Life in a cotton mill

When the Whistle Blows, I Come Home and Get Supper

Gladys Caldwell (a pseudonym) met us at the door of her four-room cottage in the mill village. It was one of a row of dingy cottages out in Poinsett, across the meadows at the edge of Greenville. In a 1929 story for the Nation, Paul Blanshard recorded the daily routine of a South Carolina cotton mill worker. Her narrative intertwined her home duties with her work in the mill, as her long day at the mill was punctuated by equally burdensome domestic chores.

I had said to one of the strikers from the Poinsett cotton mill: “I want you to take me to one of your homes where a woman keeps the house going for the wages that most of you are getting. I would like to talk to a woman about washing and doctor bills and milk, and I want to see her house. Don’t take me to a widow with five or six starving children; I can find such people in New York. What I want is the story of how you normal, strong people live on your average wages of $12 a week.”

Gladys Caldwell invited us in. We sat by a tiny fireplace in her front room, which was also her bedroom. On the walls were a picture of Jesus and a calendar. In the room were a bed, a trunk, and a dresser; in the room opposite were a trunk and a bed; in the back corner room was a bed; in the kitchen were a table, a bench and an oil stove. In the four rooms there were four chairs. The house had not plaster, no rugs, no heating stove.

As she talked Mrs. Caldwell was vivacious and eloquent, with flashing brown eyes and flashing white teeth. From time to time she spit snuff into the fireplace with perfect nonchalance and marksmanship. Her husband came in before we were through, a big, upstanding man, strong and steady-eyed. He is thirty, she is twenty-nine.

Here is Gladys Caldwell’s story as it made it into my notes:

I have a husband and five children. I’m a weaver, at least I work in the weave room fillin‘ batt’ries. I get paid by the day. No, I don’t mind tellin’ you about how I live. It’s bad enough and we mill folks have stood enough without kickin'.

I get up at four to start breakfast for the children. When you got five young ‘uns it takes a while to dress ’em. The oldest is nine and she helps a lot. The others are seven, five, four, and three. What do we have for breakfast? Well, we usually have bread and butter and syrup. No, we don’t get any sweet milk. We get a gallon of buttermilk every day from Mrs. Rochester for twenty-five cents. The children like it; they don’t take much to sweet milk. They ain’t used to it.

After I’ve got the children dressed and fed I take ‘em to the mill nursery, that is three of ’em. Two go to school, but after school they go to the nursery until I get home from the mill. The mill don’t charge anythin‘ to keep the children there. I couldn’t afford it anyway. We have breakfast about five, and I spend the rest of the time from five to seven gettin’ the children ready and cleanin' up the house. That’s about the only time I get to clean up. Ruby washes the dishes. Ruby is nine.

My husband and I go to the mill at seven. He’s a stripper in the cardin' room and gets $12.85 a week, but that’s partly because they don’t let him work Saturday mornin’. They put this stretch-out system on him shore enough. You know he’s runnin‘ four jobs ever since they put this stretch-out system on him and he ain’t gettin’ any more than he used to get for one. Where’d they put the other three men? — why they laid 'em off and they give him the same $12.85 he got before.

I work in the weavin' room and I get $1.80 a day. That’s $9.95 a week for five and a half days. I work from seven to six with an hour for dinner. I run up and down the alleys all day. No, they ain’t no chance to sit down, except once in a long time when my work’s caught up, but that’s almost never.

At noon I run home and get dinner for the seven of us. The children come home from school and the nursery. We have beans and baked sweets and bread and butter, and sometimes fatback and sometimes pie, if I get time to bake it. Of course I make my own bread.

It takes about $16 a week to feed us. We get nearly all of it at the company store with jap flaps. They are the slips that the company give you for buying groceries with after you’ve worked all day. Then you can get your groceries right away and don’t have to wait until the end of the week for your pay. If we didn’t have 'em some of the people would starve before the end of the week shore enough. I get my butter from Mrs. Rochester. She sells it for fifty cents a pound and we use half a pound every other day.

After dinner I wash the dishes and run back to the mill. We don’t have any sink but there’s a faucet with runnin‘ water on the back porch and a regular toilet there, too. You can see we have electric lights, but we don’t have any heatin’ stove. I cook with an oil stove and we have these two fireplaces.

When the whistle blows at six I come home and get supper. Then I put the children to bed. There’s a double bed here and a double bed in that other room and a double bed out in the back room. That’s for seven of us. The baby’s pretty young. I ‘spose all of the children’ll go into the mills when they get a bit older. We’ll need the money all right. Yes, my father and mother were mill workers, too, and they’re still livin’ and working‘. He gets $18 a week and my mother gets about $3 a week for workin’ mornin’s. There was four of us children in the family. My husband’s father and mother worked in the mill, too.

We’ve moved five times since we was married — that’s eleven years ago. It don’t cost much to move when you move a little way. We ain’t been outside of South Carolina. They ain’t nothin' in movin' from one mill to another in the long run. When we moved here from Woodside, just over the fields there, it cost us $2.50 a load for the two loads.

I rode around right smart when I was single, but I ain’t been on a train more than once a year since. My husband reads a book once in a while but I don’t get time. I went through the third grade in school and then I went to work in the mill. I was nine years old when I started work at Number 4 in Pelzer. My husband didn’t go to school neither but he managed to pick up readin' and he reads books. Yes, we take a paper.

When supper is over I have a chance to make the children’s clothes. Yes, I make ‘em all, and all my own clothes, too. I never buy a dress at a store. I haven’t no sewin’ machine but I borrow the use of one. On Saturday night I wash the children in a big wash-tub and heat the water on the oil stove. Then I do the week’s ironin‘. I send the washin’ to the laundry. I just couldn’t do that, too. It costs nearly $2 a week. Our rent in this house is only $1.30 a week for the four rooms and we get water and electric lights free.

I always make a coat last seven or eight years. My husband gets a suit every two years but he ain’t had one for the last six years. He got an overcoat about four years ago. Things have been pretty hard. I like the movies but I haven’t been to one in about six years now. Not since the children was young.

Maybe my children ought to get away from the mill village, but if they went anywhere they would go back to the farm and there ain’t no use doin' that. The farmers haven’t got it as good as we have.

I don’t get time to go to church. My husband goes to the Methodist church. Most everybody goes to church here. Sunday’s about the only day I get to rest any. Seems as if I just have to have a little rest then.

I press my husband’s clothes. He half-soles the children’s shoes and all our shoes. See those! Those soles on my shoes came from the dime store and cost twenty-five cents for the pair. He puts 'em on with tacks. I make a dress for myself about every six or seven months out of cloth I buy in town. It costs about twenty-five cents a yard.

We been lucky about sickness. The children ain’t been sick at all for years. When the doctor comes he charges us $2.50 a visit, but right now that the strike is goin’ on the doctors is callin’ for nothin’, and the barbers is cuttin’ the men’s hair for nothin'. That’s pretty much with the strike.

There’s one colored doctor over here but he don’t come to see anybody. Some of the folks goes to see ‘im for sores and such like. They say he’s a herb doctor, but as fur as deliverin’ babies is concerned I never heard of him deliverin’ a white baby. Let’s see, my babies cost $25 except the first one and that cost $30. ’Taint every doctor will do it for that. I never had any trouble. I worked up to two months before, mostly, an’ I went back when the children was about four months old. The nursery’ll take ’em when they’re three weeks old. I had to hire a colored girl when the babies come. That cost $7 a week.

Once I mashed my thumb in the mill. I was out for two months with it and I didn’t get anythin’. I went to pull a loom and the handle on the lever slipped because the gear was too tight and it mashed my thumb. The company don’t pay anythin’ for a thing like that.

Usually I get to bed between ten and eleven at night.

Source: Paul Blanshard, “How to Live on Forty-six Cents a Day,” Nation 128 (May 15, 1929): 580–581.

Cannelton Cottonmill Worker in 1864

My name is Hannalee Reed. I'm 12 years old, and I work as a bobbin girl here at the Cannelton Cottonmill.

I guess one mill's pretty much like another. This one's got 309 workers, 231 of them women. Back home in Roswell, I worked from 5 a.m until 7:p.m. every day 'cept Sunday. I'd get a half hour to run home for breakfast between 7 and 7:30 and again for lunch between noon and 12:45. Up here, I get to work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. I get paid $2.00 a week. My job as a bobbin girl is to sit with my bobbin box at my feet and watch the spinning girls up here on the third floor. It's too noisy in here for me to hear them calling for more empty bobbins, so I just have to pay attention to their hand signals. Then I run the empty bobbins to those that need'em. I work about 15 minutes out of every hour. The rest of the time I read my ABC book or knit on my stockings and mittens. Mama always said she hoped some day I'd be able to work up in the mill office, keeping books. But I don't 'spose there'll be much chance of that. There aren't any women up in the mill office. I recokon I'll go on to be a spinner myself, making thread. Or maybe I'll be a drawing girl, setting the patterns. Most boys who work at the mill start out at the age of 10 or so as lap boys, carrying cans of carded lapping to the mill workers who need them. Then they might go on to be mechanics or even carpenters.

I guess life ain't so bad here at this mill. By and large, it's a pretty safe place. We ain't never had no fires even though we have open gas laterns to see our work. The air gets filled with so much lint and fibers that they fairly dance up the lamplight like fireflies. I 'spect that's why, after you work here awhile, you get the cough. There have been only two deaths here at the Cannelton mill: one on an elevator and one when a spinnin' girl's long hair got caught in her machine and pulled her in. I guess every mill is dangerous in some way: the brass-tipped, fast moving wooden shuttles can misfire and hit a girl weaver. Fingers that don't move fast enough can get broken. And many a man has lost his arm being careless with the working gears of the great mill wheel.

I guess most people here know I was brought in from the mill in Georgia, but I don't talk much about it. It still feels like I'm in my enemy's own house. I guess that's why when that big ole' Southern ship came steamin' up the Ohio River and fired on this here mill, my heart let out a holler! The first cannon ball clean missed the mill altogether. But that second one made a direct hit -- right up there on that tower -- the one on the right. But it is no 'count since it just has outhouses in it. Good thing it didn't hit the other tower. All 400 of us use that circular staircase to get down from the shops on the top three floors!

I board across the street in one of those block houses make out of sandstone. I have a little room at the back of the house that has a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, and a washstand with a jug and basin on it. There's a hand-stitched red and yellow quilt on the bed. It's a fine room, and Miz Burton's a fine woman. They say she runs the best boardin' house in Cannelton. We ain't allowed to chew tobacco nor rest our elbows on the table nor drink out of saucers. But every night after work she allows that we sit right down at her parlor table whilst she give us slates, chalk, and books and teaches us! My heart beats so fast I think sometimes it will jump clean out of me. There ain't nothin' I like so much as learnin'. I reach right down in my apron pocket and feel for Mama's button; I'm goin' to make you proud, Mama.

- realistic fictional story of Hannalee Reed, from the book Turn Homeward, Hannalee, by Patricia Beatty