Mill owner delivers supplies for his mill town employees
Carter offers a brief glimpse of mill house life, and the small way in which mill owner paternalism may have eased the bite of poverty. Carter's father rented a home from the mill, which sold and delivered coal in the winter. Carter remembers this act of beneficence, but remembers also storing food to make it through the winter and going without coffee, sugar, and flour.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Jessie Lee Carter, May 5, 1980. Interview H-0237. 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:
-
Did they live in one of the mill houses? Did some of their children live
with them?
- JESSIE LEE CARTER:
-
Oh, yes, they lived in the mill houses. All their children lived with
them. All except the ones that was married. We had a four-room house and
Papa paid twenty-five cents a week for a four-room house. That was a
dollar a week. Brandon Mill furnished your coal in the wintertime. And
they'd haul your coal to you. It was two dollars a load, for
a two-horse wagon load of coal. You can't make your children
now understand it. Lord, I've told my grandchildren about
working. ‘Lord, never would I work all day, ten hours, for
twenty-five cents.’ But I said, back then you
would've, because people didn't make any more. My
daddy worked down there and made eleven dollars-and-a-half a week, and
we lived on that. 'Course with our garden and my mother would
put up stuff in the summer enough to do us through the winter. Then we
had our own corn and our own cornmeal. We didn't have nothing
to buy but sugar and flour and coffee and something like that. We had
plenty other stuff. Plenty canned stuff, plenty milk and butter.
