NEWS

Visiting Our Past: The cotton mill saved and slaved, by various accounts

Rob Neufeld
Visiting Our Past

Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series.

“It is indeed the most important enterprise yet undertaken west of the Blue Ridge,” the Asheville “Semi-Weekly Citizen” proclaimed in February 1888 when Baltimore capitalist Moses Cone invested in C.E. Graham Cotton Mill in Asheville.

It had been only one year since Charles Edgar Graham, one of the city’s financial giants in the 1880s, had cashed in his interest in Huguenot Mills in Greenville to build a mill close to home, where he also had a shoe factory, a merchandise store, a bank presidency and leadership positions in civic affairs.

For those of you who like historic anniversaries, here’s a date. On June 28, 1887, Asheville produced its first cotton cloth at Graham’s mill – plaids in the mode of Edwin M. Holt’s Alamance Mill, which had introduced the dyeing process and produced the first colored cloth in the South in 1853.

By June 1889, Graham’s mill was producing 15,000 yards of plaid each day.

Era of Southern manufacturing

Cotton mills were the industry North Carolina’s leaders saw as the state’s economic savior, before and after the Civil War. In the early years, proximity to cotton plantations had provided the economic advantage through savings on transportation costs. With the building of railroads and the freeing of capital, cheap labor became important.

Thus, the mills came to the mountains.

Mill owners then had to find ways to attract mountaineers to their factories. There were many strategies. One was to promise economic security through the provision of worker villages, which, however, kept workers captive by having nearly all their income go to housing and food provided by the company.

Asheville cotton mill workers got paid less than workers elsewhere, and it was against the law for agents of other mills to recruit workers away from employers who had, after all, incurred relocation and training expenses.

By the time tMoses and Caesar Cone bought Graham’s cotton mill in 1892 and renamed it Asheville Cotton Mill, there was a network of factory cottages and streets that locals came to call “Chicken Hill” – either because of the chickens the transplanted country people let run around or because of the chicken hatchery that Chesterfield Mill established more than a decade after the Cones got involved.

The Cones moved their Export and Commission company to Greensboro, where they also built Proximity Mill, the beginning of their worldwide dominance in denim production.

Their factory villages featured many amenities and services, as well as some hard and fast rules. If you were their employee and spoke with a union organizer, you lost job and home.

Better safe than sorry

“In our own state, the Cone brothers of Greensboro have worked a wonderful transformation among the poorer classes,” an Asheville Citizen editorial stated in Aug. 28, 1906. “They have housed their employees in model homes, they have given religious and secular education free of charge, (and) they have erected club houses and recreation rooms.”

“The Manufacturer’s Record” at that time stated that “though the builders of cotton mills in the South had planned their business from the commercial side and not from the ethical or religious side of the work, the cotton mills of this section have been the greatest missionary force which has ever preached the gospel to the class of people composing the cotton-mill operatives of the South.”

The “Record” further noted that the mills improved the lives of the mountain people who had lived “for generations ... in a state of mental and physical starvation.”

This is a touchy subject. There is a large amount of literature about the effort, intentional and unintentional, to justify the colonization of the mountain South by portraying its people as needy.

When Thomas Robinson Dawley Jr. came to Asheville around 1908, funded by a Congressional committee to investigate child labor abuses, he encountered an Asheville lawyer and learned a little about anti-Appalachian prejudice.

Travel writers and missionaries came looking for ignorance and depravity, the lawyer said. “As an example,” Dawley related, the lawyer “had seen it stated that there were families living in the mountains who had never heard of Jesus Christ.”

However, the lawyer explained, “many of the very poor mountain people had a great sense of humor,” and they purposely misled strangers who asked ridiculous questions.

A religious worker might ask, “Have you ever heard of Jesus Christ?” And the mountaineer might answer, “Who is Jesus Christ. I don’t know him! He doesn’t live around here.” The questioner would be baffled and press, and the mountaineer would string him along, letting him wallow in his stereotype.

By 1900, the profits of the companies were increasing greatly. Local mills were being forced out or bought by national trusts, and, according to a U.S. census, 1,750,178 children ages 10 to 15 were at work in fields and factories. Three in every 10 cotton mill operatives in the South were younger than 16 years old.

That’s one of the things that sent Dawley on his way. But he turned out to be a controversial figure. The Bureau of Labor would not publish his findings because he said child workers’ lives had been improved by being given jobs in the mills.

Dawley had to self-publish.

“My thoughts constantly reverted,” he wrote in his defense, “to those poor people in the mountains whose only chance for betterment are the opportunities opened up to them by the manufacturing industries.

“I seemed to hear the cries of their children from their dismal abodes,” he poeticized, conjuring up images of “half-starved bodies,” fed on “corn meal and fat pork ... (and) begrimed faces and partially clothed bodies draped in filthy rags.”

His own account suggests he might have been duped. When he arrived in Asheville, no one seemed to have heard of the cotton mill. Then, when he got there, a waiting guide hustled him quickly past things he wasn’t supposed to see. One boy, whose age Dawley asked about, said, “I’se ten years ... I’se twelve I mean! No! I’se fourteen!”

Next week, this column looks further into the lives and legacies of the cotton mill workers.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, “The Read on WNC.” Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler.