It has been said the mill whistle
was the musical background to the lives of the folks
that lived in the village. The whistle was blown
to wake up the workers and to signal the shift changes.
That mill whistle meant different things to the
different generations.
The Newcomers -
the First Generation
To the first generation that whistle meant new
opportunity. My maternal grandfather went to work in
Pacolet Mills in 1896 when he was only six years old.
The mill itself was only 13 years old at that
time. He worked there for 59 years until his
retirement in 1955. (To our knowledge, he holds the
record for longevity with Pacolet Mills.) His mother
died when he was three years old and he was sent to
friends or relatives in Pacolet Mills to raise. In spite
of today’s stigma and abhorrence of child labor, the job
in the mill was a lifeboat in a stormy sea to my
grandfather.
My paternal relatives and
also my wife’s paternal relatives came down from the
mountains in North Carolina to work in the mills around
1900. They came a hundred miles in distance but they
also came a hundred years forward in time. Life on a
mountain farm and in the mountain logging business was
backbreaking and dangerous.
The first generation was still mostly in the age of the
horse. It was closer in time to the Civil War than we
are today to the Vietnam War. It was mainly pre car-and
pre-airplane and before indoor plumbing. The first
generation probably ended around 1920 at the end of
World War I.
To this generation the mill meant a steady job, good
houses and real cash money.
A Double Blow -
The Second Generation
By the second generation, the mill whistle was sometimes
good news and sometimes bad news. In the early 1920’s,
the whistle signaled prosperity at first but turned to
desperation and hard times in the Depression of the late
1920’s and the 1930’s. During this time, the mills and
the people barely got by. Mills only ran 2 or 3 days a
week. Young men had to leave to try to find work. They
rode the rails, enlisted in the CCC camps or went to
places like Columbus, Georgia to find work - and
wives.
The second generation got another terrible blow with the
coming of World War II.
Most folk’s lives were disrupted. Men went into the
service and wound up far from home. Other men, too old
to fight, went into the War Industry like the Charleston
Naval Shipyard or to places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee to
work on a secret place that would make the Atomic Bomb
that helped end the War.
The country and its people persevered, won the War, and
led to the third generation starting about 1945.
The High and the
Low - The Third Generation
In the late 1940’s and the early 1950’s, that mill
whistle sounded for 3 shifts where everyone that wanted
a job could have one. It was the opposite of the
Depression and might be called the Golden Age of the
Upcountry Textile Mills. It could not last, by the mid
1950’s troubling signs began to appear. There began to
be competition from overseas with textiles made by cheap
foreign labor. The winds of change caught up with third
generation in the late 1950’s up through the early
1980’s. Things happened that no one could have ever
imagined. The jobs got fewer and then stopped. The Mill
Whistle itself stopped. Finally the mills themselves
were torn down and the hearts of the mill villages were
torn out. In every little textile village that lost its
mill, it was like living through a long term
funeral.
But the Story Goes
On
In reality, not only cloth but a lasting legacy was made
by all those hard working textile workers. They also
produced the generations that came after them. Coming in
the wake of that little 6 year old boy, working 12 hours
a day in the mill, are his descendants. They are
successful engineers, architects, teachers, dentists,
nurses, college professors and on and on. The same thing
happened at every mill.
