The mill worker's diet
Truitt remembers what mill workers ate. Lunch might include potted meat and a cookie; dinner might consist of beans and potatoes. Poultry was popular on holidays like Christmas. Mill owners had no problem shutting down their mills to let workers enjoy their meals, but as time passed, they became more and more reluctant to do so.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Herman Newton Truitt, December 5, 1978. Interview H-0054. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
Another kind of thing similar to that would be if
people stopped off here to buy something for lunch—again
I'm going as far back as you can remember—what
sort of things would they get?
- HERMAN NEWTON TRUITT:
-
In buying a lunch they would buy bologna, cheese, and canned pork and
beans. Potted meat. Vienna sausage. Peanut butter, crackers, and bread.
And probably a cookie.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
Things like potted meat and vienna sausage—they've
been made as long as you can remember?
- HERMAN NEWTON TRUITT:
-
Yes, and sardines, I left out sardines. As long as I can remember those
things have been popular. Speaking of pig feet, pickled pig feet was
quite popular. I remember when I was just a youngster I would hang
around here on Saturday night. My father would sell, to the people who
would come in—they had been off celebrating a little
bit—they would come in and want pig feet and crackers.
I'd smell those pickled pig feet and I'd think
they were the best thing I'd ever smelled. Sometimes
he'd give me a broken piece of pig feet and a cracker, and I
ate it. And I still like them. I like a pickled pig feet.
TAPE 2, SIDE B: January 30, 1979.
- HERMAN NEWTON TRUITT:
-
Well, the workers in the mill, on weekdays, on working days, would eat
dried beans which they would cook with a piece of fat back meat, and
these would be: pinto beans, pink beans, white beans, black eyed peas
would be the main ones. And of course, they'd eat
potatoes—Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes—and
onions along with these. Then came the weekend—back in those
days the weekend meant Saturday noon to Monday morning.
Chicken was probably the most popular meat, but they would
get pork chops or some beef of some kind, and have that for their Sunday
dinner. And then for Sunday they'd probably have a cake or a
pie, too, which they didn't eat much of during the week. We
didn't have packaged cookies or prepared cakes a great deal.
Another thing would be, you would notice when a holiday came,
Thanksgiving or Christmas. Then they would go all out. They would buy a
lot of things. I remember the times when, in the late thirties in
particular, come Christmas, sell a lot of turkeys, sell a lot of hens, a
lot of chickens, right much beef, and hams. Of course country ham was
eaten some by the mill workers all along. And the people out in the
country raised and cured their own meat. They had that that they could
eat all along.
Back in the late twenties, when we first came out here, when lunch time
came the cotton mill would shut down for about half an hour and let the
people go home and eat lunch. They would have some beans and corn bread
probably ready. They would go home and eat and then come back to the
mill in a half an hour and go back to work. The mill owners
didn't seem to think they had to keep those machines running
every minute of every day back in those days.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
In other words, they would actually shut down the whole mill.
- HERMAN NEWTON TRUITT:
-
Yes, they would shut it down.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
And they would do that five days a week and then on Saturday they would
be through.
- HERMAN NEWTON TRUITT:
-
Yes, on Saturday they'd be off at lunch.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
When did that change, when did they quit doing that?
- HERMAN NEWTON TRUITT:
-
I don't remember exactly when it was. They seemed to put more
pressure on the help as time went on, they wanted them to work all the
time. Then some of them…children would bring lunch to their
parents in the mill. They got where they would sell lunches to them in
the mill. They had something they called a "dope
cart", carried one around that carried ale and sandwiches and
things like that. They would sell them something and let them eat. The
differences there probably came about because of the time. Back in the
early days they worked ten hours a day in the mill. Then they changed to
eight hours. They'd maybe allow their help a fifteen minute
break to eat a sandwich, something like that at noontime. It kind of
evolved, I don't know exactly what time when it was that it
changed.