"I had taken a job in a good textile business..."

So begins a brief account of his career by my late grandfather, Sydney Cone Jr., who started at the company then known as Proximity Manufacturing in the summer of 1925.

His training program began with a stint on the floor of the White Oak mill -- 10-hour days, and five on Saturday. It was hard, hot labor. My grandfather was a strong man until he died at 95, and that summer he was a 20-year-old fresh off an all-American collegiate lacrosse career, but they had to send him home early on the first day he worked doffing 40-lb rolls of cotton batting from their 25-lb steel center rods.

The industrial "New South" was just a generation old, and the moment was closer in time and perhaps other ways to the end of the Civil War than to the present day.

Here's Sydney's description of his trip south from Balmer: "Riding the coach out of Washington on the Southern Railway, I was impressed by the poverty of the country...When the train left Danville, Virginia to run fifty miles thru North Carolina to Greensboro, the garden plots were smaller yet, and the negro huts were little more than tobacco curing sheds."

An anecdote about the mores of the time: "I let slip a "Hell!" in the spooler room and was reproved by a fellow working lady in bonnet. She had progressed to the degree of holiness called 'Sanctified' I was told, and 'they do not tolerate cussing.'"

And another one: "...the female with the angel's face took on four of them, in sequence, but refused to give any kind of relief to Coy. The others were chuckling all the way back to the village over his loudly expressed disappointment. The young woman works in the mill, and rooms at this hotel with another female; it is generally agreed by the local gossip that the two of them are madly in love with each other, but do not object to mixed sex."

More bicentennial moments to come if anyone's interested.

Comments

[beth]

"The young woman works in the mill, and rooms at this hotel with another female; it is generally agreed by the local gossip that the two of them are madly in love with each other."

:)

Love it!

[Roch101]

Interested? Yes! More about the sex, please.

[Ed Cone]

That about does it for the sex, sorry. Lots more on mill village life, mill work, labor relations...

[John D. Young]

Roch, since you have been doing such good heavy lifting along with many others on the Wray Fray I will make the post below that is not as good as Ed's bit on the two lovers but may be of some interest. It is from perhaps the best work of Southern oral history, "Like a Family - The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World":

"Changing attitudes towards sexuality accompanied the new forms of entertainment and transportation. Automobiles allowed young people to move their courting out of the parlor and away from the watchful eyes of their elders. Earlier in the century movies and suggestive dances had been considered the exclusive province of the urban working class. But by 1920s dances such as the grizzly bear, lovers' two-step, and "shaking the shimmy" had been toned down and accepted by middle-class Americans, who paid dancing instructors to teach them the latest ragtime steps. Popular magazines, particularly between 1923 and 1927, asserted that love, not marriage, was reason for sexual relations. Movies, such as the 1926 film, "Dancing Mothers", challenged the sexual double standard, and the sharp line between good and bad women blurred as women adopted a more provocative public style. What once might have been considered immoral came to be seen as merely frivolous and irresponsible.

Indeed, to many mill workers like Dewey McBride it seemed that young women were the vanguard of change. McBride recalled that prior to World War I, when an unmarried woman arrived in a mill village, she found herself in a double bind. The first thing the boss man did was find out if she would go out with him. If she would, she kept her job; "if she wouldn't, she kept going." But if the family with whom she was boarding found out how she was keeping her position, they forced her to leave. After the war Dewey felt people "didn't give a darn" as long as the woman paid her rent."