Do you rember living in a mill village and the people there?

Question

I grew up in one and the people of the Ella Mill look after every ones kids. you could not get away with anything. Most went to church, a few drank but you didn't air your dirty linens loud enought for others to hear. Maybe because the owners of all the cotton mills in town was the Dover family.

I grew up in one and the people of the Ella Mill look after every ones kids. you could not get away with anything. Most went to church, a few drank but you didn't air your dirty linens loud enought for others to hear. Maybe because the owners of all the cotton mills in town was the Dover family. In N.C.

Answer 1

I actually worked for a very short period of time at one of Dover Textile plants. I didn't live on that mill village, I did live on another. I hated it. I had friends but we had a weekly fight. Sometimes you were the leader, sometimes you were the loser. Funny though, when I'm in the area, I always ride by, so I guess it wasn't soooo bad. Thanks for the memory.

Answer 2

Yep, my mother grew up with five siblings in Spartanburg S.C. from 1913-. Their ancestors wee irish Immigrants. At 14 yrs old school was terminated and they started work at the cotton mill. My uncle told the story of the old men holding the children out a second story building by their ankes to terrify them into working. If given a choice he'd have taken a beating instead of walking in the door each morning. He went back to school to become an english
professor. The others retired from the mills. Their mother was among the pitiful children you see in pictures taken in the early 1900s before child labor laws were created.
They told many tales so I'm familiar with mill town life.
Blessings- Juju

Answer 3

There were lumber mills and other factories in the town I went to school in growing up. My mom worked as a supervisor in a shoe factory when I was a teen. Where we live now they just tore the mills down a couple years ago and are building a research center. It really hurt the economy here and affected so many people whether you worked there or not. Things are starting to pick up again a little now.

Answer 4

I grew up in a large part in the country 7 miles from town and
3 miles from a three room school. Our neighbors were more
like family than neighbors. When I wasn't working at one of
the many chores that go with farm life I would walk a mile to
a little country store where I would enjoy a candy bar and a
big pop, all for a dime. As I walked the wet and muddy gravel
road the red birds would flutter from cider to cider. Mocking
birds threatened everything with feathers and even the family
cat. The morning dove calling to its mate with its coo coo oo
had to be the loneliest sound in the world to a young man
wanting to leave that part of the world and doubting that it
would ever be possible. As the years have gone by and I
have seen more than my part of the world I settled just four
miles from the place I so desperately wanted to escape from.
The roads are now paved and the old house is beyond
repair. I truly enjoy driving by the old place and checking out
the old trees in the yard that I helped my dad set out over 60
years ago. And yes I remember all the neighbors. Most of all
I remember the neighbor girls. How pretty the ALL were an I
was too shy to tell them. Thinking back I suspect they all
knew it without me telling them. Thanks for the Memory's.

Answer 5

My stepfather worked in the saw mills and lumber mills in Southern Oregon.

The mills used to provide housing for their employees and we lived in several of them. They were usually "shot-gun" houses with few amenities. The mill also provided a school for the workers children. My first 4 years of school was spent in one of those schools.

He "walked the green chain" which meant that, after the tree was planed and cut into boards, they were dipped in water on a conveyor belt and, after passing through the water, it would continue out of the mill on the conveyor belt to be stacked. My stepfather graded each piece as it came out of the water. He had a long pole with black charcoal attached to the end of it. He actually walked on the boards as they came out and put a number on each piece, grading the quality of that piece. The men who took the lumber off the belt, further down the line, would make stacks of lumber and separate them by the number put on it.

Those days, cut trees arrived at the mill on lumber trucks; huge vehicles that were stacked with huge trees. The truck would pull up next to the log pond (a body of water culled from the river and banked). The driver would pull a lever which would cause the bed of the truck, containing the logs, to tilt sideways and dump the logs into the pond. There were men walking on the logs in the pond, keeping them separated....very dangerous work.

There are no more saw mills anymore. The trees that come down on lumber trucks are skinny little things - too much cutting. It's all automated.

Many lumber companies simply strip the bark from the tree and ship all of them to Oakland, CA or Portland, OR, load the stripped logs onto a Japanese ship where it is taken off shore and cut on board the ship. Then the lumber is returned to port and the lumber company buys it back.

There goes the lumber industry in the Northwest.

Answer 6

not me, but my hubby did.(NCtextiles).. from all his tales, the kids there were a tight bunch, the parents fought a lot with each other and the neighbors and that alcolhol was rampant.... it was sad here when the mill closed as it made the town nearly a ghost town.....worse for the people was that so many generations knew ONLY the mill and couldn't find work easily after the closings........

Answer 7

My grandfather arrived from Sweden via New York and Chicago, they made their way to country that was familiar to them in climate and trade. They chose "Jenny" Wisconsin, it was raided by Indians and many were killed, they later renamed the town Merrill. By grandfather was a logger in Sweden and began again in Northern Wisconsin at the saw mill in the lumber trade.

**My grandmother remained afraid of being "scalped" or shot by an arrow for many, many years

Answer 8

Nope. Read the Vile Village.