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Photographs of children in Norwich were a critical part of the national crusade to abolish child labor at the beginning of the last century.
Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress
Young Spooler An unidentified young spooler at the Norwich cotton mill.
For one day in May of 1911, he took photos in Roanoke…of children.
Lewis W. Hine was on a mission to document the living and working conditions of child-laborers across the United States. He visited canneries, cotton mills, farm fields, meat markets and factories. He gave no speeches, rarely announced his arrivals and left as he came…quietly. Hine pointed his camera lens at children, some as young as five, manning machinery, scaling fish, rolling tobacco or mining coal.
Hine had been engaged by the National Child Labor Committee. In 1902, the National Child Labor Committee was birthed by a group of reform-minded women, clergy, and political progressives who were passionate about abolishing the use of child laborers across the United States. From New England to the Deep South, thousands of child laborers were impoverished, malnourished and uneducated. Years of testifying before Congress, lobbying, letter-writing and marching had yielded little as the NCLC found their efforts rebuffed at every turn by industries whose money and political muscle carried far more clout with Congress as they claimed child laborers were necessary for their commercial success and provided wages necessary for the children and their families to survive.
Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress
Doffers and SpinnersHine wrote on back of the photo, “I counted seven apparently under fourteen and three under twelve years old.”
For years, few took notice of the child labor reform movement as it languished in obscurity and irrelevance, but the movement’s leadership was committed to its cause. In 1907, the NCLC decided to take a different tact with Congress and the nation by visually documenting the daily lives of child laborers. They hired Hine, an industrial photographer working in New York City.
A sociologist as well as photographer, Hine began his journey across the United States in 1908 to large cities and small towns using his lens for social reform. He took photographs of seven-year-olds working in a cannery in Maine and young girls at a cotton mill in Biloxi, Mississippi. There were the boys at the Ewan Breaker of the Pennsylvania Coal Company in South Pittson with dirtied overalls and blackened faces, and the five-year-olds working a Colorado beet field. He photographed a five-year-old bag collector on the streets of Boston, Massachusetts, as well as a gang of ten-year-old boys at a cigarette factory in Danville, Virginia. Hine spent seven years and took over 5,000 images of child workers, often taking a photograph of a single child, their eyes staring blankly at his camera.
Regardless of the nature of their work, the lives of Hine’s subjects were much the same. Six-day work weeks, twelve to fourteen hour days, squalid living conditions and no chance for an education. Their substandard wages hardly equaled the manual, sometimes crippling, labor the children performed. The child laborer was expendable, and many died of work-related injuries or disease due to the lack of sanitary living conditions. Hine captured the underbelly of American industry, what politicians at all levels had willfully chosen to ignore by failing to legislate the slightest regulation against the use of children.
The child-laborers of Roanoke’s cotton mill in Norwich were no exception. Mamie Witt, 12, had worked in the Roanoke Cotton Mill for a few years, the oldest of five children. Walking to work from her family’s house in Norwich, she worked six days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day as a spinner. With little education, her meager wages helped support the family. Ronald Webb lived near Mamie and was a doffer in the mill. He, too, was 12. And there was Frank Robinson, age seven, a doffer and sweeper. Mamie, Ronald and Frank were part of an invisible group, sharing bedrooms with siblings in cramped company-built mill houses in Norwich, a section located on the south side of the Roanoke River just beyond the pre-annexation bounds of Roanoke City. Norwich had been named for the Norwich Lock Company, a short-lived enterprise that had established a presence there in 1891. The cotton mill moved into the abandoned lock company’s brick structure in 1901.
In the January 31, 1907, edition of the American Wool and Cotton Reporter appeared a description of the mill. “The mill is pleasantly located on the banks of the Roanoke River between two low lying hills...The mill is the pioneer twine mill of Virginia. The company recently began the manufacture of polished twine. This is the only mill situated in the gateway of southwestern Virginia.” According to the report, the mill was producing one-to 30-ply cotton of any color that could be put up on cones, tubes, skeins or balls. The two-story structure with skylights was under the “clever management” of T.J. McNeely. The Reporter concluded with a rather skewed view of the workers and their condition. “It is no wonder that this mill has been successfully operated and that its force of intelligent operatives gathered from the nearby mountain regions are perfectly satisfied with their lot.”
Hine’s images a few years later captured something quite different. And never mind that in 1902, there were calls to investigate the cotton mill for labor abuses of the women and children working there.
Hine took a dozen known images, and for a few of them, Mamie, Ronald and Frank were his subjects. Hine photographed Frank with his broom and straw hat alongside Ronald. The barefoot boys stare back at Hine, perhaps having their photograph taken for the very first time. Mamie is shown next to the spinning machine. Dressed in a draped cotton shirt, her tired eyes glance to the side.
For many of the dozen images Hine took at the Roanoke Cotton Mill he provided a brief description of his subject matter conveying a sense of what he found.
“I counted seven apparently under the age of 14 and three under 12 years old,” Hine wrote of a photograph of a group of boys working as doffers and spinners.
“She is 12 years old and helps support an able-bodied, dependent father.”
“Said 14 years old, but it is doubtful.”
Hine took an image of a family standing on their back porch and wrote, “He is apparently working on the railroad but his three oldest children (oldest being 12) work in the Roanoke Cotton Mill...House is poorly kept. Mother would not be in photo.”
After spending a day in Roanoke, Hine kept moving and eventually handed over his collection of 5,000 images to the NCLC for their ongoing efforts to abolish child labor in the United States.
Those efforts would ultimately prove fruitful but too late for Mamie, Ronald and Frank. By the time child labor was legally abolished by Congress in 1938, Mamie and Ronald were 39 and Frank was 34. For 20 more years after Hine visited Roanoke, child laborers were used at the cotton mill, diminishing only in the mid-’30s when desperate Depression-era men needed work.
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