H-0066_Audio |
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Object Description
Interview no. | H-0066 |
Restrictions | No restrictions. Open to research. |
Project | H.3. Piedmont Industrialization, 1974-1980: Bynum, N.C. |
Project description | Interviews, 1976-1979, about industrialization in Bynum, N.C., a company-owned mill town in Chatham County. Many interviewees worked at the J.M. Odell Manufacturing Company, a spinning mill, for part or all of their careers. Topics include technology, the impact of the Depression and World War II on the mill, paternalism, work discipline, work division by sex and race, unionization attempts, brown lung and other health hazards of mill work, recollections of London family members who ran the mill, mill village life, and the transition from company to private ownership in the 1970s. Interviews were chiefly conducted as part of the "Perspectives on Industrialization: The Piedmont Crescent of Industry, 1900-1940" project. |
Date | 2 September 1976 |
Interviewee | Durham, Flossie Moore, b. 1883. |
Interviewee occupation | Textile workers |
Interviewee DOB | Unknown |
Interviewee ethnicity | Whites |
Interviewer |
Frederickson, Mary. Glass, Brent D. |
Abstract | Ninety-three-year-old Flossie Moore Durham reflects on her long life in Bynum, North Carolina. Durham began work at a Bynum cotton mill at age ten, remaining there until she married at age eighteen. She spends most of this interview describing the rhythms of mill life and detailing her life as a wife and mother. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she remembers mill work fondly. The hours were long, but she felt like she was part of a community, and in some ways the cotton mill did seem to reflect southern society in the early twentieth century, with its sharp gender divisions and rigid racial caste system. This interview will provide researchers with a glimpse of mill life in North Carolina at the beginning of the region's industrialization. |
Subject Topical |
Child labor--North Carolina. Women textile workers. Textile workers--North Carolina. Bynum (N.C.)--Religious life and customs. Bynum (N.C.)--Social life and customs. Bynum (N.C.)--Race relations. |
Citation | Interview with [interviewee name] by [interviewer name], [interview date] [interview number], in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Description
Interview no. | H-0066_Audio |