Leaving school for mill work at fourteen
Hopkins left school to do mill work at fourteen to help support the family during her father's illness.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Eva Hopkins, March 5, 1980. Interview H-0167. 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
- EVA HOPKINS:
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The reason I went to work in the mills when I was fourteen, quit school,
my daddy got sick, and he had to go to the sanitorium.
- LU ANN JONES:
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Did he have tuberculosis?
- EVA HOPKINS:
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Un-huh.
- LU ANN JONES:
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That was a pretty common disease back then, wasn't it?
- EVA HOPKINS:
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So then I went to work. I quit school-that was during the
Depression.
- LU ANN JONES:
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What year was that?
- EVA HOPKINS:
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I don't know. He went when I was seven years old to the sanitorium. Then
I quit school when I was fourteen. I don't know what year that was.
- LU ANN JONES:
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So you were born in 1918. Nineteen-thirty-two then.
