Cotton mills: The South's Marshall Plan
I was disappointed when the Charlotte-based National Football League team chose the shopworn nickname, "Panthers." I thought the name "Charlotte Shuttles" would have been more alliterative and more redolent of local history. Call them the Carolina Shuttles and you don't lose much punch.
A shuttle, of course, is the streamlined device that hurtled filling yarn across a loom between the strands of warp yarn, at speeds of 45 mph, I'm told. It is also a space-age vehicle that carries astronauts aloft and brings them back home. The name would be a neat link between the past and the present.
Charlotte, in its zeal to become a world-class city, may prefer to forget its textile past, and the South as a whole may shun its linthead image in this era when shiny BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes and other prestigious products pour from its manufacturing plants. But the textile industry is the one that started the South down the road to industrialization.
"The Southern textile mill was the South's Marshall Plan," Jim Rumley told me as he conducted a tour of the Textile Heritage Center in Cooleemee, N.C. Jim and his wife, Lynn, maintain the heritage center on the site of a former mill village with the support of several groups dedicated to preserving the memory and spirit of the mills.
As Jim tells it, the Southern rural economy never recovered from the effects of the War Between the States. The war left around 250,000 widows, he said. The flower of Southern manhood perished on the battlefield or languished from war wounds. The region suffered from a lack of manpower, and the manpower that it had was low in industrial skills.
Enter the textile industry, fleeing the high wages and union shops of New England and spawning a new culture on Southern land. Clustered around the mills were villages of small homes with more comfortable abodes for the mill management close by. I lived on such a village in Langley in 1944-45. The Rumleys have for their headquarters the Zachary House, a spacious, two-story brick building erected for the manager of Erwin Mills No. 3, built by the Duke family around 1898. It once served as a recreational center for the town.
The mill workers may have been short on skills, but they were long on work ethic and on family loyalty.
"Remember, the people who moved into these villages still had the tang of the soil in their nostrils," Jim Rumley said.
Among those who moved in was Dora Coke and her family. Her portrait on a wall in the Heritage Center shows her to be a pretty, dark-haired girl. Her father had fought with Stonewall Jackson, and she was not one to bow humbly before moneyed power. Dora may not have thought of herself as such, but she was an early fighter for women's rights.
At the time, the mills didn't deal with individual job-seekers. They dealt with families. The family elder would strike a deal with the mill management. If management offended one worker, it risked losing the whole family.
"I want to be a weaver," Dora told the supervisor.
At that time, weaving was considered to be a man's job. But the supervisor didn't want to lose a whole family, so he promised that Dora could learn to be a weaver.
As time went on and the promise went unfulfilled, Dora went to him and said, "Sir, you've broken your word."
The supervisor stood his ground. So did Dora. Soon afterward, the wagons of the Coke family hit the streets of Cooleemee, laden with furniture and personal belongings. The mill lost a number of good workers. Eventually, the company caved, and Dora became a weaver.
The textile exodus from New England to the South took place roughly between 1880 and 1923, although the Graniteville Company, a home-grown enterprise, was in Aiken County as early as 1847. The Southern flow bled the New England industry dry. Dixie mothers and fathers brought their children into the mills to work. If that sounds harsh to the modern ear, one must remember that the alternative to working in the mills was working in the fields - not a pleasant experiencing in the broiling Southern sun. The young people found pockets of leisure in the work day. Boys would play hide and seek when the machinery didn't require attention. Little girls brought their dolls to play with.
The Yankees tried to introduce Northern efficiency, but it didn't work.
"I don't want people following my wife to the bathroom with a time clock," protested one defiant linthead.
The Dora Coke story was a southwide story, said Rumley. The workers shunned unions, but they embraced family solidarity, and the mills tried to accommodate. They provided baseball fields for local teams and even fielded semi-pro teams. Where do you think Shoeless Joe Jackson learned to hit a baseball? Many provided college scholarships to sons and daughters of their employees. I attended the University of Georgia on a scholarship from a foundation established by the Graniteville Company.
The mills provided other forms of recreation. In the late '60s, when I was in public relations for Springs Mills in the Carolinas, the company provided golf courses, bowling alleys and even a beachfront motel in Myrtle Beach for its workers. And at its large recreational park on the Catawba River near Great Falls, I met Grand Ole Opry stars such as Tex Ritter, Merle Travis, Sonny James and Faron Young, all brought in by the mill company for the entertainment of its employees.
Such benefits were often derided as paternalistic, but the mill hands didn't complain.
These columns on mill culture have tapped a rich vein of nostalgia among Southerners who remember the mills and their impact on the region. I hope you'll indulge me one more time as I return to the subject next week.
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.