Working in the spinning room of a textile mill
Trammel offers a brief description of her first job at the Victor textile mill, maintaining roping on a spinning frame. She and other children worked in the spinning room.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Naomi Sizemore Trammel, March 25, 1980. Interview H-0258. 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:
-
Well, what do you remember about first going into the mill?
- NAOMI SIZEMORE TRAMMEL:
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Well, I didn't know, hardly, but I just went in and had to
learn it. Really, I had to crawl up on the frame,
you know. You've seen a spinning frame. Well, I had to crawl
up on that to put my—what do you call it?—roping
in, you know, because I wasn't tall enough. 'Cause
I never was much big, you know. Then I a little old spindly thing, and I
couldn't reach up there to put my roping in. And
I'd have to crawl up on that frame down there, and put it in.
I wasn't the only one, they's a whole place like
that. And they had mothers and daddies. They wasn't no better
off than I was.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
There were lots of other children your age.
- NAOMI SIZEMORE TRAMMEL:
-
Oh, yeah, a lot of them. It's a lot of them.
'Specially in the spinning room, that's where they
put the children. You could run a frame, you know, where you
couldn't run—a child couldn't run
nothing else.
