The rhythm of life in mill villages 11/8/2009 9:55 PM By GENE OWENS Columnist
For generations, the sturdy Southerners who left the cotton fields for the cotton mills worked their way through flurries of lint, steaming humidity and suffocating heat toward the promised land in which the rhythm of the shuttle would give way to the rhythm of a rocking chair.
Like the fiber they turned into cloth, they sprang from the soil. Years of wrestling the land for a living had ground the work ethic into their genes, and they carried it with them from their exhausted fields into the humming mills.
Within the mill and its surrounding village, they built a distinctive culture that left its mark on small Southern towns such as those lining Horse Creek as it winds from Vaucluse toward the Savannah, and Cooloomee, N.C., where Lynn and Jim Rumley are keeping memories alive through a textile museum on the site of a mill village. I will come back to the Rumleys and their museum in a future column.
The wants of the 20th-century mill hand were few and simple: a bait bed in the backyard; a serviceable conveyance for going to church, to town and to the lake; children and grandchildren on their way to prosperity but close enough for a weekend visit.
For many, these wants have been filled, thanks to one generation's lifting the next generation on its shoulders.
"I've got all my children, except my baby girl, that I can see in 30 minutes," boasted a retired Alabama mill hand whose "baby girl" graduated from Auburn and married an Auburn grad.
With the arrival of the automobile, many mill hands kept their places in the country and drove into the mill villages to work. Others took advantage of the low-rent mill houses and lived in the village, where the mill whistle governed the cadence of life. It's the mill-village culture that the Rumleys celebrate in Cooloomee.
I lived on the village at Langley at the height of World War II. Our home was a white two-room shotgun on Barret Street within walking distance of the Langley Mill. The mill burned down in the mid-1940s. Last time I visited Langley, the house still stood.
At 5 a.m., Mama would rise at the sound of the mill whistle. Lights would be flickering on in neighboring houses as she lit the kerosene stove, rolled out her biscuit dough, sliced the fatback, laid it in a pan to fry and put on the grits to boil.
The 6 o'clock whistle summoned everyone to be up and about. Cold water from enamel wash basins splashed onto faces still pining for the comfort of a pillow.
Before the 7 o'clock whistle signaled the start of the first shift, shadowy forms would make their way down the dusty street toward the big building that loomed like a fortress over the village. From it came a drone like the roar of a waterfall, punctuated up close by a rhythmic percussion.
The droning was from the spinning room, where thousands of spindles twirled the bobbins that collected the yarn emerging from thin films of cotton flowing between small rollers on the spinning frames.
The percussion came from the weave room, where hundreds of shuttles slammed to and fro across the looms at 45 mph, batted back and forth like the aptly named shuttlecocks in a badminton game. Within the sweating brick walls, caked with damp clumps of cotton, the workers, unable to hear one another above the deafening clatter, learned to communicate by lip-reading.
The mills were not air-conditioned. Hundreds of electric motors churned hot air into the blistering heat of Southern summers to boost inside temperatures above 100 degrees.
It was into this lint-filled environment, in the early decades of this century, that working mothers would bring their babies, turning yarn boxes into bassinets and tapered filling quills into pacifiers.
When the babies reached the age of 8, 10 or 12 - depending on size - Mama or Daddy would take them down to the mill and introduce them to the section man - the line overseer. The children would work without pay until they were able to handle the jobs on their own. Then they could go on the payroll, contributing their paltry pay toward the family's necessities.
Little girls would take along sets of jackstones to play with during the intervals when the spinning was running well or the frames were shut down for doffing. Boys learned to improvise toys from the implements of the weaver's trade.
The textile workers seldom strayed far from the land. When the men were off work, they turned their backs on the clamor of the mill and sought the quiet solitude of woods and streams. The women kept house, tended gardens and visited.
As Glenn Cotney, a retiree from the Russell mills of Alexander City, Ala., once told me, "Everybody had a pea patch, and every pea patch had a covey of quail in it. I'd go from pea patch to pea patch. I didn't have to ask nobody."
That was the generation that entered the mills about the time of the Great Depression. It may have been the most selfless generation this nation ever produced. They worked tirelessly through the impoverished '30s, the hard times and hard work molding them into "a raised-right, God-fearing" breed, in the words of one mill-town journalist.
Then, as the nation stood on the brink of prosperity, they turned to the task of fighting and winning the most savage war in human history and came home determined to build a better world for their children.
They are the people who, in my mind and memory, wove honor into the term "linthead."
Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com.
Gene Owens is a retired newspaper editor and columnist who graduated from Graniteville High School and now lives in Anderson.
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Comment Title:
This was a great article. I am very interested in the history of Horse Creek Valley.
Posted by: On: 11/10/2009
Comment Title: Beautifully Written
Thank you so much for this article. It was wonderfully written and truly painted a picture of a vanishing part of our area.
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