Captures a lost era
Like a Family interestingly and accurately portrays life in southern cotton mills and mill towns in the central southeast, primarily North Carolina. The book examines family, work and community life; it is a social, cultural and political history. Working in the mills was harsh, dangerous and monotonous. Most employees left farms and a rural way of life to toil in the mills; for these people living under the constant eye of mill management was humiliating at times. The mills controlled not only the worker's jobs, but their housing, churches, schools, entertainment and shopping through company stores. It is important to note that this book does not leave out women's perspectives, as many mill workers were young women and working mothers. A great deal of the content of this book was provided by interviews done in the 1980's of people who worked in the mills and lived in mill communities. This oral history is both fascinating and priceless. Most of the mills have closed and the memory and history of them is becoming scarcer to find as most of the mill workers who lived during the era portrayed in this book have died.
While most of the mills have closed, central North Carolina is dotted with the communities that are remains of old mill towns. I am from this region and my mother lives in Bynum, NC, a mill town dating from the mid-19th century. Several of her neighbors were interviewed for and written about in Like a Family. The old company store still serves as a post office and the mill community's church has regular worshipers. Unfortunately the rest of the community from the mill days, including the mill itself (which closed in the early 1980's and has burned down recently), have succumbed to time and aging from the elements.
Oral History at Its Best
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and the other writers of _Like a Family_ created a tour-de-force study of cotton mill towns in the American South. It is a very rare book that captures such a clear, complex sense of history; Hall balances a careful sense of detail with a sweeping picture of life in the cotton-mill South by using a combination of oral and written sources. This book is perfect for scholars and non-scholars alike, and richly conjures a full picture of this period in American history.
(2 reviews)
