How the Other Half Ate by Turner Katherine Leonard

Author:Turner, Katherine Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520277571
Publisher: University of California Press

SOUTHERN TEXTILE MILL VILLAGES

Textile workers in mill villages throughout the South lived suspended between rural and industrial life. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, low crop prices and poor living conditions forced families to abandon farming and take up “public work,” as they called it. Textile mills sprang up to take advantage of water power and low-wage workers, especially in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. By one estimate, in 1905 one out of every five whites in South Carolina lived in a mill village.18 Without a tradition of industrial work, mill families struggled to incorporate their rural survival habits, including those related to housekeeping and food, into the new demands of living in small villages and working in an industrial setting.

Textile mill workers in the new South came to the mills from agricultural work along a variety of paths. Most families who went to work in mills had been farming, as sharecroppers or tenants, but some had owned their land. Many turned to mill work after repeated agricultural depressions prevented their families from prospering on the farm. Others came when the loss of a husband’s labor to illness, death, or abandonment made survival impossible. Still others came lured by mill agents who traveled the countryside promising inducements such as steady high wages and comfortable homes for families who promised to come and work.19 People moved back and forth between farming and mill work during the year or during their lifetime, or they combined the two, or they split family members between farm and mill.20

People who migrated to mill villages hoped to better their material lives, but they didn’t always succeed. About 90 percent of mill workers in the new South lived in company housing, where rent was free or nominal for employees and their families.21 Conditions in the mill villages to which workers migrated changed over time. Families in early mill villages were expected to live in one-room cottages, a step down from the usual tenant farmer or sharecropper’s dwelling, which had at least two rooms.22 By the time of the 1907 Bureau of Labor study, four-room houses were more usual, with only one family per house.23 In late nineteenth-century villages, houses were placed too close together and the communities lacked drainage, safe water supplies, and community facilities apart from a single company-owned store. By 1915, however, “village welfare work” had improved conditions with better sanitation, fly screens, churches, schools, stores, fenced yards that provided more privacy, improved streets, and landscaping. Conditions in mill villages, although poor, were not necessarily worse than those experienced by sharecroppers and tenant farmers, although mill villages were more crowded.24

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