, by today's standards, they wouldn't have been that
well off. They were mostly farmers. A lot of my mother's people were
farmers too. When the mills come to town, they thought they could better
themselves by getting a job in the city. Then they got trapped in the
mills. I don't know why the image has got off. When I come along, it was
a social stigma. Like Tom, my older brother, he and I neither one would
ever have dreamed of going in that mill to work because people would
point and say, "You work in the cotton mill." It's
just got a bad taste to it now, but then, even up to the 40's or so, I
don't really think it did. It was just an everyday, lower middle class
or low class living because of the wages. Now, it does have a social
Even though my husband made fifteen hundred dollars last month with his
salary was over, and he
They don't call it mill anymore.
It's real modern where he works now. It's a beautiful plant, it really is. Doesn't look anything like these down here.
You talked about your husband was a real fair-minded overseer. What's an example? Would workers come and complain to him. . . .
Yes, they would come to say, "This hand over here is not doing his job. He's not working as hard as I am. He's getting paid the same amount of money an hour, and he's not doing nearly as much work as I am." That type of thing. He would go and try to straighten this out and find out why he wasn't doing it. Why the other one had to do so much more than the other one.
When you were going into the mill, do you ever remember speedups or stretch outs or. . . .
Oh my goodness yes! They could speed those machines up, and they did.
What would happen when they did that? Would you all protest?
You had to work harder. That's what would happen. You had to work so much harder to keep up the machine.
Did workers ever complain or. . . .
Sure they complained.
How would they complain?
They would go to the superintendent of the plant. They
Why not?
Well, that's why so many plants got unions. These plants that we worked in never had unions.
Was there ever an attempt to ever. . . .
Oh yes, they tried to get a union at all of them, but people wouldn't vote for it.
Why not?
I don't know.
Would you have been in favor of a union?
If it would have bettered working conditions I would have, and raised wages.
When a union attempt was going on, what would it be like in the mill? Would one of the union people be coming in to. . . .
Yes, and they would be at the gate handing out flyers.
Was this in the thirties?
Yes, this has been ever since I've been working off and on. They had a big strike right after I went to work at Mercury Mill, a six week strike. All the mills struck. They had picket lines, and nobody crossed the picket line to go into work. They were striking for higher wages.
Was that in '34? I've heard about the general strike. What was it like then?
So did you cooperate with the strike?
Oh yes, we didn't go across the picket line. We didn't go in. In fact, my mother joined the union. Everybody just about joined it. But we didn't never go up there, we didn't participate in it. She just joined it. We just stayed at home.
Why do you think she joined?
She's like everybody else. She thought that they weren't fair, they didn't pay enough. Just like raising those windows, that sort of thing. They wouldn't let you raise the window, and it was so hot. That's why we call them sweat factories, sweat shops. They wouldn't let you raise the windows, it was so hot, they didn't pay you enough. They'd make you what they call stretch out, put you on more work to do for the same amount of money, and that sort of thing.
Do you remember when she joined the union?
No, it was during that strike though. But then, she didn't keep up her dues after the strike was over and we all went back to work. She never did go back to any of the union meetings or anything.
Did some people cross the picket line?
Yes.
What did you think of those people?
I thought they were taking their life in their hands for one thing. I thought some of them just wanted to show people that they would do it if they could do it. But they couldn't get enough in there to run any machines, so they had to come back out.
Did you ever walk the picket line? Did your mother?
No, never!
In the late 20's and early 30's, there were strikes going on not only here, but all over in this area and Gastonia and up towards the mountains. Did you hear about these things or talk about them at work?
We heard about them. We took newspapers, and we read about them. But it didn't concern me too much at that time because I was young, and I had my mind on parties, and pretty clothes and having a good time.
Did you ever join once you were older and working or try to help on the picket lines?
No, they never got a union out there. After that strike was over, nobody ever fooled with it anymore. They didn't get enough people out there to get a union in that mill. They couldn't get enough people to sign up for it to get it.
What were the results of that strike?
I don't tink that it helped any. I don't remember that it did. I had my mind too much on other things. I don't know. Paul might could told you what it did. I don't remember.
The people who did join the union, did they lose their jobs, or did the company ever harass them or anything?