Recollections Of Life In A Southern Textile Mill Village

Since its original publication in 1987, Like a Family has become a classic in the study of American labor history. Basing their research on a series of extraordinary interviews, letters, and articles from the trade press, the authors uncover the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Now with a new afterword, this edition stands as an invaluable contribution to American social history. "The genius of Like a Family lies in its effortless integration of the history of the family--particularly women--into the history of the cotton-mill world.--Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review "Like a Family is history, folklore, and storytelling all rolled into one. It is a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse.--Studs Terkel "Here is labor history in intensely human terms. Neither great impersonal forces nor deadening statistics are allowed to get in the way of people. If students of the New South want both the dimensions and the feel of life and labor in the textile industry, this book will be immensely satisfying.--Choice

Baseball. religion. work. death. and the company store-these figured eminently in the lives of Southern cotton mill workers and their families during the early decades of the twentieth century. In this firsthand account of his native Bladenboro, North Carolina, George G. Suggs, Jr., captures in rich detail the world of a thriving cotton mill town where the company was dominant but workers had forged a strong community. Here the focus is on the workers-their interests, personalities, and values-in their best and in their darker moments. Ultimately we see the many dimensions of working-class culture and taste a way of life that has vanished. Drawing upon childhood memories and his father's recollections, Suggs covers events in Bladenboro during the 1930s and 40s. He describes the nature of cottonmill work, the stresses and strains produced by undesirable working conditions, and the various ways in which workers and their families learned to cope. Many characters emerge from this story-from the kind woman who dispensed the company fiat money to the desperate men who would gamble it away. The book explores key topics such as social rankings, medical care, the company store, and workers' responses to death. Above all, we see how faith found expression on the job and in the surrounding evangelical churches. The workers of Bladenboro are gone, and little remains of the mills, but this work pays tribute to lives well lived under the most challenging circumstances.

It was never a term of endearment --linthead-- but some people whose lives were formed in the cotton mill villages of the South wore it as a badge of honor. One is Wilt Browning, part of the last generation to be born and raised on the mill hill. This book is a look at mill hill life from the 1940s through the early 50s, when the mills began selling off company houses and life on the mill hills began changing rapidly. Linthead is a revisiting of the life that thousands of Carolinians and other Southerners once lived, a life that exists now only in memories. Browning brings those memories to life.

Most of the American textile manufacturing business is now either bankrupt or has moved offshore. This leaves what used to be the Carolina textile belt riddled with former company villages which are having to scamper to provide water, housing and utilities for the mill villages services that once were provided by the plants themselves. "Carolina Linthead" hopes to tell what basic, warm communities these once were. The author, who was born and reared in the Southern textile belt, gives such a glance. And while he's at it, he tells of his determination to get out of the insular surroundings and join the "real world." He tells of growing up in the age when life was simpler and even radio was a new-fangled thing. The biggest recreation for most people was visiting each other. They didn't invent front porches, but these came in mighty handy. Also, it gave a big impetus to textile village baseball. You might even say that most cotton mill people either spent most of their lives either visiting neighbors or going to ballgames. Just maybe such recollections will prompt other former lintheads to sit down and jot a few things about their own histories.

Employing a valuable body of archival material from the Alamance mill in North Carolina, McHugh here examines the role of the family labor system in the early evolution of the postbellum Southern cotton textile industry and details the development of the mill village.