Mill work improves over the years
Over the course of the twenty years Hopkins worked in the mill, she noticed an increase in wages and in efforts to make the environment safer for workers. Newly installed fans in the mill blew away some of the lint.
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
- LU ANN JONES:
-
Did things change a lot while you worked? How many years total did you
work?
- EVA HOPKINS:
-
I went to work when I was fourteen, I worked until I was fifteen, which
was a year. Then NRA came in, and I had to quit for a year. I went back
to work when I was sixteen, and I worked till I was about nineteen
because that was when my first baby was born in the spring. I quit then.
I didn't work anymore till the next one was . . . I went back to work
then in 1940. I worked from then on until 1948. Then I went back to work
in 1950. I worked about two years, and then I haven't worked any
since.
- LU ANN JONES:
-
Did things change a lot from the first time you went into the mill?
- EVA HOPKINS:
-
The wages did. When I went back to work when the children were small,
they had these blowers. They had gotten these to suck some of that lint
up. So much of it would get in your nose and your throat.
