Childhood’s End

I took a walk on Labor Day to an old mill I’ve shown before. It’s about a 20 minute walk from my house. On the way over you can see its great cupola looming to the left, peeking over other mill buildings in the area.

To get there you have to cross a small bridge that goes over the old mill stream and under the freeway which was built long after the mills went up.

As you get closer, the mill comes into view more clearly.

And then finally the cupola comes into view.

The mill has been converted to non-industrial uses, but while it was in operation it was expanded considerably from its original core. The tower is part of the oldest section, and you can just make out a stone marker with 1877 carved in it about 50 feet up.

Some of it is now offices and a health club. Part of it has been converted into a high end restaurant with a nice patio outside.

Toward the end of its life, the mill produced outerwear, and huge extension was added in the most utilitarian design possible.

And in keeping with modern demand, that giant manufacturing and warehouse space has been turned into a storage business.

All in all, it’s a pretty quiet, unhurried place, where you’ll see a few people at any time casually walking around.

Child Labor Stories

But if you know anything about mills during the industrial revolution, you know that wasn’t always the case. And as you might expect, it shares a history of child labor with mills all over.

Here is a selection of photos of kids laboring in the early 1900s from all over the country.

It’s really hard to get your head around how hard it was to be a kid in that era. I don’t live in Maine, but this photo captures another mill so much like the one I visited. Impressive architecture and beautiful buildings, where kids marched off to toil at hard physical labor all day long.

The photographer, Lewis Hine, made made it a personal mission to show millions of Americans what was happening in places they never visited.

Hine often worked on the sly, or undercover, because of course mill owners, businessmen, and their security men didn’t want the general public to know just how hard life was for kids as young as five or six. His photographs often lacked technical finesse, such as this one which is overexposed on the right side. He often had to show up, take a photo, then disappear, and could struggle to set off a flash before he had to disappear.

This article from Conversation is a great introduction to the work of Lewis Hine. It describes how Hine’s photos helped spur the movement in the US to deeply curb childhood labor. It also points out how Hine largely focused white kids, and left Blacks out of the picture. Although, probably inadvertently, Hine was reflecting the way Black people in general were excluded from so many job opportunities, as harsh as they were. The mill shown in these photos didn’t integrate its workforce until the 1920s, and then only as a tactic to disrupt union organizing.

Many of Hine’s photos have been digitized and can be seen here. It’s not fun to scroll through, but it’s definitely enlightening.

At the mill I’ve shown from my city, children under the age of 15 – under 15! – made up 25% of the workforce in 1880. Kids could easily be stuck working 12 hour shifts.

As a sign of how much anger had built up, 35 girls staged a walkout in the early 1900s at this mill. 50 boys joined them. They had no union, and little formal education before they had begun working, but on their own they decided enough was enough.

As it turned out, the girls won a concession. They got a raise from $14 a month to $16, or less than a penny an hour considering they worked 12 hours a day.

The boys got nothing. Their fathers insisted they end the strike.

As time went on, Congress passed child labor laws, right wing justices on the Supreme Court blocked them, and then Congress finally passed a law in 1938 which the Supreme Court upheld after Roosevelt threatened to pack the Court.

And today, of course, the fight drags on. It’s important to remember how things used to be.