Cotton mill villages, whence we come

For the past few weeks, I've been reading a book I had given my father many years ago. "Like A Family" from UNC Press is a study of cotton mill villages in the South, particularly North Carolina. I had given the book to Daddy because it sounded like a nostalgic piece about the good ol' days of growing up on a mill village, which my father (and my mother) did. The book is light on nostalgia and a bit heavy on socio-political slant. The authors (six of them) view much of village life in terms of labor relations and economic exploitation of poor workers. Needless to say, my father, his brothers and sisters, his father, father-in-law and brothers- and sisters-in-law (all of my relatives worked in cotton mills) didn't see their lives that way. In their conversations at family gatherings, the talk was nostalgic, sharing stories of tending gardens, playing baseball with a taped-together ball, and courtin' in the parlor of mill houses. Though they never discounted the harshness of the work or the paucity of the wages, they fondly recalled the camaraderie and the community spirit of a place where everyone knew everyone else because all the families worked in the mill, attended the mill school, joined mill churches and lived in close quarters on narrow mill lots.

The story of cotton mills in the South is both a social and an economic history. Although the authors of "Like A Family" are critical of the post-Civil War investors who brought cotton manufacturing to the South, cotton mills were in some sense the salvation of the destitute former Confederacy. This defeated land, its currency worthless, had relied on agriculture operated by a landed aristocracy dependent upon slave labor. Without slavery and without the capital necessary to buy seed and fertilizer and hire labor, southern landowners developed the sharecrop system, which has been compared to slavery, but it entrapped both former slaves and poor whites, including some of my ancestors. Cotton manufacturing took advantage of the nearby raw product produced throughout the South and of the excess of farm labor. Both of my grandfathers were among those who made the transition from farming to "public work" (as their generation called it) in cotton mills. The work was hard, hot and dirty, and it failed to provide the personal satisfaction and sense of accomplishment of farming, but it paid a steady wage, regardless of weather or insect infestation. Few of those who tried public work ever went back to farming.

Some elements of the cotton mill economy make us cringe today — child labor, whites-only hiring policies, and blatantly anti-union laws and policies. But there was also an egalitarian element to mill villages. Everyone, at least in the early years, lived in basic, nearly identical houses built by the mill. Workers paid rent or received free rent in lieu of wages. In the mill village where my parents grew up, houses were rented by the room. If a couple needed only one bedroom instead of the three available, the extra rooms would be locked, and they'd pay rent for only the rooms they used. The superintendent's house would likely be larger than the workers' houses, but it was not ostentatious in any way, just another wood frame structure with few, if any embellishments. Although there was some wage differentiation, most workers earned close to the same wages, and most of the work was equally hard.

It has been reported that W.J. Cash, author of the seminal and still readable "Mind of the South," had intended to write "the great American novel" set in a mill village. Instead, he killed himself. Few novels I can think of are set in textile mills or mill villages. Novelists, it seems to me, have ignored one of the great stages of American life — the southern cotton mill village. Doris Betts' "The Scarlet Thread" is one of the few novels I'm aware of that is set in a mill village, and it is out of print.

In literature and in history, cotton mill villages deserve more recognition. For generations of Americans in the South, mill villages constituted the shared experience of life and work.