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This is an ·Appalachian Oral History Project interview with
M
r. Perry Hicks of M
arion, North Carolina who is a retired mill
worker. He was interviewed by Sam Howie on December Jl, 1975.
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Some of the first things we need to know are thi ng s like where
you we re born.
Well, I was born in Haywood County in the extreme western part
of North Carolina, right inside of North Carolina. Our closest
neighbors we r e in Tennessee •••• back in the extreme western part,
near Pigeon River.
Pigeon Rive r?
I was raised on a company's land. My father paid $25 a y e ar,
standing rent, on the mountain f a rm. And he raised hogs, c a ttle
and livestock and he farmed. He raised wheat, corn, oats, rye,
irish potatoes. The land produced rye and oats in abundance,
and irish potatoes and cabbage and vegetables. But the corn made
about 15 bushels an acre, about 6 to 8 bushels of wheat per acre,
and about 20 bushels of rye, and about 20 or 25 bushels of oats.
And , I was raise d there and we had a three-month school. We went
to school through July, August and September, at an old sawmill
shanty. And my daddy left there when I was ab out 12 years oad and
went farther back in Haywood County to a big double-band sawmill.
He went there for the e x press reason to send me and my brother
to a six-mon th school. We was up to a pretty good size. About
the only thing I learned wa s how to hobo a railroad engin e in
old log[ ing trains. It 'd leav e there in the morning ab out the
time my daddy went to work.
I 'd get on it and go to the mountains
and come back in just ab o ut dinnertime and go to the house and
eat my dinner. I went back, I went back to the mountains •• I did
most of the ti me. The thing that got me out of heart about g oing
to school was that most of the students were stupid or dumb or
something o r d i dn't care about learni ng and the tead.her appointed
me to try to help them learn.
nd I went from seat to seat for
a week or two and I wasn't making any progr e ss. They weren't
learning, and the teacher would get on me ••• so I got out of heart
and quit . ' Then my daddy bought a farm in Madison County, moved
back there, and stayed til I reckon it was 1920. But in the
meantime I met my wife and me and her was married. I was 17 years
old, she wa s 16. That 's been 59 years ago .
What year we~e y ou born in?
I was born in 1899 and we decided to come to t h e cotton belt •••
here to M
arion and we come up there and I went to work in the mill.
What year wa s that?
That was 1919 that I went to work in the cotton mill.
Which mill was that? Was1 that in •••
That was Clinchfield.
Clin chfield?
It's Clinchfield. The one that you came by.
The bi e one?
And the mill run 12 hours a day. Of cours e , the day I worked was
10 hours , but the wheels and machinery they would stop at 12
hou rs.
I went to work in the card room for a dollar for 10
hours, got a dollar a day. I paid 45 cents per week for house
rent, for a three-room house.
W
as it a mill village then, that you lived in?
Yeah.
Clinchfield mill villa g e?
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Yeah, Cli n chfield village.
Did you have to live in the mill village to work in the mill?
No, you didn't have to but it was cheaper. They furnished the
house. It took 700 hands to run the two mills at that time. We
was up there, I don't remember how many years, several years
though. There was a man who come in here organized a union.
What years?
Two cotton mills.
Was that in 1929?
I guess it was. Yeah , it wa s. And oh, he got the East Marion
mill pretty well organi zed . The mill I was working in, they
never did go so str ong for the union. All of the bus i nesses in
M
arion was bitterly opposed to it.
To the union?
Yeah , to the union. And, of course, by me being nonunion, I
was let in the inside of wha t was going to happen. I was sworn
to secrecy not to tell anybody what I knowed about what was go i ng
to happen. But I knowed the union wasn ' t gping to win and I
knowed the unio~··· ah, the company was not going to accept it,
the people wasn t going to accept it. The town and the businesses
wasn't going to accept it. They were se ar ching all the time for
something that they could try the union organizer for, in the law.
Take a warrant for him ahd try him.
Do you remember his name?
Hoffman . And he went right on and closed the mill I was working
at for three weeks a nd they got ready to start it up and they told
us all where to get to, t o come in on a certa i n Mo nday morning .
And we went there, and I was the first person to get ther e th t
morning , me and my brother-in-law. We went up on a bank and the
union neve~ did see us. But when they began to gather in, to go
to work, the union people they was on the picket line, they had
the spies and they all came in there. And the union got to
singing hymns and inviting people t o come to the ••• to be saved,
t hat is come in and join the union. And th9 superintendent,
Henderson, he c a me in and when he went to open the gate, why some
of them caught his coattails and drug him backwards. So he said
ev e rybody go home.
o we all went home and in another week they
notified us to gather up one day again a t 12 o'clock at the company
office.
That was the superintendent's office?
Yeah, so that day we all come and there was number one, number
two mill and we wa s going to try to start up number two mill.
It was the b iggest mill.
nd of course the union was evtErywhere.
It was closed. h nd we got the ••• finally got the soldiers in
there. 'l bey pushed t h em back.
nd we got inside t h e lock.
W
ell, we had enough help to start the smaller mill.
o they took
us all ov e r to the smaller mill and we started up at 12 o'clock
that day. Then after that, it was all over with. They cut the
hours down at the mi l l. Of course all along they'd be.gun rais i ng
the wag es. And I had got up to piecework and I made 18 dollars
and 75 cents a we ek , five days and a half on piece work.
ow many hours a d ay?
W
ell, I worked 12 hours a day b e cau s e every hour I worked was more
money to me. They started t h e machi n e ry at 6 o 'clock in the
morning, but I was always on hand to start my ·ob. Then me and
somebody would work together, and he wo uld take my job am. his
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too while I was of f to l u nch. And I'd come back and watch h is
job and mine too and he would g o to luhch. So we never let our
machinery stop. I was running frames in the card room, and it
went on that way and after that was all over with, all blowed
away, they went to putting one, couldn't have one man, put t ing
two men on a ••• putting one man on the job two men had been
running. And it just kept getting worse and worse.
Was that after the strike in 1929?
Yeah.
~hat was after that?
Yeah.
nd then they ••• thing s got so bad through the Depression
and they cut us down to half a day at a time. I went of a
morning and worked u ntil twelve and so mebody would come in and
run my job in the afternoon. But I had a wife and at that time
five children and I couldn 1 t feed anyone on it. So I quit and
went into farming, and went to farming.
Do you remember what year that was? In the early JO's?
Yeah. The early JO's. And them people that was left up there,
they didn't have no way to get out. But I had connections with
that person who had some property. I was always pretty bad to
talk and get acquainted and find about people, make friends with
people. So I had connecti ons with a rich man who owned all this
land from here, I mean right where this house is, and he rented
me his farm a nd
farmed it for five years. At that time, the
cotton mills picked up again ••• still stretched out.
e called
it the stretch out.
I went back to work to get my old job and
I worked about five years. And I b ought a farm, southe ast of
this county ri ght down near the Burke P ounty, Rutherford County
line. W
ent down ther e and stayed for six years.
W a t community wa s that?
h
That's the Dysartsvill e Community. And after I sold out that
place down the re, my motive t h en was to work out Social Security.
Th en you cou ldn't carry Social Security if y u we ren't working
for the company , but they chang6d theJaw after a while.
nd
in the meantime, by work i ng in the cotton mill I took what they
call emphy sema, brownlung we called it. I was afraid to go back
in t h e cotton mills on account of that so I went to Drexel
Furnitu r e Company and went to work for them.
Wher e is that?
I t's up here in M
arion.
nd I worked there for 15 years. So I
worked in t he cot t on mills for 15 years, I farmed for 15 years,
and I worked for Drexel Furniture Company 15 years. I made
4 5 years u ntil I r e tir ed. Th e fir s t of this year will be 14
years after I retired. And as far a s the mountains is c oncerned,
where I wa s rais ed, people wore out their land.
ot to where it
wou ldn't produce. One other thing tha t I didn't mention that
i t g re w good was tobacco back in them mountains.
Wa s there a good market for it?
Yeah. Pe ople ma d e pret t y good money a t it. A lot of people, they
didn't when I was a ch i ld, but af ter I got up about grown, people
g ot into tobacco, raising tobacco and mad e more and more after
I left. W been in this county about, a b out 5~ , ~ea!!B . fhat's
e
wh en we left Ma dison County. I was r ai sed inMAi~~ & · County , and
my wife was raised in M
adison County. ~ hat's mountain counties
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and my daddy bought a farm in Madison County . Tha t 's how come
we were living in Madison County when me and her wa s marr ied.
And her father owned a farm a nd it was wore out when he g ot it,
and he ain't ever d one muc h to build it up. And after me and
her c om e here,her who le family come too, in about a yeBl'and lived
here.
Did they come to work in the mills?
Yeah . The y c me to work in the mi l ls.
I t was he a ven to them,
to work in the mills and draw a payday, however small. But to
have payday every week and they had about thr e e or four chi ldren
old enough to work i n the mill .
How old did you have to be before you could go to work in the mill?
W
ell, back when I was a child, they put c hildren in the mill that
was e i ght years old.
Eight years old?
igh t years old.
What did they have them doing?
They were work i ng in t h e spinning r o om, spinning, swe eping the
floor.
I knowed a man, he 1 s been dead about two or three year· s.
He told me he went in t he mill when he was eight y e a rs old, worke d
there until he retired. He was an overseer for a bout lS or 20
years. But when my wife's p eople came here y ou h a d to be 14,
a ch i ld h a d to be 14 years old. You had to prove your a ge.
That wo u ld have been during the 2o•: s?
Yeah . And then they got it up ••• Yeah, then I think they fina l ly
got it up after I left there to where you had to be 16 before
they let t hem work in the mills. But when I first come to the
cotton mill with my brothers and sisters working i n there a nd
have little children, brothers and sisters, and the y'd take them
in there six, eight and ten years old and help to run. Anybody
going · n the cotton mill worked. ~ here wasn't nothing to it.
Did they pay, was th ere a pa y di ff erence for young •••
Yeah , you had to start off with the smallest wage and after you got
to where you cou ld run piece work, of course,you g ot a raise. Paid
better .
'pinners h a d to h a ve p iece work, we was in piece work and
carders had to h ave piece work.
hen they had day labor too. Hut
the day labor never did work but ten hours. They let them off,
they went to work at seven , let them off an hour lunch, and they
quit at six that evening.
iece workers, naturally, they would go
mor e hours a nd then of course I was y oung, pretty ambitious a nd
with family to support and I liked to get two hours more because
I made more. But they f :!. nally-I'm gett i ng a ll this mixed up-they f l nal ly got a case against the union or ganizer. 'l' oo k h im
to court. Tried him and he got a fine.
• urned him loose, he
r
went on down t h e coun t ry somewhere , I for g et where he went to,
went to organiz i ng down ther ~ and they got a case against him and
they came to Mari on to l nvesti r at e wha t went on ab out him around
here. And I don 't know exactly wha t the y ever did do with him.
But he t old them he organized Kingsp ort, Tennes s ee, that he was
over there or ganiz i ng, working on a union, to raise a union .
ell,
so me of the strikers here, to be sure,
they went over th e re to
check on him . They said that when they got there, the re was the
roughest looking man they ever saw with two .45 pistols walk ing
arou nd the gate , keeping the gate . Said they asked him had the mill
ever been uni onized and said he went to cus sing , said no, it
hadn't be e n organi 7.ed. ' hey run all the unions off. well, they
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run the most of them off here.
hey was defeated.
(inaudib le)
••• frie nds that hadn't jo i ned to beg for them and get them
(inaudible) ••• But naturally, I have, all of my l i fe, been opposed
to t he uni o ns.
I think, now this is just my opinion, I may be
100 percent wrong, but I believe the unions is the thing that
caused us to have the most troubles (i naudible) •• I think they
are what is causing 1.us to have high prices now.
Because when
they organize where they have to pay u~i o n wages, they have to
p a y s o much to pr0duce the stuff then they must let prices rise
to come out on it.
hen the poor class of people, people on
ocial Security l i ke me a n d my wife, we h a ve to pinch pennies,
to g et by. Buy only stuff t ha t's necessary. Of course, back
in the Depressi on, during the JO's and late 20's, there were people
who wer e out of work and strugg led to fesi their famili es .
nd
a 24-pound of flour about 65 cents, five pounds of su gar 25 cents,
a pound of coffee 15, all suc h as that. In the Depression when
th er e wa sn't so much union ••• ow, the people that have to pay the
union wages, to g e t t h eir stuff produced have to have a big price
on it to come out. And I guess the uni ons have done s orr.e good
but I th ink it's done more dama ge than any k i. nd of good, taki ng
all around. And I 've alwa ys been opposed to it and I guess I
always will be. I 've had some people, some v e ry close friends
belong. I n f a ct, some of my close relatives lost their jobs
up her e on ac c ount of uni on. ~ hey hired so me back but some had
to le ave. That's about all now,unless you want to ask questions.
You can ask questions about anythi n g you want to. I ' l l do my
b est to answer them.
You we re sayi ng awhile ag o that one of the reasons you all c ame to
M
arion was because the farming wasn't all that good. Now, did
you, your father owned the farm in M
adison County but you said
something about the soil th ere had been leached out, wouldn't
grow very well. Could you have had part of that f arm yourself?
No; there wasn't enough of it. There was just fifty acres.
How many brothers did you have?
I just had one •
Just one brother?
Only one of us could have l i ved on half of it.
I t j ust wouldn ' t produce?
No . It took the whole farm of fifty acres because it had been
cleared up , mostly cleared up and worn out before my father
bought it. M wife and father and mother, they had eight
y
c hildren when the y left there. He owned fifty acres, and his
land was wore out. Most of it washed away up there in the
mountains.
It was steep cou ntry?
Yeah . It was pretty straight up there •
Is there any way to estimate what, say, it was possible to
e a rn off of a farm of tha t size then?
Well, you t ake a farm of tha t size, my f a ther was selling
livestock and didn't mak e any grain to sell on that small place.
Now, he did where I was raised, where he had so much land. But
about, I 'd say about six hundred dollars a year was about wha t
he got out of his livestock he had for sale. Of course, the
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living , he had his l i ving made there, he made it there. Didn't
hav e to buy gr oceries or anything like that. About all the
money he got was clea r to stick in his pocket, clear. 'Cause he
made all his seed and in summertime he had pasture to run on.
As far as having any money and investing it, why wit h out he
too k a notion to buy so methi ng, he didn't have any at all. It
was all cle a r. When I was a child on the farm, I was raised
on, company land. I seen him in t h e fall of the year when lie'd
sold his livestock, and wha t stuff he raised on his farm for
sale, I ' ve known him sticking that money i n his pocket and going
out over the country want i ng so mebody to loan it to. He didn't
need it, didn't want it, didn't want to carry it. He got about
six percent intere s t on it and he felt safer of course when he
wasn't ca rryi n g it i n his p ocket. He just didn't want to carr y
it arou nd. Go out and hunt somebod y to loan it to, and sometimes
it was hard to do •••
Wasn't as much use for money then as ther e is or was later on,
was there?
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There wasn't mu ch you had to buy •
The only person who would borrow it was somebody who wanted to
add nore livestock. And of course, in them days, livestock all
run outside, in the mountains, fenced up your fields. ~ ow in
the mountain s it was ready to be put on the market in the
fall. It got fat and was ready for t h e market . He just brought
it off the r a nge and put it right on the market. An:i a year or
two year-old •••
.Al,.
End of tape #1, side 1
Beginning of side 2
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Your father owned tha t farm free and clear?
Yeah , the last p lace. I n fact, that ' s the only p lace he ever
owned.
In M
adison County?
Yeah . He finally sold it out and came her e to Mari on too.
So your family and your wife's family came to M
arion?
Yeah.
Did they come for the expressed purpose of working in the mills?
W
orki ng in the cot t on mills.
So you all pretty much figured it was, that staying on the farm
of that size was not going to bring you suf f icient income to raise
a family.
Wel l , that wasn't my father's c oncern. He wasn't worrying about
the income he made, he made as much money as he cared about.
He wanted to get rid of the harder work. Working l n the cotton
mill was not as hard work as running one of them mount ain farms.
Of course, me and my brother wa s married. Just him and my
mother we re living on the farm. He ca me here to work in the mill.
Him and my mother both worked. M mother didn 't work too much
y
but she worked some. He sold out. He give ~35 0 for the place
he owned. The feller except ed the timber but he had in the
trade to saw him house timber. And he built a house out of
great big boards, built a barn, cleared some land, built some
fence. Kept it I don't know for how many years and he sold it
for $2200. Aft er he comehere , a ft e r we all come here, he divided
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that $2200 with me and my brother, give me $1100 and give my
brother $1100 .
Of course, you take the mountain people who
learn to do what they do themselves and lea rn how to do wi thout.
And he saved money all the time,he laid money back all the time.
Not much, but some that after a year or so it began to count up.
He got enough money saved that he bought that place right across
the road there where that house stood. He stared there for 12
or 15 years, I guess. When he retired,he got $ 22 a month and
mother drawed off ofhim and she got half as much.
'he got $ 11.
Both together got like $33 . Well , they laid away some of that
every month, some of that $33 because they made everything we
e a t r ight over there .
This wasn't built up out in here as it is. It's farm country.
There was one build i ng right out here, that house, and one out
here on top of the hill. That 's all there was, just there at the
top of the hill up yonder plumb down to Ne bo. Uns e ttled.
How did you learn that the mil ls we re here?
Well , I had friends tha t had left there and c orre here and worked.
They came back home.
vid they leave for the same reasons?
Yeah , for the reasons coming to the co tton mill to work.
When they came back home andyou learned from them, they were just
visiting?
Yes. I n fact, when me and my wife moved here there was a young
man that we knowed had been h e re and worked and he came back with
us. In 1918, when that awful flu ep:t.demic come in here. W was
e
here at c1·nchfield, and we had one ch i ld less than a year old
who had flu.
('Wife speaks) No, we all had the flu and it looked •••
(Hicks r e sumes) No, it looked like it was going to be so long
b e fore I could even get back to work, well, I had a little home •••
so we went back there and stayed a year and then come back. (wife
speaks) Then we c ome back to the cotton mills .
That would have been in the early 20 1 s?
(wife) Yeah , the la st time we come back.
And you came back th a t time to stay?
Yeah.
1e been here ever since.
I n this country, but not whe r e
we'r e living. Here in McDowell County.
The people who we re working in the mills during the early 20 1 s
after you all came back, came h e re the second time, were they
from McDowell County?
No . M
ost of the people in M
cDowell County wouldn't work in •••
might few people from McDowell County that would work in the
cot ton mills at all.
Only a few people?
Mighty few.
It was a disgrace for people in this county t o
work in a cot t on mill .
I t was made up of mountain people. (wife
speaks) That 's all it was •• ( inau d ible) (Hicks resumes) M
adison,
Haywood , Mitchell, Yancey, Avery , Watauga countie s.
ost of
the people that wo~ked here was from Haywood County where I come
f rom.
M
ost of the people i n Clinchfield?
Yeah .
Some people would get maybe in debt back at home. Th ey
had a home, but they'd get in debt and couldn't ••• an:l they'd
come here, their whole f amily, go to work until they paid that debt.
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When they paid t h is debt, they'd take off back home.
Is it your fe e ling that the people that came here from the other
counties to work in the mills came for the reasons you've said.
That is, it was either impossible or hard to make a good living
on the farm?
Yeah .
And the reason they came here was because they might find work
a little easier and there was some more money?
Yeah. In the end of the year, you co 1ld make more money up
here in a cotton mill than you would out on the farm. But
people lived hard. The houses were cheap. The house we l ived
in, y ou co ld set in the house and see daylight almo yt anywhere
you looked.
W s that the mill house?
a
That was the mill h ous e . They'd have people ••• they finally at
last sold them to the hands . Most all the houses repaired (inaudible)
nd what did you pay for rent?
45 cents a week for a three-room house.
nd wh en you first started in the mills, y ou were making somewhere
near $10 a week?
Yeah, around that.
When people in, say, ~ adison County were looking around for
something to do other than stay on the farm, wha t else could they
have done, say, besides stay there or come to the mi l ls? Wa s
there a lot of timbering back then?
No , not then. When people began to c ome to the mills,the timber
business was ove r with. Peop le had log , ed out all. the timber.
What was the name of the comp any that owned all the farm where
you were born? W
as it a lumber company?
No, it was just a big land company. Uptogo (?) I believe was
the name of the company a nd then the Boise Hardwood Lumb e r Company
finally bought the whole mountain.
Boise?
Yeah, Boise Hardwood Lumber Company .
nd they built a narrowguage railroad up in them mountains and set their band mill at
Hartford , Tennessee.
ell, they were working on that when I
left. Of course, I could have went to work for them but it was
a little too rough, for me. I went down there and helped t h em clean
off the ri ght of way for the railroad up Pigeon River. That was
after me and my wife got married . And of course one thing that
bluffed me out on it, everythin g in the whole country c ame in
ther e to work.
On that railroad?
Yeah . Cutting timber and logg ing . Drunkards, murderers, everything
else .
I t wasn't no fit place I felt like to raise a family.
And , I help ed clean off the right of way on Pigeon tliver. I-40
goes down through there.
(wife speaks ) Where he was raised, now
it's a game pres e rve.
vhat' s the name of it? (Hi cks resumes)
Yeah , in orth Carolina and part in Tennessee . Have y ou ever
be en down I - 40?
Yes sir. I know a fellow who lives out at t h e foot of l t.
J;'.isgah. He 's out on the Pigeon River . Clark's his name (inaudible).
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rr you went down I - 40, do you kn ow that W
alters (?) dam, that
dammed up P igeon River?
uns the water through the moun ta _ns
and comes out at 1v'a terville? 'r o a powerhouse?
I know wher e the river's down below I - 40 there. But I don't
remember it .
Well , I don't guess you've ever noticed ••• (wife speaks) Did you
see the powerhouse when you ••• ? (Hicks resu mes) W
ell, back up
t h is way there's a sign up there tm.t says the Harmon Den , on
a post .
I remember t hat .
Well , right there, just a lit t le piece up that creek was wher e I
was barned an d raised .
That is up and down country , isn ' t it?
Yeah .
Good bit steeper t h an around here?
I've t o ok peop le down through there and told them I helped clear
off that right of way . The~ say I don ' t see how you stood up
on that hill . And I could n t now of course , but I could then ,
when I was a young man .
hey say people had one leg shorter than the other so they could
stand on the ~ide of a hill .
(pause) You said that when you came
here you d i dn t h a ve to live in the mill village?
No . You didn ' t ha re to but it was cheaper . And ther e weren ' t too
many houses for rent other than in the mill village . or course ,
the cotton mill company wanted you to live in their houses .
But you didn;t have to?
No, you didn t have to •
Did y ou have - to at East arion?
No , you didn't exactly have to but they were the same way . They
wanted them to live in them .
(wife sp ea ks) They h ad bet t er houses
at East 1arion .
They did?
(Hicks) ~eah .
When you start e d out you were working ten hours a day, ri v e and
one - h a lf days a week . Did that chang e much during the 20 1 s?
At some point i n there you went to a 12- h our day .
Ye ah . It changed a lot , now . or course,
think t he.y start up
n ow and run maybe ten hours and the day labor works eight .
But ,
when I was runni ng frames on piece work , in the number two mill ,
it's the biggest mill, the one next to th e highway, there were
23 frame hands in th u t card room to maJ.re roping to make thread
for yarn spinning . And they put in new machinery, bi gge r machinery ,
and the last time I was talk i ng to people that lived and was
work i ng there , they got three hands doing what us 23 done .
· 'hat is a stretch out isn't it?
Yeah, that's a s t retch out .
Did you start out working as ai. carder?
Yeah , I went to runni~cards .
What s being a carder? What does that mean?
Well; that's where the raw c otton comes and you start it into
roping, about the size ofyour finger . It first comes to the
lap room . They make it into big round laps , runs through two
machi nes im there .
nd they take a lot of the waste out of it .
And they make big laps and br i ng it in there and hang it on the
backs or card s . And when the laps run out we laid it down on
a roller , stuck the end of it i n there and it would conB through .
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And we carded it and took a lot more waste out of it. and
made that roping . Then we took that roping in cans to the
drawing f r ames . Them drawing frames, they run it through two
mach i nes there, front d r awing and bac k d.J:rawing. Then it went
from there to what they called slubbers, gre a t bi g heavy work.
That was the first piece work I ever did, running slubb ers.
Then it went to the intermediates. Tha t wa s the job I run the
most .
nd they took the slubb e rs ••• (inaudible). Then we run
it through them interme d iat e s a nd it cut it down to about fourth
of tha t size. But we had to run two spools of cotton togethe r.
That is , t~ of the same size. Then it went from there to tre
spe eders.
nd th ey had to run two together there . And tha t
cut it down to a smaller thread .
nd a stouter thread. fhen it
went from th e re t o th e spinning room and the y respun it on
spinning reels. l n the spinning room. Then it went from the
spinning room into t h e weav e shop .
Did y ou ever work in weaving?
Yeah , I worked in weaving one ti e. First time I ev e r come
her e I worked in the weave roo m.
Did Clinchfield do any finishing then? Or print ing?
No, they d i dn't do any fin ishing. Just white cloth •
Did East ari on?
Yeah . They finished cloth ov e r there.
(wife sp e aks) They do
now. I don't know whether the y used to ••• (Hicks resumes)
They didn 't the n , when I was working in the mill, but the y do now.
They make rayon and use man - made f i b e r over there.
Let me ask you a question about the mills . Was it possible to
move up in a job? Like to be a boss or foreman or something?
W s that pr etty easy or were there so many people that it w s
a
hard to do?
No, it wasn' t hard to do . It was easy to bu i ld up to it. I
built up to that and wo uldn't take the job . Because I didn't
feel like I could put up with the agg ravating help . I was pretty
high -tempered . I knowed ~ e andthem was go i ng to have trouble,
becau se t hey failed to do wha t they were suppos ed to do.
ow
when the bosses got on them, they'd argue back and they just
wouldn't fire anybod y . About the only way they'd fire anybody
was on account of bad char ct e r. I f he t u rned ou t to hav~ a
bad character, why they ' d f ire him right on the spot.
But doing bad work, they wouldn't necessarily fire •••
They wouldn't fire you for that. They'd c o me around and raise
sand with y ou, but they wouldn't fire you for it.
We re there plenty of jobs? W
as there lots of people tryi n g to
get in the mills then or was the re just a few jobs open?
No. There was plenty of jobs. And a lot of peop le co me and
there was h a rdly a n ybody come tha t didn't g e t a job. They
was always ne eding help.
'l 'hat was du r ing the 20 1 s ?
Yeah, because tha t was wh en t h e people wa s coming out of the
mou ntains and off of the fa r ms and they s oon got dissatis f ied
and went back home .
Did a lot o f that happen? Lot of t h em come in, they 'd work
a nd then they went back home?
Yeah , they'd go back home and usually after they went back home
and stayed a year, year and a half, two years , t hey'd come back.
And pr ob ably stay the rest of th e ir lives th a t time.
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Why did they go back to the farms i n the first place?
W
ell, because they'd got dissatisfied . Dissatisfied with
the mills . (wife speaks) Some of them would come to work out
money to buy more land with, or improve their land some .
Oh , the y 'd come and get more money to buy a bigger farm?
(Hicks resumes) Yeah . But them that did that, usually when
they went back home, they stayed .
But the ones that did come
because they kinda got tired of farm ng , in fact young people,
children, th ey all had to leav e the home to get a job.
Why wa.s that?
W
ell , there weren't a ny jobs there , only just the farm •
And -the farm would only support • .•
That was the only sup p ort t here was, and the young peop le
didn't much like it . They wanted payday coming in .
You stayed i n Cl i nchfield pretty much duri n g the 20 1 s . Or did
you ever work East Marion? Or one of the other mills?
Yeah , I went ov e r th e re one time and worked with them awhile .
t East Marion?
Yeah , after I went out on the farm .
I got some lei~ure and
didn't h a ve nothing to do and I went back up to Clinchfield and
they just didn ' t have nothing for me .
They told me to go over to
~ st Marion and tell them that they sent me over there .
And I
went ov e r there a nd told the overseer that I 'd been sent over
there to work about three weeks . He said, well I can't do nothing
but put y ou to work here . Come in in the morning and work .
So , I worked there thre e weeks .
I
I
That would h a ve been during the 30 s, wouldn t it?
No, that was in the early 40's . That was after I'd moved and
bought that farm .
Ioved out on that farm .
It was after c rops
was laid by and everything was over .
1
But up to that time that you all left during the early 30 s ,
you stayed in Clinchfield?
Yep. I was in Clinchfield .
At the time y ou left Cli n chfield , how many hours a week wer e you
working?
I was wo rking 55 .
55 . Do you remember wha t you were bringing home in pay then?
Do you rememb e r what y ou were being paid?
Yeah .
I was makin~ $18 . ?S (inaudible) .
But inthe early 30 s they we re c ut ting back hours and •••
Yeah .
(wife speaks) ••• ri ght after the war , the First W
orld War •
We re the wages during the 20 1 s pretty much steadily going up?
No, they didn't go up fast .
ow , I might AO a I little politicking .
I
I don t know what your politics are .
But that s all right .
I
like you just as g o od to be one as the other .
nd , right after
World War One , let's see , who was elected? arren G. Harding .
· ell , after the election was ov e r with , they c ome around and cut
me down to 85 cents . After the electi on, I was cut down fran
a doll a r .
Why was that?
Just because t hey could . And I don 1 t knov if poll tics had any thing
to do with it or not. But I always blamed Warren · G. Harding for
it . Because he was president when I got cut .
Were the bosses trying to tell you how to vote?
W
ell , up here at Clinchfield , they wanted you to vote straight
De mocrati c tick e t . And if you wasn ' t a Democrat , you didn ' t fare
too g ood .
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But you could get a job if you we re ••• ?
Oh y eah. You could get a job and stay, but they giv e you the
c old shoulder if you wasn't a Democrat.
Do you know if that wa s the same thing at East ari on?
Yeah, t h e same thin g at East 1ari on.
They wanted you to be a Democrat~
Yeah. But now at Drexel Furniture Factory I worked at, you h a d
to be a Republican to get any favor up there. They wanted you
to vobe a straight Republican ticket and all my overseers was
Republican. They led me pretty high . Wh en Nixon wa s running
against ~enne dy, they come around, several of them, and t old me
that they'd done found out that ixon was going to be elected so
I 'd better turn ove r and vote for him. I told t h em he wo uldn't
be elect ed, thi;t I d i dn't think so, that he wruld.
o I had it
I
back in my favor. Of course, I didn t rub it in on any of them,
after Kennedy was elected,you know , and Nixon got beat. But I
never could understand how Nixon ever could get elected. Then
after this Water ate mess, he got elected like all therest of
them do because he had plenty of money or the people that h a d
I
the money was backing him ••• (inaudible). But it wasn t too
long a f ter that that I got on piece work.
ow when you went
in there running c ards like I started running cards, they'd
tell you that if there was anything you'd rather do besides the
job you had, when you got a few minute s off your job, go and
work a t it.
nd help the hand that was running it. And as quick
as y ou got to where they thou ght you could run that job, pretty
well, why they 'd giv e it to you . Give you this same kind of
job. The turnover in the work was awful fast ••• (inaudible).
Do you know why t hat wa s? That t h ere was so much turnover?
W
ell, one thing was, they began that stretch-out system. Of
course, it wasn't too bad at that time, but it started in that
direction and the people that come from 0 outh Caroli n a up here,
just droves of them. I n fact, all our overseers was fro m ~outh
Carolina.
(inaudible) And they'd co me here and they didn't
like North Carol ina. They didn't like the temperature and they
d idn't like the people, didn't like the mills, didn't li~e
nothing about it. Well , they wou ldn't stay long before they'd
go back to South Carolina. And they might co me back aga i n. 3ome
of them did. Of course, some come and stayed.
ow all the
ove rse e rs up there was fr om South Carolina. And I said awhile
a g o where I was off e red an overseer's place, you had first to
start off, they c alled it a fixer. You had to keep the machinery
repaired. They held you res p on sible for the work, the machinery.
And some people would get c areless and make bad work and when
they got on them ab out it, they'd swear that the machine wasn't
working right. So then they'd g et the fixer up and they'd give
him a bawling out. And when the fixer got on to the help, for
the work, why they (inaudible) to tell him what they thought of
him. A~d they didn't hesitate to speak with him. I heard them
talk to the fixers and that was why I was glad li wasn't a fixer
after I heard what they said. Then you went from there to what
you called a second hand. He was over the fixers.
nd he had a
boss carder over him, and a lot of them went on to be the boss
carder, the boss weaver, and the boss spinner. After the old
ones all died out.
End Tape #1
Begin Tap e #2, side 1
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You were saying that the fellow you bought thi s land here from
was telling you that the bus i nessmen i n larion didn ' t want the
Clinc hfield mills to come in here?
No, they didn ' t want it to c ome . The people here knowed that
their people wasn ' t going to work at it . And then they regretted
the people t hat it brought in . ( i naudible) too many bad peop le .
But they fell in love with them old mountain people , when the y
come here . They found them to be truthful and honest . Whi c h
they didn ' t exp e ct them to be .
rrl they liked them .
Got along
wi th the m and r e s pect e d them .
You were s aying that a lot of people who might hav e been av ailable
in McDowell County to work i n the mills didn ' t . You ever find
out why?
No . W
ell , they just , it was a disgrace . They consid ered it a
disgr a ce , to work in the c otton mills .
That was the people who were , say , farmi n g here in McDowell Coun t y?
Yep . They lived around here , they was born and raised here , and
they lived hard . They lived a whole l o t harder than they would
if they ' d have worked in the mills .
But they just c ouldn ' t take
a bossman . They didn ' t want no boss i ng .
So they eked out a li v ing
out in the soil . And a f e w of them , a l o t of them , work ed on
the side and made a little blockade liquor . Most of them ended up
inthe chain gang before it was over with . They'd just rather live
off of what the y could make out o n the farm .
You farme d ••• You we r e on a farm in adison County and a farm in
this ar e a . Woul d farming have b e en any eas i er or more profitable
here?
Oh y e s . It was more profitable he r e , of course . I f a rmed with
a man that had an extra good farm .
t had been well took c a re
of and handed down thr ough his grandfather .
nd he finally
(i n audible) . He was a M
urphy . And his grandfather at one time
had owned 100 Negro slaves . And he built bri c k houses and burnt
the bri c k on the place where he built the hou se s for the colo red
people . • hey finally come on down to Condre y (?) , t h e g randson
and gr a nddaughter . There were two granddaughters and one grandson
a ndth em three got all his property .
Was tha t this property , here , or · n Dysartsville?
No , it was this here .
I don ' t know , it was about fi v e or six
hundred acres , all told . Arrl he had a riv e r farm but the Duke
Power Company bought his river l a nd and put water up on it .
nd he heired a lot of wealth from his mo t he r. (wife speaks)
She was a M
urphy and married a Condrey .
(Hi c ks r e sumes) Arrl
he had plenty of mcn ey and he was a hard man to get any of it
out of . He stuc k to it .
I n the 20 1 s and JO's , when you were in the mills , were there any
black people work"ng i n the mills?
Nothing only the scrub b ers . The y h ired a colored man to scrub
and (inau d ible) •
Then it must h a ve been co pany policy not to h i re bla c k people ?
Yeah .
Jell , them mounta i n people - wh e r e we re you raised at ,
in the mounta i ns or down in the cou ntry?
Down farther east .
ell , I can g iv e you a little informati on about that .
ow , them
W
mountain people was awful op p os ed to the colored people .
hey
didn ' t allow them in the mountains .
If one went back th e re ,
they killed him . And the peo ple that was work i ng in the mills
would have left if they ' d ever put a colored pe rson in there
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running a nything other than scrubbing. Scrub b ing the floors
(inaudible). Now they're using some of them now, but they
couldn't back then b e cause t h e people wou ldn't bear for it.
Up to the time when, you left the mills, there were no black
people work ing •••
No black people in th e re. Only the scrubbers.
During the 20 1 s and before you left the mills, how were mill
workers, people tha t worked in the mills like yourself, how
were they treated around town?
When you went to town to do
some shopping or something?
Wel l , they was high ly respected by the bus · nesses in town
because the bus i nesses in town knowed that Wu S where their mo ney
was comi n g from. And they knowed they was go i ng to get ev e ryt h ing
that the mill peo p le got ahold of.
So where busin es smen might h a ve opposed the mills coming in, they
were happy once the mill workers were here spending their money?
When they was getting the money.
nd the peo p le that was opposed
to it ever be i ng put here was happy about it once it got here.
Another thing. You were say ing ear lier that at some point some
of your bosses, i mmediate bos s es, were from South Carolina.
Yeah . W
ell, the main overseer was.
Was that true most of the time during the 20 1 s and early JO's?
Why was that? Did they ••• ?
Well , they ••• North Carol i na peop le didn't know the cotton mills.
And you know that ' outh Carolina was full of cotton mills and
everybody worked the cotton mills down there.
(wife speaks)
They didn't raise no cotton in orth Carolina much . (Hicks resumes)
And they knowed the mills . And sev e ral of them ••• my overseer
and a lot of the other overse e rs, the main overse e r, when they
found out that the mills was going to come here to arion , they
took correspo ndence co u rses in textiles. So they come prepared
to •• educati on for work and all . ~nd they really could handle
the cot on mill machinery . l'hey really coul d. I mean in running
the mac h i nery.
aking rope and thread and stuff like that. It
seemed to be na tural, b e c a use they had be en raised with it.
Do you know where Clinchfield and East ar i on got most of the raw
cotton they proces s ed?
Well , they got it out of the main market . The c otton market.
(inaudible) that bought and sold to these companies ••• (w ife
speaks) It come from South Carolina mostly ••• (Hic k s resumes)
W
ell , most of it did (inaudible) Anywhere t hey raised cotton.
Now , a t the time of the Depression , big cotton farmers come ·here
to try to sell t h eir cotton direct to the companies.
Did t hat work?
No. Th e company wouldn't b u y it. They to l d t h em to sell it to
these companies and they'd rebuy it from thEm. Shipped up here
by the carlo a d, one carload after another .
Why wouldn't they buy it direct?
Well , they had a standing contra ct with these bi g companies and
naturally the peo p le that have the mo ney get th i ngs dore the way
they wanted done.
The big cotton-buying co mpanies that bought the cotton and then
s old it to, say, Clinchfield . Do you know wher e they wer e ?
ere they in Balti more? Or New York?
W
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ell , they was way off somewhere . I don't k now for sure where
the y was at, but t h ey s e nt men i n at the fall of th e year , you
know, t o bid on the ~o tton for ginning . There never was but
one cotton gin in North Carolina that I know of .
It wa s down
near crest City .
It's gone out of business , I thin k , now .
It
was a small unit.
Let me ask you another que s ti on about that strike in 1929 . About
how many peo p le in C1inchfield were part of the union or supported
the strike?
I ' d say about , there was about one f::l:fth :,at Cli nchfield . Of
course there wa s more than tha t at East M
ari on .
And there was about 70 0 p e ople at work in Clinchfield? Then ,
in 1929?
Yes . At Cl "nchf ield, at the mill . And I don ' t know how many
worked at East ari on . It was a smaller mill than either one
of these up here . But there wa s about half of the people at
East arion that claimed for it . Finally got two or three kil l ed
over there .
Why was it that the workers at East arion supporte d it more than
at Cl i nchfield?
I don ' t know ••• I never have be e n able to understand that .
It
r eally was a bett e r place to work t b an Clinchfield.
t was?
Yeah , it was .
Was it better in t e rms of the mo ney you made or •.• ?
o, it wa s not the money but the work : ng conditions was bett e r .
You said earlier that the mill village at East Hari on had better
houses?
(wife speaks) Yeah.
(Hicks speaks) W l l , East t arion had better
e
homes for the people to live in .
(wife r esumes) ••• loo ked nicer
on the outside . I never have been in one of them . before .
Did you all know many of the peop le tha t worked at East Mar ·o n?
Yeah . I knowed a lot of the m. I knowed some of them well , one
of the old men that got killed was from Clinchfield .
Do you remember his name?
Yes . He was a Vickers . I knew him well .
Sam Vi c kers?
Yeah .
(wife speaks) He co . e from D ~ sartsville to the cotton mills .
(H ick s resumes) He got into the union . And some of them w&s so
stubborn that they wo uldn't have went back if the company had
told them to . But the most of them they wou ldn't let come back .
M
ost of them th a t joined the uni on?
Yeah .
nd they come around , I lived up here at Clinchfield at
that time, and they co me around one morning with a bi g old mega phone horn , around in a car . I was just getting ready to go to
work . They was hollering that everybody at East ar i on had been
run off . Ev e rybody at East M
arin has been run off . Tha t 's all
they said . W
ell , the people h ere from Cl i nchfield , well , that
joined the uni o n and was sticking to it , t h e y just took off ar:rl
went over there . But when they got there , why people was bunched
up into two bunches, union here and the non- uni o n up here • And
there was so me people, somehow, I don't k now how they d one it ,
some of them had got in the mill .
nd they was up in the card
room , up in the spinning room top floor , and they got a rifle in
the re . And the union f i nally at last went to sho oting guns (inaudible)
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And there wa s three peop le killed. One wa s old man J ona s.
e
was from East lar ion. Old Sam Vickers and I forget the other
fel l er's name .
(wife) He was a g ood old man, Vickers was.
(Hic k s res u mes) Yes , he was. He just got into that union.
e
liv ed,he had a home, he had a farm in Dysartsville. And he
had left it to come up here, but he was raised in hutherford
County . ~ nd he c ome up here and went to work. Had a great big
bunch of girls.
(inaudible)
Who wa s it ••• how was t h e union organized at Clinchfield? LJid
they get a couple of t h e workers to go a round and talk to each
person abou t joining?
Yeah . They first went to h olding a meeting about halfway b etween
Clinchfield and East
r i on.
nd a few of the Cli n chfield peop le
went out there and they liked what the o ld man promised them.
Promtsed t h em shorter hou rs and higher wages. If one of them
d i dn t like the boss, they'd run him off. So forth and so on.
They was going to appoin t common workers to be the hea4 man.
nd there was one old man, he was a Baker, and he didn t know a
thing l n the world about a card room. He could run, i fi the picker
r oom making them first laps. But that was about all he k nowed.
But they t o ld him if he joined t h e union, they'd make him a boss
carder.
' o before the mill closed down, he come around to the
card room there and he off e red me a second hand job if I 'd come
work for him when he got t hy place. I told him, oh yeah, yeah.
Of course, I knowed he wasn t going to get placed . And so he
g ot run off thinking that I -wou ld have been his boss man if he
had gotten the job they offered him.
nd he couldn ' t have run
the (inaudible) , much less the card room. And the peop le got to
talking it up, the ones that, had joined. Of course, they was
I
awful secretive about it. rhey didn t want many people to know
at Clinchfield. And •••
They were afraid of losin g their jobs?
Yeah. They was afraid of losing their j obs. Out they'd t a lk it
a lit t le and the strikers got gathering up at night after we went
back to work and they'd sh oot dynamite all night. 1 ight around
the mill villag e. Hard for a ma n to sleep. I can tell y ou one
pretty goo~ tale about that. I don't knew whether we ought to go
into that or not. But there wa s a fel le r when them strikers,
he had a little old dog ab out the size of that one and they'd
t rained it to t h row st i cks and it would go and get them. Bring
them back. That feller decided to get even with them.
e got
him some dynamite and he loaded up a stick one night and throwed
it down toward the ra i lro a d.
ell, that little dog seen him throw
it and he went and got it and brought it back. Got it back into
his yard before it exploded. I asked him , I said if, ever find
any of your dog . And he said no I never did find a p iece of it.
Blowed it all away,
(wife spea k s) inaudible .
I was read i ng in the newspaper in 1arion , had stories abou t the
strike and there was one thing I wa s reading about . Said they
had caravans d u ring the strike when both the mills were closed
down, ca ravans of farmers that we r e br:k:ging food i n for the
strikers. Do you know who organized them, or why?
Yeah. A lot of them did. The strikers organized it, but, they
got it started . But they made the farm e rs think they was
winning, go ng to win, and it would be up to them to buy the
farm e rs' food wh en ev e rything was over. lild a lot of people •••
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that wa s the day of th e horse and wagon and a lot of farmers
would bri ng a wagon-load of food in to the strikers and park
somewhere and they'd come and get it . Then the union went to
order i ng when they got out of any thing to eat. The strikers
all had a good garden. Everybody at Clinchf ield had a good
garden . And the strikers, the union man told them t o divide
their gardens with peo p le that didn't have any. W
ell, they'd
come in the r e, they'd pick tomatoes, they'd p ick potatoes , they
p i ck a row of corn, and in a day or two's time the y could clean
his garden out.
nd they went to Hoffman , the head man , and told
him that they had to have something to eat. lild he ordered a
carload of flour.
It come, and people told me that had a right
to know , they said it was from great .big rolli n g mills where they'd
sweep up of a tjight the flour that had sifted out on the floor.
They put it in bags and he ordered it. The people that seen it,
I never did see it , they said it was just as black as tar. People
got to eating that and the y all got sick.
But the farmers in the outlying areas were willing to do that
because they •••
Yeah , t hey thought ••• the uni on had them thinking that the y were
just going to take over. And they was going to help most of
them people buy their products when it was all over with. rnd
they'd bring it in just to give out to them.
You were saying earlier that some peo ple at the Clinchfield mills
had sort of taken you i nto their confidence and were telling you
how everything was going to work. Was that y our supervisors?
Yeah . No, not my supervisors. Me and him was very close
together and he kept me i nformed all the time what wa s going to
happen . I know the union c.ome to me, sent a special group , come
to my h ouse right late one evening. tl nd they told me that they
was giving me, since they liked me , they was giving me my last
c hance to join t he union . And i f I didn't, I was going to have
to leav e . Going to r u n me off if I didn't join the union. And
I knowed then that th ey was the ones that was goi n g to lea ve, and
I was going to stay. Th e way they come about it, they kind of
tole me now since y ou are a special friend of ours, we're giving
you a special c hance to join the uni on. You c an get in without
p aying any dues or anythi ng for so long . And I said, well, I
pretended gnorant i n it. Of course, I co u ldn't say nothing else.
I asked them, I said well, what am I promised1 They said s h orter
hours and higher wages. I said, well, when do I go to work?
I 'm ready to g o to wor k for shorter h ours and higher wages. I
pretended that I thought theunion was going to pay it, you know .
They said, n o, we're just going to make the company do this .
I said, well, if you ' re go ing to make the company do that, I can
do just as good a job at that as you can.
~ o just count me out.
I won't fool with it .
nd the loyal help up there , the y made it
so hard on the strikers after we all got back to work, after the
mills was running, they mad e it so hard on the strikers that
they j ust pulled up and left as fast a s t hey cou ld get away . The
company used so me tri cks too . They went down here somewhere
about outh Caro lina and the y got the roug hest old man and the
sweari ge st o ld man and the most profane old man I ever saw and
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he loaded up some household g oods i n a stati o n wagon. i nd the
union didn't think nothing. He come right on throughthe strikers.
And went to the office. They t ook back ovec there and showed him
an e mpty house and he put that stuff in that hou s e. 'l hey locked
the door. W
ell, the uni on found out . Uow I was working at the
time up in the card room. I didn't do much work.
I stayed at
the window to watch them mostly. I seen everything that happened.
They'd done had the soldiers up here in town, but hadn't brung
them down. They went over there, and t here was an old man, a
good old man, agood friend of mine.
ound the door locked, they
didn't k now wha t to do. He said it wou ldn't do to let that old
man move in there. So that old man that I 'd put so much faith
in, he took a stick and he broke the lock off tre back door of
that house.
Was it the h ouse he was living in?
The house t his old man had put his stuff in . He just , he put
it in the re a nd he left.
nd they carried that stuff out there
and throwed it across the hi ghway. I n front of the mill. And
the company sent a wagon team out there to get it. W
ell, when
they got out there, when they got to doing that, two big old
mules, and they got them mules by the bridles and everyone had
a club. And they got to beating them m
ules ove r the head and
most everywhere.
(wife speaks) The un i on people.
(Hicks resumes)
And they wouldn't let t h em come back. So that's when the soldiers,
they brou ght the soldiers in.
nd they said, the union said,
the so l diers was here to see that the rest of us left. That
was what they said. Well , the soldiers corre down here and they,
with fix ed bayonets, a n d they went to putting half of them this
way and half of them the other way. One old man- I could se e
h im fro m where I wa s at-he stood his ground. He wa sn't going to
run, a nd o ne of the soldiers give him a good poke in the backside
with that bayonet and I mean tha t old man could outrun a mule
af t er that. He just left there . fini then the soldiers stayed
up there for about a week.
(wife) Se ems to me they stayed lo n ger
than that.
Why was it the company went and got that feller from ~outh Carolina
and brou ght him her e with his furniture?
It was after we had went back to work. And then after trey p ut
his household goods back, they brought some more. Then he cane
he r e and they worked him ab out a month. I was glad when he
left . He was ••• (wife speaks) but he said why did they, why
d d they have h im t o come?
(Hicks resumes) Well , they had him
to come for j ust exactly what happ ened. They knowed that the
strikers would tear his stuff up.
Oh . '.!.'hey wanted to get the strikers to do sore thing, to provoke
them?
Yeah .
~ o the soldiers would come.
Yeah . And tre soldiEr s, they'd
told them t h e y wouldn't c ome down here, trey was already up here
in the courthouse. But they wouldn't let t h em come without there
was some violence erupted somewhere. And they went and got that
old ••• and he was the feller that got it started.
Was the r e anythi n g el s e you co u ld rem ember abo ut whether or not
the company had a plan to deal with the union? Did the y tell
you other things that they might have thought about doi n g?
Well , t h e¥ just aimed to be · t them. That was all there was to it.
They d i dn t aim to run under a union .
nd the Cli nchfield company
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did know that they h ad enough lo yal help to start up. ~hey
knowed it wouldn't be no trou ble to g e t e n ou g h .
nd they just
d idn't aim to run under a uni on. And that old man, bri nging
him in, he was the feller t ha t tur ned the tide.
He brought the soldiers, he help ed brin g the soldiers, arrl tm
soldiers could break t h e pickets at the gate?
Yeah.
W
ere there a n y other k i nds of tr i cks l i ke that th a t either side
used, that you could recall?
W
ell, not very much , I don't reck on. Now, t he company, after they
g ot back to work, the union members that was still in com
pany
hou s es, they notif ied them to g et out.
nd some of them left
and the most of them didn't.
nd they went a nd put their stuff
out i n the street. Or on the side of tbe street. t he c ompany
a nd the law did.
Evicted them?
Just piled it up on the si d e of the street. W
ell, the uni on
people they s ome h ow found some kind o f house a nd some of them
went back home. The y was all fr om the mountains.
nd some of
them went bac k home and some of t h em found a house. I had one
of my mother's brothers got into t h e union and one of my daddy's
brothers g ot i nto it.
nd my daddy's brother lived way down
h ere a t
ebo. And he was go ing back a nd forth to work. And they
fired him. And my mother's b r other, they got him a house over
the r e s omewhe re. And he went there and lived until he could find
a place t o mo v e. He went ou t on the f a rm.
' tay ed th ere as l ong
as he lived.
I s the re a nything that made the people that join ed the union any
dif f erent fro m t h o s e that didn't? I mean, were they like fr om
a diff e r e nt a r ea? Or did t h ey have anything in common?
ell, they was all fro m th~. mounta i ns. But the ones tha t I k now e d
W
from t h e mountains a nd back i n where we co ne from was co n sidered
to be boss y and ov e rbearing. That was the way . the y l o oked on t h em
back there at home.
W
ere they the ones that joined the union?
Yeah. They was t h e ones that join ed the union. And th ey was
people that had had their way where they'd lived. ~ ecause people
was afraid of them.
Sort of bossy and mean?
They were bossy and overb e a r i ng.
1
W
ere t h ey y ounger tha n tm people that didn t join the union? Wa s
there any age difference?
No, they were mostly middle-age peop le that joined. Mostly families,
that had a man at the head of t he family.
nd of course the
b osses had always made t h em mad.
h ey'd come around arrl bawl them
ou t about somethi ng.
W
ere t h e y g ood work ers? Or were they poorer workers t han t h o s e
that didn't join the uni o n?
W
ell, they just d o n e wha:; they had to do. uot by with anything
the y cou ld.
he ones tha t I knowed.
Did any of your close friends join t h e uni on?
Yeah •
We re you all still clos e friends t h en?
Yeah. I never did hold that against t h em, because some of them
I talked to, I t old t h e m I said now I don't believe in t h e u nion.
I don't want t h e uni ons. rlut you do •••
n d of Tape # 2, s i de 1
Be gin Tape #2, side 2
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After they broke the strike and broke the union, were most of
those people that was in Clinchfield that were in the uni on, they
eventually g ot them o u t of the mill? They run them out one way
or the other?
·
Yeah. Some of than t ore up their houses before they left (inaudible).
How did the company ••• did they just fire them or make it rough
on them?
They just fired them. Right off.
ost of them. Fired most of them~
Yeah.
Vo you k now where they went?
W
ell, they scattered about everywhere. ~ome of them went out
through the coun try around through M
cDowell County and some went
back to Madison , Haywood , Mitchell County, very Cou nty, Y111 cey,
back in there where they care from.
'ome of them stayed around
McDowell County as long as they 1 ived.
1:y uncle ••• both my
uncles did. Of course, my daddy's brother, he owned a home h e re
at Nebo.
nd worked in the mills I don't know how many years.
A lot l onger than we had. He ha.d a great big bunch of g irls and
they all worked (wife) They still live around here.
(Hicks . resumes)
They give him what they got for their work. It was the change
that come in their ticket. Say they drawed a ticket for $10.50.
He give them the 50 cents. He took the $10. That's the way most
of the parents did. ~nd he saved up enough money to buy him a
home. He had it when he died. A lot of tte parents, they just
let the children pay so much board.
Was there a lot of women that worked in the mills?
Ye ah. There was more women than there was men.
M
ore women than men . Did they do pretty much the same jobs that
the men did?
Yeah .
About the same thing.
LJid they get paid about the same?
Paid the same. All except n ow the rough end of the card room
where I was. L ike the carders, and drawers and intermediates.
'.l'hey was run by men. But the f i ner spinners, the speeders, that
made the f ner yarn, they was all most run by women.
Did they also work i n weaving?
Yeah. Abcut as many women as there was men in t h e weaving.
What about ••• what d id the women do? uid they join the union
in about equal num
bers, or were there fewer women?
No. Th ere wasn't hardly any joined •
The union was mostly men1
Yeah .
Was that true at East larion too?
No . I thi nk it was a loy of women joined over there. I tell you •••
That thing's off now ain t it? You got it cut off now ain't you?
No. It 1 s still on. You want me to stop it?
No. I don't care anybody knowing what I got, was fixi ng to say.
Th e re was one of our next-door neighbors up there at Cl inchfield.
And he joined the union and he had a little ch ld take sick. A
little girl, and he sent after me one evening to come out there
as quick as I could. And I got out there and him and his wife left
the r o om with a little child, and asked me to go in there and
stay with it. And ~ went in there and it died in five minutes after
I got t here.
W
ell, he had a sister that lived at East arion. Her
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husband belong ed to the union ove r there and they hadn't never
went bac·k to work. And everybody that belong ed to theunion seemed
to think that if you didn't belong to it y ou ought to be afraid of
it.
fraid of physical dama g e. He asked me, he said Perry are
you afraid to go to Ea.st M
ari on? I said no sir, I ain't afraid
to go to East M
ari on. He said you go over there, told me what
house his sist e r lived in and tell my sister to come over here 1
that baby's dead.
So I went to the house and pecked on the door
1
and she come to the door and I told her my business.
hat her
brother's baby had died, s ent for her. She said, well, I'll
have to se e my husband. He's down there on the picket line.
That was before East Mari en had ever started up. Said, I 1 11
h a ve to go down there,and se e him. Sa id I guess you're afraid
to go down there, ain t you? I said no, I a i n't afraid to go
nowhere. I said get in the car and I'll go down there. I went
down there an:i she hunted her husband.
evera.l of them c an e,
eight or ten foot of my car with t h eir clubs. And they was
looki ng at me awful mean, but they never said nothing. And
she talked to her husband and then she come back and got in the
car and I too k her back over ther e to her brother's. And when
I was a young man up there at Clinchfield, I was a man that
everybody looked to for everything. I had to hunt the doctor for
all the people. I had to dig graves for everybody, and I had to
hunt preachers t o preach at funerals, and I had to, well, they
just looked on me as a fre e riding horse. 0 o one n i ght, so me
feller pecked on the door and I went to the doo r and he said
Perry, my wife's having a baby m d I can 1 t get none of my uni on
men to go a fter t h e doctor.
aid, will you go? I said sure,
I 'll go. ~ o I put on my clothes and went out there and got in
the car. I had an old T- model Ford. He said, now are you afraid
to go to the head man? He lived over there between the r e and
Clinchfield. Said, are you afraid t o go to his house? I said not
a bit in the world.
owe went to his house andhe pecked on the
door and his wife come to the door and said he was over at union
headquarters on ~ orehead idge. That wa s a Negro secti on. He
c ome back and said that man's over at the union headquarters and
I guess you're afraid to go over there, ain't y ou? I said no,
I a i n't a bit afraid. Said a re you su r e~ I said I 'm v e ry sure.
So he g ot i n the car and we went over there to that union headquarters. That whole hilltop was covered up witq people. ind
he went in the old bu i lding there. I t had be en an old store
buildi ng. Found t h at man. And they had to get an order fr om the
u ni on bef ore they could get a doctor. He went in there and got
t hat order and brou ght it back and we went up to tov n to an old
doctor. He's b e en dead a good many years, and he wa s an old
country doctor. Name wa s Jonas. And we went to his house and
call ed him out. He promis ed to come. But I went through them
any time I took a noti on to. Part of the time I was mad e n ough
to bitten through nails and part of the time I was a mused, I was
tickled at them.
~hen you would go through the picket lines ?
I went through the picket l i nes. Another thing I ' l l tell · you. They
had t he roads blo c k ed. W
ouldn't l e t anybody in.
W
ell, my
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brother come down through there and me and my wife and family
was over at my daddy's on the other side of the mill • .And my
brother asked me, s a id have the y se rched your car yet? I said
no. He said, well, they will before you get home. He said
t h ey searched my car, and we both had an old t ouring car with
a cloth top. And of course, that finished making me mad. I
didn't have too much farther to go . I told him, y ou get right
behind me and I 'll show you how to go throu gh them. And my wife's
brother had t ook two old F ord c a r horns and tore them up and
put them together. Put it on my car and it made the awfulest
racket you ever hea rd. So he got right behind me and I started.
I had a 1 926 T-model Ford . And we crossed the railroad switch
that goes down to Clinchfield. W
ell, that crowd was all up
there, men and women playing (inaudible) , hav l ng a bi g time.
nd the farther I went, the mad d er I got. So I blowed that old
horn and it went l i ke a railroad whistle. .And they all turned one
another loose and just reached around and picked up them clubs.
They h a d them setting aga i nst the bank and the y watched the road.
And tha t's one time tha t o l d car run good. Just seemed like it
wanted to run g ood. I poured the gas to it, and it was the wnong
thi ng to do. And I went through tha t crowd. They just spread
li k e water. I got to the foot of the hill and told my wife,
said I 'm g o i ng to stop and go back the re. I might have hit
somebody. I 'm sorry that I done that. She commenced to beg me
to go on, s a id y ou'll just g et in a fight. Just go on, go on.
So I went on home. I said, you reckon I hit anybody? He said,
I don't know, but he said they was three and four double deep
on the side just as I come through . Bu t he said that ro d was
ope n, but they was all piled up on the side.
(wife speak s) They
j ust jumped out of the way. You brushed one man . (Hicks res umes)
A few d a ys after tha t, I was off , going back. The y stopp ed a
man , wouldn't let him g o in. I pu l led right up against him.
So they told him he'd have to back out, and go back. Wouldn 't
let h i m go in at all. And he started backing into me and I just
blowed that old horn and held my ground.
Some of them come back
there and looked. Said, let him through , let him t h rough. I t's
this craz·y man back here . He' 11 kill a bunch of us if we don 1 t
let him t h rough. So they let him through, go on, but they
followed h i m ove r there. F irst place he could t u rn around , t h ey
made him turn around and go back (wife spea k s) They was afraid they
was brirgtng i n new hands to the mills, that was wha t •••
Oh . New worke rs to repla ce the strikers?
(Hi cks resumes) Yeah. ~ hat was what they was trying to sto p .
ew
hands coming in. (wife speak s) But they never did try to s top
us no more . Why we lived on cotton mill hill a nd we had to go
out sometime. (Hick s resumes) ow when the soldiers come, they
sea rched my ca r every time I took it out.
(inaudible) Even
raised the back seat and raised t h e tr unk lid. Looked u nder the
hood and ev r y t hing .
Wha t we re t h ey looki ng for?
They wa s looking for weap ons.
Dynamite?
Ye a h . And pistols and ev erythi n g . F irst morning I went in the
mill after t h e soldiers come, the y stopped me abou t seve ral
hundr ed yards from the mill a nd wanted to search me. An d I needed
a poc ke t k nifle on my job, to cut roping.
nd he searched me and
found my p ocket knife . He said, now I 1 11 have to take that • I
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said well , I don 't know h ow I'm going to do withou t my pocket
knife . I said , no way I can get it in there? He s a id you might
put it in y our shoe . So I just reached down and stuck it in my
shoe . '.L ook it in there . But I left it in there . I wouldn ' t
brin g it back out . They was afraid sorr:ebody would take a weapon
i n there .
(wife speaks) An d they ' d g e t to fighting (Hicks
res um es) They sent us word o ne eveni ng from East Marion thEt
the y was comi ng over there a nd going to run ev e rybody out of
the place .
Who was going to do that?
That was the union at East arion . And they brought us the word .
W
ell, there wa s p lent y of broom handles in there . mi we had to
make , call t h e m brush sticks . Take a bro om handle and whittle
it off and cut notches in it, and make a brush out of that waste
(inaudible) . To clean up under the machine ry with . And everybody
went to work , some cut the brush off the handle . Some found
a bro om handle . And the feller that had the little dog that
carr ied the dynamite ba ck to the house , he bro u ght him in there ••
g ot h i m a railroad tap off a joi n t on the railroad . He had it
n there m.d he whittled down his broom handle and put that tap
on the end of the broom handle . I watched him fix it .
nd we
wa s go n g to meet th em out at the h e ad of the stairs . I told
h i m, I sai d when we go ou t there a n d me e t them people , I'm going
ri ght behind y ou . He said why? I said , well , there won ' t be
nobody left for me to hit after he gets through with that nut.
nd they had the picket line all around our mill . 'l'he railroad
switch was down t h rough there. W
ell, a lot of them mean bo y s
wou ld g e t nuts , a nd the re was always plenty of old wore out nuts
off of the machi nery . They could get a poc k etful . They slip
1
up ther e and they'd throw them up at the windows .
hey hurt
several people that wa y . But that felle r brought h i m a nut off
the railroa d .
(wife speaks ) W s he aimi ng to throw it at
s omebody? (Hicks resumes) Yeah~ And they'd pick up the nut wh en
it c ome a nd they' d go to the off ice and report it .
nd they c ru ld
look at the nut and tell where it come from . W h a d an of f ice
e
in o ur own depar tment. One old mean boy n the r e , good old boy
but devilish . And he went so mewhere and took a wrenc h and he took
him a ••• got h i m a nut off ••• Come back in there a nd told me , said
you come over here nd watch what I ' m going to do. And I went
over there and of cou r s e he h i d there i n the window a nd they
couldn't see . He throwed that old big railroa d nu t out there .
He d idn't hit anybody, but come ri ght clo s e to . They run a nd
rabb e d it up and look ed at it and we co uld see them .
nd he
said I 1 m wo nd e r i ng if they k now wha t wi ndow that cane out of.
He got it off the railro a d .
Let me try to get the time stra i ght in my mi nd . You c a me to the
mills firs t in 191 9 ?
I guess it wa s 1 1 8 •
1 91 8 . And t h en you a ll lived in the mi ll villag e? And then you
went b a c k to M
adison County? S ta;yed a year and then you come back?
Mov ed back i nto the mill vil l age , and t h en so metime during the
20 1 s, y ou mo ved h er e ?
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A.
Q.
•
•
•
Q.
Q.
No . Not here .
Dysartsville?
I first went out on a farm over across the hill, here adjoining
Lake James .
I rented it from an old feller . That wa s old man
Condrey .
When wa s that? What year were you out there?
Now that was in the 20 1 s .
(wife speaks) No, that was in the
30's .
(Hicks resumes) Was it?
(wife) Yeah, because Lois was
a little baby . Shew as born in 1930 and we moved between then
and 1932 . (Hicks)
ow, about the time she was a year old.
(wife)
It was ab out inaudible) when we moved out on the farm .
~ o , did you all then live in the mill villag e all thew ay during
the 20 1 s up to the 30's?
Up to th e 30's when we went out there . No , I bought a little
farm down here at Nebo and we quit the mill and went out ·and
stayed about a year . And ••• (wife sp e aks)But you worle d 'in the
mill. (Hicks resumes) But I worked in the mi l l .
went back and
forth .
And then you finally left the mills in about 31 or 32? To go •••
Yeah . We staye d ou t five years .
And t h en you come back to Drexel?
nd then I went back to Clinchfield .
nd I worked several years
t he n and then I bought that farm in Dysartsville . (wife) Th~
was in 1939 . (Hicks r e sumes) I t was in the early 40's . It was
just abou t the time that W
orld War One was breaking out .
They got three of our oldest boys. In W
orld W
ar umber Two .
How many children did you all h ave?
Ha d six. Six living and two dead . Got four boys and two girls .
You said earlier that you had brown lung . When did you discover
that you h ad that?
Well, I don't know that was what it was . I knowed it was something
bad wrong . Th e last wor k I done in the cotton mills .
That would have been in 1939?
Yeah . About 1939 . And I got a l lergic to everything . Hay fever •
Breathin§ got bad.
hen I went out on the farm and stayed six
years .
old the farm . That was wh en I was talk i ng a b out wanting
to work out ::,ocial Security . To have something to depend on
when I retired .
nd you had to have worked for a company at
that time to carry it ..," And I decided to go back • •• instead of
g o i ng to the cott m mills. They done everything they could to
get me to come back th re . And I went to Drexel Furniture ~ompany .
W
ent to work out on the yard . Handling lumber . And my emphysema
g ot worse, and worse. I got to where I wasn't able to run the
job . Somebody said (inaudible) well satisfied with my work .
When did you 1 k now you h a d b r own lung ?
W
ell, it ain t b e en too many years ago that I knowed for sure
that's what it was (wife speaks) We l l, the doctor told y ou that
was emphysema . He n ever did tell you it was brown lung .
(Hicks
resumes)
No.
lhey cal l it brown lung now . And , W3ll I wrote
t o a doctor that wrote this in the Asheville ~itizen . l old him
h ow I had work ed . And he wrote me back a letter and told me I
had emphysema . But the doctors around Mari o n here they ne~er
cou ld discov e r.
(wife spea ks) They called it athsma .
Just athsma?
�A.
And after I went to wor k up there in the lumber yard, I told my
overseer that it was getting too hard for me.
I'd have to give it
up. He as k ed me what I wanted to do and I told him I thought I wanted
to nightwatch. I'd worked with him a year and a half. So they had no
trouble getting a nightwatchman job. They was having trouble
keeping nightwatchmen. I t was an awful big old p lant and it was awful
spooky . And ther e wa s a lot of people ( inaudible). So they put me
right on. I nightwatched for two years there. .rind in the time I
was there, we built this lit t le old house h ere. Our oldest son's
wife while he wa s i n the Army, bought two a c res a nd a half of land
here.
nd he said he'd give •.• both of them said they'd g ive
e n ough l a nd to build us a house on. W
ell, I didn't much like the
idea of that, but I went ahead and built this little old house.
Cheap lit t le old house.
nd we been here about 30 years.
nd I
nightwatched two years and a half and our children all go t away
from home. There was nobody to stay with my wife. She was afraid
to stay by herself at night. I went and told my bossman that I want ed
on the days hift, something. I didn't k now nothing ab out the furniture
factory, that is the inside of it. Well, he went and got me a job
in the machin e room. Rough (inaudible) where all the lumber all started.
But it was worse than the cot t on mill. F or dust. There wa s dust
ev e rywhere. The ve ry worst thing that I cou ld have done. But
I stuck it out there until I was , got old enoug h to retire. They cut
the a ge down fro m 65 to 62. And on the l''ourth of July, I was 62
in April. Been 63 the next year. W
ell, I went to the Social Security
man here i n a rion and signed up to retire. He fir s t told me, said
you can't retire. Yet. Said it;s all right to sign up, but y ou
can't retire. I said,~11, didn t you know they'd cut the a g e down
to 62? He said no, I didn't know it. W
ell, I said, I been watching
th a t closer than you h av e. So he signed me up and I went back on
M
onday morning after the ~ ourt h of J u ly, went right up to my boss
and tol d him, I said I'm just work i n g a ten day notice and I'm quitting.
He said what's themat t er? I s aid I' m r e tiring.
So he come around
about an hour or two and he said, P e rry y ou can't draw a thing this
year. You've done made o ver $ 1200, and that's all you're a llowed
to make. Wi th them. He said you c a n't draw a cent until next year.
He said l e t's throw that notice away. I said, well, just throw it
a way. He said, well, I never did turn it in nohow. So I worked the
rest of that year and retired. I like to never made it. I had, tl!mt
dust gi v e me hay fever and agitated this collapsed lung. And so at
the end of the year, when they c ome out for Christmas, he come around
to me and said now P erry you're just go i ng to make $ 1200 next
year, ain't you? I said I ain't going to make nothing next year. W
hen
I go out of here a t Christmas, I 'm not comi ng back. Oh, he said, co me
back and work out $ 1200. I said no, I'm done. He s a id,~11, come back
and wor k unt i l yo ur birthday . I said no, I 'm done.
'o I ~ome out the
Christmas vacation and although I was supposed to go back and work a
few days between vacatio n and the first of the year. But I took
pneumonia fe v er. I saw a doctor and wasn't able to go back. But
quick as I was able to go, I went and signed out for release and got
what was coming to me.
nd they beg ed me there yet to come back and
visit, but I ain't n e ver g oing back.
End of Tape #2, sid e 2
�
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Title
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Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
In 1973, representatives from Appalachian State University (ASU) began the process of collecting interviews from Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell county citizens to learn about their respective lives and gather stories. From the outset of the project, the interviewers knew that they were reaching out to the “last generation of Appalachian residents to reach maturity before the advent of radio, the last generation to maintain an oral tradition.” The goal was to create a wealth of data for historians, folklorists, musicians, sociologists, and anthropologists interested in the Appalachian Region.
The project was known as the “Appalachian Oral History Project” (AOHP), and developed in a consortium with Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College (now Hazard County Community College) both in Kentucky, Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and ASU. Predominately funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the four schools by 1977 had amassed approximately 3,000 interviews. Each institution had its own director and staff. Most of the interviewers were students.
Outgrowths of the project included the Mountain Memories newsletter that shared the stories collected, an advisory council, a Union Catalog, photographs collected, transcripts on microfilm, and the book Our Appalachia. Out of the 3,000 interviews between the three schools, only 663 transcripts were selected to be microfilmed. In 1978, two reels of microfilm were made available with 96 transcripts contributed by ASU.
An annotated index referred to as The Appalachian Oral History Project Union Catalog was created to accompany the microfilm. The catalog is broken down into five sections starting with a subject topic index such as Civilian Conservation Corps, Coal Camps, Churches, etc. The next four sections introduced the interviewees by respective school. There was an attempt to include basic biographic information such as date of birth, location, interviewer name, length of interview, and subjects discussed. However, this information was not always consistent per school.
This online project features clips from the interviews, complete transcripts, and photographs. The quality and consistency of the interviews vary due to the fact that they were done largely by students. Most of the photos are missing dates and identifying information.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1965-1989
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview.
Howie, Sam
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed.
Hicks, Perry
Interview Date
12/31/1975
Location
The location of the interview.
Marion, NC
Number of pages
25 pages
Date digitized
9/19/2014
File size
24.4MB
Checksum
alphanumeric code
b6affd7cf20c7fcf3df5c2f7a0b30fa4
Scanned by
Tony Grady
Equipment
Epson Expression 10000 XL
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Copyright for the interviews on the Appalachian State University Oral History Collection site is held by Appalachian State University. The interviews are available for free personal; non-commercial; and educational use; provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Appalachian State Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records; 1965-1989; W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection; Special Collections; Appalachian State University; Boone; NC). Any commercial use of the materials; without the written permission of the Appalachian State University; is strictly prohibited.
Source
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AC.111 Appalachian Oral History Project Records; 1965 - 1989
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111_tape338_PerryHicks_transcript_M
Title
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Interview with Perry Hicks [Feburary 9, 1976]
Language
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English
English
Type
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Document
Creator
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Howie, Sam
Hicks, Perry
Source
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<a title="Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/195" target="_blank">Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Appalachian Region, Southern--Social life and customs--20th century
Appalachian Region, Southern--Social life and customs--19th century
Hicks, Perry
Description
An account of the resource
Perry Hicks talks about working in a cotton mill in western North Carolina in the early twentieth century. He was born in 1899 and began working at a young age because he dropped out of the six-month school he was attending. He explains the influence the unions had: "naturally, I have, all my life, been opposed to the unions." He says that the unions caused inflation, so the poor people didn't come out ahead anyway. He eventually left the cotton mill because he couldn't support his family.
Boise Hardwood Lumber Company
Burke County N.C.
Clinchfield
Clinchfield company
cotton mill
Drexel Furniture Company
Duke Power Company
Dyartsville
East Marion Mill
farming
flu epidemic
Great Depression
Haywood County N.C.
Madison County N.C.
Marion
mill house
mill work
Perry Hicks
Pigeon River
protests
railroad
Rutherfod County
sawmill
segregation
voting
World War I
-
https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/files/original/2e109166b51ca3a355ab1722712bc90d.pdf
fef526d36099634e28ce11fa81579a98
PDF Text
Text
#336
Dewey E. Helms
This is an Appalachian Oral History Project interview with
Marion, North Carolina who is retired textile mill worker.
Dew~y
Helms of
He was inter-
viewed of January 10 , 1976 by Sam Howie .
Q:
First of all , where were you born?
A:
I was born in Mc Dowell County.
Q:
Do you remember the township?
A:
I was born in Marion.
Q:
Marion?
A:
Yep .
Q:
Was it outside the town or within the town limits?
A:
It was about a mile out of town .
Q:
What year were you born?
A:
1903.
Q:
What did your parents do for a living?
A:
They farmed part of the time and my father was a carpenter.
the carpenter trade for a while .
He worked at ..
�2
Q:
Was it a fairly large family that you were born into?
A:
There were eight of us:
Q:
When you and your brothers turned eighteen or twenty, what did most of
you do?
four byys and four girls.
Were most of you staying on your fattl.er's place or did you go out
to work-to what they called public work?
A:
We stayed at home most of the time until we finished school and worked
kind of part-time.
I worked between school terms in a furniture factory and
my older brother sold insurance.
I believe he was in Greenwood, South Carolina
and the girls stayed home until they were married.
Q:
Which furniture factory?
Was it · one in Marion?
A:
Yes, Drexel Furniture Factory.
Q:
Do you remember when it opened?
A:
No. I don't re.member.
Q:
I remember you told me that you first went to work in the mills in 1923.
A:
Yes, right, July l, 1923.
Q:
Was that for Clinchfield?
A:
Yes, it was.
Q:
You were saying earlier that one of the Clinchfield mills opened in 1916.
A:
There were two mills, the north and south plant.
.
The south plant I''m
absolutely certain opened in 1916 and I believe the other one opened in 1911.
�3
I'm not sure.
Q:
Which one did you go to work in?
A:
I went to work in, ' I reckon, what they call the north plant.
The older
mill.
Q:
Do you remember when East Marion might have been opened:?
A:
1905, I think.
Q:
You don't recall when Cross mills first opened do you?
A:
No, but it was later, probably around 1917 or 18.
Q:
Did you do any other kind of work besides furniture before you went into
It started in 1905.
the mills in 192 3.?
A:
No . Nothing but farm and cut wood.
Q:
So you knew how to farm.
A:
Yes, pretty much
Q:
What kind of farming did your father do?
A:
No, mostly corn.
vegetables.
Q:
Did he raise beef or what?
Well, that was our biggest crop ... corn and just
We pl!actically lived on what we made.
Was it possible to have some income from farming in those years?
�4
A:
No, very little income.
Q:
Can you
~ay
why it was you decided to go to work in the mill?
Wli:y you
were first attracted to the mill, to working in the mill?
A:
Well, like I told you, I worked between school terms and I tried the
furniture factories.
I only made ll¢ an hour at the furniture factories.
were paying more at the mills and I decided to try the mills.
work
. 11re one summer, but I wound up staying.
and we were running five days and a half.
til eleven o'clock on Saturday.
eleven hours a day.
I intended to
I went in the weave room
At least we run, the mill run un-
About sixty hours a week.
We worked about
We went to work at six o'clock in the morning and worked
until six o'clock in the evening.
clock in the morning.
They
We were supposed to go to work at seven o'
We were supposed to have a ten hour work day in North
Carolina, but it was never enforced.
Q:
You mean there was a ten hour work law?
A:
Supposedly, yes, supposed to be.
It was enforced in South Carolina, but
it was never enforced in North Carolina.
We went to work at six o'clock in the
morning and worked until six in the evening.
Saturday morning and worked until eleven.
We went towork at six o'clock on
I went to work for thirteen dollars
and eighty five cents a week.
Q:
What was that an hour?
A:
(Laugh) I don't know.
Q:
Okay.
A:
Supposed to have been fifty five hours, but we were working sixty hours.
�5
Q:
Did you get paid for the extra five hours?
A:
No.
Q:
The company said, "You want the job, you've got to work.
A:
That's right.
11
If you didn't want it., there were a lot of people waiting
for it .
Q:
There were a lot of people that wanted to work in the mills?
A:
Yes .
Q:
But then generally you went to the mills because it was possible to make
a little bit more money than in the furniture factory.
A:
Yes , that's right.
Q:
Other than the cotton mills and the furniture industry, was there any other
kind of work available in the Marion or Mc Dowel 1 County area?
A:
No, the only thing was the railr oad.
They had section crews on the rail-
road, but you couldn't ever get a job on the railroad.
Q:
There just weren't any jobs there?
A:
None.
Q:
Did they pay well, the railroads?
A:
No , not too well.
I've forgotten that.
I knew my father worked for South-
ern Railroad Company for a while for a dollar and tea cents a day, but I guess
that was before I was old enough to go to work.
Q:
Were you still going to school then when you started working at Clinch-
field the first time ?
Ai
Yes.
Q:
And you just stayed on?
�6
A:
Yes, I just stayed on.
Q:
You said when you went to work for them, you went to .work in weaving.
A:
Yes.
Q:
Clirichfield, as I understand it from Mr. Hicks, was just turning out woven
cloth.
A:
It wasn't doing any printing or dying.
Just what they call "printll cloth.
64, 64--64, 60 and 80
64, 50 a filling.
Q:
Is that coarse cloth?
A:
No, it's pretty fine.
Q:
What did you do in weaving?
A:
I started in the loom plant, just cleaning looms with a brush and that was
It's thin cloth.
What was your job?
before they used air jets, or compressors.
I cleaned looms with a brush un-
til I learned a little bit about weaving and I started weaving on sixteen looms.
We had to learn on our own.
Tpey didn 't pay for no learning.
Q:
You mean they wouldn't t r ain you?
A:
No.
There was no training program at all.
And if you tried hard you could,
after a year or so, you could start weaving on the looms.
more and a good weaver made right much more.
They even paid a little
I started work in 1923.
started fixing looms in 1925 for nineteen dollars and sixty cents a week.
friends easy and the fellows helped me out a whole lot.
1925, and I fixed looms until about 1945, I guess.
Q:
Fixing what does that involve?
A:
Just keeping a loom running making good cloth.
I
I made
I started fixing in
�7
Q:
Just repairing it and keeping it going?
A:
Yes.
Q:
Is it as good a job as weaving or better?
When you were weaving were
you on piece work or was it possible to be on piece work in weaving?
A:
They figured by cut. what they called a cut.
hundred and ten yards.
TB.ere was a cut mark on every
They put a blue mark on it with a slash around it .
Q:
Yes.
A:
A blue mark at the cut for a cut mark and the weaver had to keep the
looms running, fill the batteries. and take off the cloth.
on 'til 1936.
That probably went
Then they went on what we called a "stretch-out system" and
they give the weaver more looms. where we were running twenty-four looms.
They gave them fortyeight.
doff the cloth.
They had battery fillers on them and somebody to
They took the battery filling and cloth doffing off the weaver and
gave them more looms.
It was called the "stretch-out system. "
Q:
More production ... in the same period of time.
A:
Finally they went on and kept adding help and they got up to seventy two
looms in the weaving.
Q:
You had to really work fast on that didn't you?
fixer . . . and you stayed a fixer until sometime in the
A:
But by 1925, you were a
1
40' s?
Around sometime in the !40's. I went over in supervision.
I stayed a
supervisor until I retired.
Q:
All the time with Clinchfield?
A:
No. I worked at Clinchfield until 1940.
Q:
And you were a supervisor at East Marion?
A:
Yes.
April of 1942 I went to East Marion.
East Marion was installing new machinery and I was interested in
�8
learning more about it.
I went over there for that purpose, to learn something about
the machinery.
A: Yeah.
I was married Ln 1924 and I went to house keeping in the mill village .
Q: Was it a company policy that you had to live in the village to work for Clinch-
field?
A: No . there was no living requirement .
If you wanted to live in a three room house
that was forty fi ve cents a week and if you rented four rooms, about as much a s they
had, they had a few six room houses.
then that included your lights.
Four room house was sixty cents a week and
Sometimes I guess back in the '20's they wired the
village .
Q: Would that have been cheaper rent than renting somewhere else in the town?
A: Yes, it would.
Q: During that early period did the mills operate a company store for the workers?
A: Yes.
Q:
Was it just a general store? Did it have grocer ces in it and clothing and just
about anything you need?
A: General store, yes, hardware, clothing. groceries.
Q:
Were the prices cheaper in the company store than anywhere else in town?
A : No, they were not.
�9
Q: They were the s : me or higher?
A: They were about the same.
What you could do was if you bought from the com-
pany store, they had a checking list system .
You could go to the office and get a
check on your tlme and pay for your groceries or whatever you bought.
It came out
on a ticket on Saturday at the end.
Q: They gave you credit in other words.
A: Yes , they just wrote you what we c a lled a (speaking to someone else) a ticket
wasn't it?
(othe r person answering) : Some kind of ticket you got and you go down to the office
window and you tell them how much you w a nted and they wrote it.
You gave it to
the store manager for what you bought and then at the end of the week it would come
out of your check.
Lots of people ne ver did draw a dime in pay.
They never did draw
any money.
(other person-NOTE: other person was Mr. Helms' wiie)
They had some kind of old books too, that people would ...
A: Yeah, they had coupon books from a dollar to five dollars and you could get a
dollar coupon book if you wanted to buy a small amount at a time sometimes ten or
fifteen cents worth of something.
dollars.
They'd tear out a coupon and that went up to five
Five dollars would just about pay for a week's groceries.
Mrs. Helms: Some of the men made money with books.
You could get them for a
dollar cheaper than you could go to the office and get them yourself too, couldn't
you?
�10
A: Yeah.
A lot of people sold their books.
They'd get a five dolar coupon book
and sell it for three dollars and se venty-five cents.
You could, if you had the money
to buy the books, you were lucky and you could get flve dollars worth of groceries
for three seventy.five.
Q: Well, waht about the ones that were selling them?
A: They were losing , yeah.
They were losing.
Thet were really cutting their wages.
Q: Wonder why they wanted to do that?
A: Well, money was scarce and if you had to go the the doctor you had to pay them
a dollar.
So they sold their two dollar book to get a dollar and a half for it .
Then
they could pay their doctor bill and hospital or drug store bill with a dollar and a half.
Q: So, they did it just to get. some ready cash.
A: Yeah, just in an occassional emergency.
Q: During
~he
'20's , you said there were a bt of people trying to get work in the
mills and there weren't enough jobs for everybody.
the mills during the '20's?
Was it possible to move up in
That is, you became a fixer ...
A: Yes •.. depending altogether on how hard you tried.
Q: But could it be done.?
A: Yes .
Q:
You could improve your situation.
During the '2 0 ' s, did wages increase or sta y
�11
the same or for the same job?
A: They ne ver increased.
We might have gotten a few small raised. but they would
decrease too, in the '20's and on up into the '30's.
In the summertive usually from
probably June until September they ran three or four days a week, curtailed, and
that happened for several years in succession.
The market was bad.
They couldn 't
sell the cloth so they curtailed and it was awfully hard to make a living.
Q: That was during the Depressian?
A: Yeah.
Q: Wa ges might have stayed the same, but there just wasn't enough work during the
week, enough hours.
A: Wages didn't vary much from 1920 'til I guess it was 1936 when we went on eight hour :
Q: Yes.
Mrs. Helms: That's when Social Security started wasn't it?
A: Yeah
when President Roosevelt came in.
Q: Compared to other jobs a man might have had
~n
the area during the '20' s and
say '30 's too, was the work in the mills generally hard? Was it say as hard as farming or working in furniture or something liRe that?
A: Well, it was steady work.
did.
You had to keep busy and especially in the weave room YOl
The lunch period, I belie ve, and that's the only time you ever got and slack.
�12
Of course, the weavers did all they could to keep their production up and make as much
money as they could and the supervisors saw that our hands st,5lyed busy.
The first
two years that I worked, I worked for them by the hour.
Q: That's when you were cleaning?
A: Yeah, cleaning, taking our quills , and sweeping and I had enough spare time to
learn a little bit about weaving.
They had two 16 loom sets in the mill and the rest
of them were 20-24 and 26 . and I got to where I could run a sixteen mill set.
didn't pay much more than cleaning, about the same.
I felt like I was getting somewhere.
during that time.
It
Anyway, I was progressing.
Then I went on the smash job, I learned smash
Do you know anything about the mills? What the smash job is?
Q: I know what weaving and fixing, but I don't know what a smash job is.
A: Well, sometimes a loom would make a break, break all the warp our for a space
maybe six or eight inches wide and that was the smash hand's job to draw all of the
threads in and get the looms ready for the fixer to start up
Q: Yes.
A: I learned to do that and then I learned to fix a '.little.
Then finally I became a reg-
ul2.r fixer sometime in 1925 probably in the later part of 1925.
Q: How did that work?
You were working in a smash job or cleaaing or something
and you watched a fixer do his job and you figured out what it was he did .
Could
you go to the supervisor when a fixer job came open and say, "Well, · I know how
to do that, could you consider me for that?" Is that how you got that job?
�13
A: Yeah.
Q:
You just had to teach yourself and then ...
A: Yes, what they'd do, some of the fixers would help you out for a while,
explain things to you and tell you how .it worked.
job, you went and asked for it, applied for it.
When you felt like you could run a
Sometimes they'd laugh at you
(laughter) 2.nd sometimes they'd consider you.
Q: Yeah.
Who were the supervisors?
Were they people from around here or ...
A: My first supervisor was originally from Madison County, but he l ived in the
village at that time.
Q:
Yes.
A: George Reynolds.
Now he's been a minister of the Gospel for several years.
He's eighty-two or three years old and he's still preaching.
Q: Yes.
A: And lives in Black Mountain.
Q: Were the majority of the supervisors, when you first went to work, from
outside the county?
You said he was from Madison County.
A: He was raised in Madison County.
Most of the people that worked in the mill
that I knew came from Madison, Heywood, Yancey, and Mitchell Counties.
Q: Yeah, that's what Mr. Hicks said.
That was in the early and middle '20's.
�14
In the
1
30 1 s. were the people still coming from Madison and Yancey and Mitchell
Counties?
A: They certainly we r e , yes s ir.
Q: But were there some from McDowell County that were working in the mills?
A: Yes, a lot of people from McDowell County were working.
whole families.
They would hire
Suppose a man came along and had flve ar six or seven childres
were old enough to work .
They would hire the whole family and give him a house
to live in and I think that they figured they would keep that family.
I mean, they'd
be satisfied if they hired that family and stayed there, make permanent bands .
Q : They wouldn't be moving on.
They woul dn ' t be as ready to move on as say a
single man?
A: Yeah, right.
But there wasn 't much place to go.
and people were continually changing.
There just wasn't any work
I don't know why, but the p eople were
continually coming from Spartanburg, Gaffney, and e ven Greenville, a nd Rutherford County coming here for jobs , loom fixing and all that and it didn't pay any more .
I don't know if they were discharged or why they moved ..•
END OF SIDE 1
TAPE #1 SIDE #2
Q : Was it your impression that the mills in Mari on pa ..d as much and had as good
working hou r s and conditions as say in Greenville or Spartanburg .. .
A: Yeah, about the same .
About the same .
Q: So people we r en't coming here for any real reason then .
They were just sort
�15
of drifting .
A : Yeah.
Q: Perry Hicks said that a lot of the supervisors and he went to work in 1919 .
He
said a laot of his supervisors in the early '2 's were from South Carolina, because
the y had more mills down there and peopl
could pick up skills and know more ab':out
it than they could up here.
A: Those men weat on to make overseers.
visors out of them.
If a man qualified they'd make supe r -
I think it depended a whole lot on whether the overseer liked
you or not more than it d i d on your ability.
Nov. that was always the way it looked
to me .
Q: That was in the '20's.
A: Yeah.
Q: Did it seem to you that there were a lot of people who would switch from one
mill to the other? Start at East Marion and come to tone of the Clinchfield mills
then go to Cross mills .
A: Yes, they di d 'Switch alot.
I never did understand why, whether or not they were
discharged from their jobs or whether they decided to move , just got mad about
something and decided t o move.
I don't know what .
Q : Was there that much difference between wbrking at one and working at the othe r ?
A: C r oss mill was a spinning mill , they didn 't do any weaving.
Clinchfield and
�16
East Ma r ion both were weaving mills.
C r oss mill.
For some reason people liked to wor k at
They we r e treated a little better, I think.
Q: Yes.
A: It was indi vidually owned and they just treated t heir help a little better and they
paid a little, a few cents more at that time.
Howe ver, the other mills finally got
to paying more than Cross Mill.
Q: Yes.
D id C r os s have a village, a mill village?
A: Yes, they had one.
They st ill own thei r village.
Cross mill still owns and
rents its houses.
Q: But East Marion and Clinchfield sold their houses to the
workers~
A: Yes.
Q: Who owns C r oss now?
A: Eugene Cross, the Cross family.
Q: Yeah.
A: I imagine they have a lot of stock holders, but ..•...
Q: Other than those three, Cross, Clinchfield, and E a st M a rion, there wasn't
any othe r mill in McDowell County in say 1925, or later that you recall?
A: No, the r e were no other mills in McDowell County.
Thread was the next one.
I believe, American
�11 ..
Mrs~
Helms: No , it came years later.
A: I imagine it was 1950 when American Thread came.
Q: Do you recall who the owners of Clinchfield and East Marion were in the '20 's?
Do you recall their names, who they were or ... mainly where they were from?
Were they from around here?
A: Now , I think that the same people built both mills.
and later on it was mostly locally owned.
East Marion started up
They buily Clinchfield up and I did
know the history pretty well, but I'm pretty sure ....
Mrs . Helms:
A: "Baldwins, Carol Baldwin from Baltimore.
He owned the controlling interest
in East Marion and ...
Q: Does the
name Ha.rt ring a bell with Clinchfield?
A: Sir?
Q: Hart.
Do you recall a man named Hart in connection with Clinchfield?
A: Yeah.
Anyway, there was some disagreement somehow and one faction tooK.
over East Marion and the other one, Clinchfield.
Q: Yes .
A:
But, I've forgotten just how it was.
�18
Q: But the same people were invoLred when both mills first started up.
You don't
recall what it is they had a dispute o ver do you? I don't know of ....
A: No, sir, I don't.
I, it hasn't been too long.
Not too many years since I read the
history of that , but I've forgotten.
Q: Where did you read that?
Was it printed up somewhere?
A: It was printed material, but I've forgotten what it .....
Q: Wasn't in the newspaper was it?
O r was it?
A: I don't remember, I'm not sure.
It might not have been any special edition of
the newspaper.
I don't know.
Q: Was it your feeling that Clinchfield and East Mari n were fairly profltable for
the owners?
A: Yes.
I think they were fairly profitable.
They made some money, because when
they finally decided to remodel, install the new machinery they had the money t o do
it with.
I know that, because I was more or less on the inside when thet started to
remodel and install new machinery.
it.
Why, I know t hat they had the money to pay for
The mills in the early '20's and 1 30's were dirty and hot.
The weaver's room
was awful hot and they didn't have any ventilation, except what they called a skylight.
They had a little window over the window that they pulled in and
le~
a little air in,
but they didn't allow you much ventilation and your work wouldn't run good.
running around a hundred degrees, ninety five.
unbearable.
It was
In the summertive it was almost
�19
I think that the weave r ooms were the hottest place there was.
In the latter years
I found out that it was more just an idea than anything else, because we finally went
to running the we ave room down t o seventy degrees during summer.
Q:
You mean there wasn't any point in keeping them hot?
A: No.
We got air con ditioning to keep it down I believe that was the supervisor
or the plant m a nager, I don't know.
humidifying system.
But they were dirty
The floors stayed wet in places.
a rm or leg, th t wa s your experience at work .
ensation, workman ' s compensation.
Q:
If
Wfl.
nd we had a old model
If you fell and broke your
They didn't have any kind of comp-
got hurt, we just got hurt.
Lost your pay?
A: Lost pay, yes .
Paid our doctor bills.
Q: Was th ere a c ompany doctor or company nurse?
A: No, there wasn't any company doctor.
Q: Any kind of first aid on hand?
A: No, none.
I fixed looms for years and had a little bottle of iodine in my tool box
and we didn't have first - aid.
W.e.' d u s e something to tie our finger up with, if we
got cut or hurt or something.
Q:
Just go on and work?
A: But we did it ourselves.
There wasn't any use to go to nobody and say anything
�20
about it.
Q: Why did they feel they needed to keep it wet or humi§l?
A: It takes a certain amount of humidity to keep that yarn running.
through the slicers and the side.
It's run
Start to put on the yarn and it's brittle.
of course ,
You have
to have a certain amount of humidity to make the work run, but the humidifiers were
bad to get out of order and when they did , they just wet the floor, you know.
Some
of the warps got too wet to run, but all that was changed ofter the remodeling and
got air conditiaming and a diffe r ent: }
1umdiifying system.
Q : You were saying earlier it was your impres s ion that most of the people who c ame
to work in the mills during the early '20 1 s , middle '20' s . were not from this c ounty.
They were from farther west like Yancey, Mitchell, or Madison County.
A : You see, I lived in the village and I was acquainted with almost everybody.
Most
of them came from Madison and Heywood.
Q: They were farm families?
A : Yes.
Q: Were they giPen, because they were fam ilies, were they given hiring preference
over individuals, single people .
You said the mills would more readily hire a family
than they would an indiv idual or they felt that he would make a better employee or
worker.
Or were the people that came in from s a y Madison, were they goven prefer-
ence over local people?
A : No, they were not .
�21
Q: Not really?
A: Sometimes a whole family m.ight have been giving a little preference to the
houses , I cb n 't know .
Q : Because they wouldn't have any house at all?
A: But, all you got, all anybody g(j)j; then, they worked fo r it .
promoted to a better job, p u had to work for it.
Of course, you got
You had to convince the man
that you were capable of doing it .
Q: Do you have any idea why f>eople came in such numbers from farther west to
work in the mills? We r e they just tired of farming or couldn't make a living on
farming or what was it?
A: I just have an idea that it was harder to make a living.
Q: Yeah .
Did any of them tell you that, say that , was why they came to the mills?
A: Not tha t I recall.
But you take a man , say he had six children.
He and six children
went to work and if they m ake twelve dollars a week that made eighty fou r dollars a
week .
Well, he'd have probably kept ten dollars out of each child's pay.
There was
a lot that went back and bought farms depending on how large the family was.
Q : You mean they would work a couple of years and save up and go back to say
Heywood County and buy a farm?
A: Yeah .
They'd work several years like that .
took most of the money that the children made.
I'm pretty sure that the parents
�22
As long as they stayed at home, the parents just about got all t hat they made.
(cough) So, a man with a large family pretty well mopped up.
Q: Yeah.
How old did a child have to be before they would let it work in the mill
then?
A: I believe fourteen.
Q:
Yes.
A: TQ.ey did work just small children, but I believe they made the General Assembly
pass a bill.
They had to be fourteen years old .
Q: Yes.
A: They had to go get a work card then (c ough) from the
ing before the company would hire them.
~hool
that they were attend-
I think it was fourteen.
Q : That would mean tmt couldn't go to school if they were hired?
There was no
night work, was there?
A: No.
Q: So, that meant if they went to work at fourteen , they weren't in school?
A: They didn't go to school.
But they had to get a permit of some kind before they
could work .
Q: Were there about as many women working at Clinchfield as men?
A: Yeah , I think there were .
�23
A: See, most of the spinning rooms, most of the spinners or all the spinners were
women.
A lot of the women worked in the card room .
Probably more men worked
in the card room than women but in the weave room, I'd say it was pretty well divid ed About as many women as there were men.
Q: Did they pay them different?
A: No .
Q : There was no difference in pay?
A: A woman can actually be as good a weaver as a amn can.
I've worked with
women that was awfully good weavers .
Q: What did they have the children doing, say those fourteen to eighteen?
A: Learning, mostly to weave .
My wife said she went to work at Clinchfield for
twenty five cents a week for a size and she, I think, got to where she could run
two sizes and made fifty cents a week .
I'm no , I'm not certain .
Q : Who did just general clean-up work azround the mill?
A : Do you mean inside?
Q : Yes .
A : \Vell,, they had room cleaners and sweepers and they l=lad probably two c olored
people that did the mopping
that mopped the floors once a week .
They didn't get
around to it often, because it was a big plac e and I know there was some colored women
�24
that used to mop at Clinchfield.
Later on, it was only men that did the mopping .
After they got an air compressor and what we called blow pipes, they blew all this
lint and cotton off the looms and the sweeper swept it up and it was sold for somekind of waste.
I don't know what they did ...
Q: The lint was?
A: Yes .
Q: Perry Hicks said when he first came to the mills around 1920, that there was a
lot of feeling in this county among people that they d idn't want to go to the mills to
work.
They'd rather farm or do something else.
A: Yes , I was.
Were you aware of any of that?
People that worked in the mill were actually looked down on.
(laugh) were called cotton mill trash.
They
Now that's a fact , I'm just telling you t he facts.
They were actually looked down on by people.
Q: In the town?
A: Yeah , father was offered a job at Clinchfield and it was a good job , if he'd move
into the village.
He wouldn't do it.
That was before any of us ever went to work.
They felt like the people that lived in the village was nothing.
Now that's a fact.
Q: Why did people feel that way? Was it because they were from outside, they'd
come in from other counties or ...
A: I really don't know, I must admit.
I' ve had friends down through life that was
the best people you could ever come by.
the mills.
They lived in mill villages and worked in
�25
Q: When a mill worker went into the town to the store to buy something, they wouldn't
refuse to take his mmey?
A : No, they wouldn't.
(laugh)
But you had to have some kind of somebody to recommend
you before you got any c redit and if nobody didn 't know you, nobody would give you
credit.
So, I think it was one reason that so many people c r edited at the company
store, because the few grocery stores that were around refused them credit from
one week to the next .
Q: Yes.
What else did the companies do for the workers?
with a village, housing, and the company store .
at all?
They provided them
Did they do anything else for them
Like . were there mill schools for the children?
A: Yeah , they built a school house over there in the village and the company did
that on their own I'm su r e .
Now, when this building come through the mill I was
going to school in a little two-room school house about two mlles over there and it
was a ctually closer to Clinchfield mill than it was to our home .
These kids that
came from the mill village just over-crowded the school for a year or three years
until they got a school of their own funds .
Q: Did they also hire the teachers or were they...
A: No, I guess, they were hired by the state .
was put up by the c ompany and they owned it.
I'm almost c ertain that the building
After they built modern schools at
both villages, the company made rooming houses, apartment houses, out of the old
ones.
Q: Did the company e er build churches ?
�26
A: No.
Q: Did the mill workers tend to go to one chuch?
A: The first church that was built was Clinchfield Methodist Church.
Marion Methodist Church was the first one built.
Church.
Probably East
Then they built Clinchfield Methodist
Of course , these people did it, and then later on they built the Baptist
Church over there and one at East Marion and then several years later they had a
Presbyterian Church.
owned.
N o w it's in the village over there, but it was ne ver company
They probably donated the lot to build it on and they would donate the lot or
the property for the church to build on.
Not that was both places because those
churches are on company owned property or what was company owned property.
Now
I'm sure they donated it.
Q: Do you recall any other services, or whate ver, that the company did for the
workers?
You said there weren't doctors to provide midical ser vice.
A: No , we didn't have any doctors or nu r ses.
a house and we did't pay any powe r bills.
The only thing that they provided was
They didn't ha ve anything, but lights and
they didn't allow hot plates or no kind of electric appliances, but the power didn't
cost you anything.
You paid fifteen cents a room for a house a week.
Q: F or a week?
A: Yeah.
They dept the streets up to where you could drive a wagon over them.
There were very few cars back then, you know
furnaces down at the mill to put on the roads .
and they used the cinders from the
T hey had a well with a pump for about
every four houses, I belie"e, something like that.
Probably two on each side of the
�27
street used the same pump.
Q: Yes .
A: Hand pump.
Q: So there wasn't running water in the house?
A: No.
,
Q: You pumped it and brought it in .
Would they allow you to set you a garden out?
A: Yes.
Q: In the village?
A: Uh. There was a garden spot for about every house.
Q: How big were the lost for each house?
Was it maybe about a half acre, as much as
they ...
A: No , they were not.
In some of the houses, you know, on the back streets where the
houses were built, they were built in a line down and on that ground you could go back
as far as you wanted to normally.
They owned the land, but people that l ived say fac-
ing you on the other side of the street, between two streets had a very small lot .
Q: Most people did try to garden though didn't they?
A: Yes
they did.
END OF TAPE #1
SIDE #2
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
In 1973, representatives from Appalachian State University (ASU) began the process of collecting interviews from Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell county citizens to learn about their respective lives and gather stories. From the outset of the project, the interviewers knew that they were reaching out to the “last generation of Appalachian residents to reach maturity before the advent of radio, the last generation to maintain an oral tradition.” The goal was to create a wealth of data for historians, folklorists, musicians, sociologists, and anthropologists interested in the Appalachian Region.
The project was known as the “Appalachian Oral History Project” (AOHP), and developed in a consortium with Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College (now Hazard County Community College) both in Kentucky, Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and ASU. Predominately funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the four schools by 1977 had amassed approximately 3,000 interviews. Each institution had its own director and staff. Most of the interviewers were students.
Outgrowths of the project included the Mountain Memories newsletter that shared the stories collected, an advisory council, a Union Catalog, photographs collected, transcripts on microfilm, and the book Our Appalachia. Out of the 3,000 interviews between the three schools, only 663 transcripts were selected to be microfilmed. In 1978, two reels of microfilm were made available with 96 transcripts contributed by ASU.
An annotated index referred to as The Appalachian Oral History Project Union Catalog was created to accompany the microfilm. The catalog is broken down into five sections starting with a subject topic index such as Civilian Conservation Corps, Coal Camps, Churches, etc. The next four sections introduced the interviewees by respective school. There was an attempt to include basic biographic information such as date of birth, location, interviewer name, length of interview, and subjects discussed. However, this information was not always consistent per school.
This online project features clips from the interviews, complete transcripts, and photographs. The quality and consistency of the interviews vary due to the fact that they were done largely by students. Most of the photos are missing dates and identifying information.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1965-1989
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview.
Howie, Sam
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed.
Helms, Dewey E.
Interview Date
1/10/1976
Location
The location of the interview.
Marion, NC
Number of pages
27 pages
Date digitized
9/18/2014
File size
12.6MB
Checksum
alphanumeric code
a27303eca732de128997d62c1ba80121
Scanned by
Tony Grady
Equipment
Epson Expression 10000 XL
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright for the interviews on the Appalachian State University Oral History Collection site is held by Appalachian State University. The interviews are available for free personal; non-commercial; and educational use; provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Appalachian State Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records; 1965-1989; W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection; Special Collections; Appalachian State University; Boone; NC). Any commercial use of the materials; without the written permission of the Appalachian State University; is strictly prohibited.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
AC.111 Appalachian Oral History Project Records; 1965 - 1989
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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111_tape336_DeweyEHelms_transcript_M
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Dewey E. Helms [January 10, 1976]
Language
A language of the resource
English
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Howie, Sam
Helms, Dewey E.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a title="Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/195" target="_blank">Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
McDowell County (N.C.)--Social life and customs--20th century
Farm life--North Carolina--McDowell County--20th century
Mountain life--North Carolina--McDowell County--History--20th century--Anecdotes
Helms, Dewey
Description
An account of the resource
Dewey Helms, born in 1903, talks about working in McDowell County, North Carolina, in the early twentieth century. He came from a family of farmers and carpenters, and when he was old enough he began working in the furniture factory for eleven cents an hour between school terms. In 1923 he began working at the mill because the pay was better. He said the only other job you could get besides furniture and mill was the railroad, which didn't pay very well either. He eventually began weaving and repairing looms as a career.
American Thread
Clinchfield
Clinchfield Methodist Church
Clinchfield mills
Cross mills
Dewey E Helms
Dewey Helms
Drexel Furniture Factory
East Marion Methodist Church
East Marion Mill
general stores
Greenwod
loom plant
Marion
McDowell County N.C.
mill community
mill village
North Carolina
railroad
South Carolina
Southern Railroad Company
weaving
weaving mills