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James Pharis oral history excerpt

About this recording

From oral history interview with James Pharis and Nannie Pharis, December 5, 1978; January 8 and 30, 1979. Interview H-0039. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007).

Date created

December 5, 1978

Duration

2:00

File

MP3

License

This recording copyright ©2004. All Rights Reserved

Source

Original audio housed by Documenting the American South / UNC Libraries

See this recording in context

• Children at Work: Exposing child labor in the cotton mills of the Carolinas: In this lesson, students will learn about the use of child labor in the cotton mills of the Carolinas during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They will learn what life was like for a child worker and then write an investigative news report exposing the practice of child labor in the mills, using quotations from oral histories with former child mill workers and photographs of child laborers taken by social reform photographer Lewis Hine.

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Learn more

• Search LEARN NC for child labor, history, North Carolina, oral histories, textile mills, and work.

In the classroom

James Pharis began working in the cotton mills in Eden, North Carolina at age 8. He worked for 11 hours a day and earned 25 cents a day for several years. He met his wife, who also began working in the mill at age 8, at a square dance in the mill village sponsored by the mill owners. Here, Mr. Pharis remembers smashing his hand while working in the mill as a 9 or 10 year old, and having to wait hours for the mill doctors to help him.

Transcript

James Pharis

I was about nine or ten years old when I got that hand hurt right there.

Allen Tullos (interviewer)

How did that happen?

James Pharis

I was riding on an elevator rope in the mill. Me and another boy was getting the quills in the mill. He was on the bottom floor and I was on the top floor. We’d go to the spinning room to empty our quills out, you know. The first one who would get up there would ride the elevator rope. He’d be down on the bottom floor. We’d ride the elevator rope up to the pulley and slide back down. I was riding one day and was looking round over the spinning room and my hand got caught under the wheel…(unclear)

That thing was mashed into jelly, all of it was just smashed all to pieces. They took me out. It happened right after, pretty quick after lunch one day. It started up after dinner, they gave forty-five minutes for dinner. They took me down to the company store — the drug store was in the front end of the company store—they took me down to the company store, never even notified my people or nothing. Set me down in the front of that company store. There were only two doctors in town at that time, and both of them was out of town on country calls, around town. I sat there until about four o’clock. Nobody done nothing in the world for me.