Child labor in North Carolina's textile mills

Lewis Hine, photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, recorded the lives and work of hundreds of children in the first decades of the twentieth century. Hine photographed these boys in Hickory, North Carolina, where they worked for the Ivey Mill Company. (Except where noted, the photographs in this slideshow were taken in North Carolina.)

Young girls worked the spinning machines at textile mills. This girl was employed by the Catawba Cotton Mills in Newton.

When the bobbins on the spinning machines were full of thread, doffers removed the full bobbins and replaced them with empty ones. Here, doffers are working at a spinning machine in a mill in Cherryville. Behind them are carts of full and empty bobbins.

Young doffers push bins of full bobbins past the spinning machines at Trenton Mills in Gastonia.

The boy in this photograph was identified as "one of the smallest doffers" in the Cherryville Manufacturing Company. Like most of the younger children in Hine's photographs, he is barefoot.

Eleven year-old Nannie Coleson works as a looper, attaching the toes of socks, at Crescent Hosiery Mill in Scotland Neck. She is so short that the machine is at eye level.

Charlie and Ollie Allen had been working at the Harriet Cotton Mills when this photograph was taken. Ollie was then about ten years old. Hine wrote that "the sanitary conditions are frightful." Note that the front porch is held up by a slab of rock.

Children in factories, like their parents, faced long hours of repetitive work in often dangerous conditions. But the expectation that children should work wasn't new to textile mills. Farmers often had no choice but to use their children's labor, and hard work was thought to build character. Here, an eleven year-old boy in Oklahoma walks behind a horse, plowing a field for peas.

Some farmers hired children for seasonal work. Here, three girls, aged eight, nine, and ten, string tobacco leaves. The ten year-old made 50 cents a day. The farm employed 12 workers aged 8 to 14, and another 15 who were over 15 years old.

Mill owners often published photos of model mill villages with neat houses and well-kept gardens. Here, Hine shows the small houses at Cannon Mills in Concord, surrounded by scruffy patches of weeds and billowing black smoke.

A family of textile mill workers in Gastonia pose in front of their house in the mill village. The girl, aged twelve, made 60 cents a day. Many mill owners allowed families one room in each mill village house per worker, a policy that encouraged child labor.

When they had time, boys played game such as marbles. The boy shooting the marble had worked in a mill in Salisbury for five years. His grandmother told Hine that "I don't like to have 'em play marbles on Sunday, but when can they play?"