Boardinghouse Guests: Mill Town Ladies
If there was a slubber and a doffer at your house what would you do? Invite them in and charge them rent like Julia Wolfe? In August 1943, Maybelle Lynn and Cleo Mae Slough were registered in the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse. Cleo had stayed at the house before in early 1937. She visited several times with her sister Grace and again with Maybelle’s sister Helen. They might have described themselves as inspector or clipper, hemmer or weaver from Kannapolis, NC. All four women, since about age seventeen, had been employees of the Cannon Mill Company. They started life as farmer’s daughters and were born into large families in China Grove, NC, about seven miles north of the place that soon became Kannapolis. Grace born in 1909, Helen in 1910, Cleo born in 1911, and Maybelle in 1913. They were connected as family through the marriage of one of the Slough sisters. In the 1940 Census, all were living together in a company owned mill house at Kannapolis and working there in the cotton mill. A weekend in Asheville was probably a pleasant escape from the mill town.
Scrolling the surrounding census pages, one immediately gets a sense of a 1940s mill town. Almost every resident of the community was employed at the mill. The town boasted 25,000 people by 1940. Many of their occupational titles sound very foreign if you are not familiar with the operation of a mill. They were winders, folders, hemmers, spinners, blowers, stretchers, ironers, spoolers, twisters, checkers, carters or haulers, loom fixers, and rovers. Some individuals identified their job by the part of the mill that they worked in, the roller shop, the card room, the sample room, or the bleachery. A baler was someone who carried cotton into the mill. The bobbin carrier worked the spinning and weaving sections, fillers filled the bobbins, and pickers cast the shuttle on a loom. The slubber operated a machine that prepared fiber to be spun. Linters removed unwanted thread from the mill areas, and doffers removed the empty spindles from the mill. In the picker room, pickers or lappers cleaned the cotton while carders then fed the cotton into carding machines.
All were not equal in a mill town. Race and gender played an important part in where you fell in the occupational hierarchy. At one time, only boys were employed as doffers or sweepers, and men worked as weavers, loom fixers, carders, or supervisors. By the 1940s, women were performing many of the jobs that had once been held by men and boys, especially with many men leaving for war. Few African Americans were allowed technical tasks reserved for white workers. At the non-union mills in North Carolina, employees experienced low wages and long hours, often six days per week, but there were also benefits to living in a paternally operated mill community.
Most Cannon Mills workers were proud of their jobs and the products they made. The sheets and towels they made were shipped around the world. Cannon had become the nation’s largest towel producer, and Kannapolis by the 1940s was at its peak of prosperity. Kannapolis, known as the “city of looms” was founded with the construction of the mill in 1906. By 1940 it was the largest unincorporated town in America. There was no city government, and the company paid the police and fire services, operated the water and sewage system, provided trash collection, and street maintenance. Started in Concord, NC in 1887, Cannon was a family-owned company. James Cannon and descendants were known as civic-minded and for their support of the mill community. In Kannapolis they built the YMCA and established the Cabarrus County Hospital.
Grace, Helen, Cleo, and Maybelle, who knew Julia Wolfe and probably shared an iron bed in the old boardinghouse while visiting Asheville, spent their lives in the mill town and retired from the Cannon Mill Company. They all lived long enough to see the family finally sell ownership in the company in 1983. Grace died in 1983, Helen in 1986, Maybelle in 1988, and last, Cleo in 2004. It was a great loss for the community when under new management the mill eventually closed in 2004 putting some 4000 people out of work.
Read more at https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/work-textile-mill
