Mill work did not seem to cause illnesses or injuries
Osteen does not remember anyone getting sick or injured as a result of working in the mill.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Letha Ann Sloan Osteen, June 8, 1979. Interview H-0254. 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:
-
It could've been real dusty and you just didn't realize it.
- LETHA ANN SLOAN OSTEEN:
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I didn't realize what dusty was. Take children nowadays, unless they're
out where a car runs and fill you full of dust or dirt, they wouldn't
realize just the dust that accumulated in the house or around.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
Well do you think that that had any effects on your health. You know some
people talk about different kind of breathing-the brown lung
and the breathing problems that people had.
- LETHA ANN SLOAN OSTEEN:
-
Well I don't know, there never was none of us sick, to my remembering.
You know my little brother that died, that I told you about, he was nine
years old. Well he had dropsy. That was all the disease I ever knowed
any of us to ever have, was him having that dropsy. And outside of that
I don't remember any sickness except the measles. We had the measles.
And outside of that I can't remember any of us being sick.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
Do you remember any of the children that worked in the . . .
- LETHA ANN SLOAN OSTEEN:
-
Mill, they wasn't sick.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
Did they ever have any accidents, anybody ever . . .
- LETHA ANN SLOAN OSTEEN:
-
No, no, nobody. We never had any trouble at all.