Lint and North Carolina cotton mills, 1887-1939

Abstract

Cotton textile mills opened in considerable numbers in North Carolina following the Reconstruction period as a part of the industrialization process dubbed the “New South.” First drawing from family histories, then literature, newspapers, music, and photography, primarily the photography of Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, this thesis reconstructs the lint-filled cotton mills of the post-Civil War North Carolina landscape through the Great Depression from 1887 to 1939. Lint, the filmy substance emitted from cotton textiles as a part of the production process, stuck to the clothing, hair, and lungs of mill workers. In North Carolina, lint also became a social signifier of race and class. Thus, the term “lint-head” was widely used to refer to poor, white, cotton mill workers. As a piece of material culture scholarship, this project evaluates an object that has always been categorized as a waste product and does not physically survive in the archive, despite its ubiquity for mill workers.