| JUDY GLANTON MCKINLEY | |||||||||||||
| Judy Glanton McKinley, a former cotton mill worker, was employed in the mills for twenty-nine years. Having been diagnosed with byssinosis (brown-lung disease), she is no longer able to work in the dust-laden environment of the few remaining mills. She grew up and still lives on the same mill village where four generations of her family lived and worked. Some years ago, she watched hopelessly as the mill, where most members of her family had worked for so long, closed its doors forever. |  |
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| A SOUTHERN LEGACY - Life on a Mill Village | |||||||||||||
| When the textile industry began moving south in the1920's, mill villages quickly grew up near the plants, their primary design and purpose to provide housing and services for mill workers. The close relationship between the mill employees and their company, as well as to each other, provided a positive social atmosphere wherein the mill furnished nearly all the workers' needs in the form of schools, churches, a community store and barber shop, and a variety of social activities. Workers, spending as much as two-thirds of their daily lives together, formed unusually close ties that became treasured throughout their lives. Everyone knew their neighbors, who were of course also their fellow employees, and shared in nearly all aspects of their lives. Indeed, life on a mill village was quite unlike life anywhere else in the world, especially during the years the mills flourished. Many of these mills began closing in the late 1970's and early 1980's, primarily because of new technologies and cheaper imports from other countries, thereby erasing a lifestyle cherished by most of these mill workers. Many of them, having known no other way of life, felt their world crumbling around them.This is the story of one of those mill villages and the people whose lives were molded by their experiences of living and working on a mill village. Share in their agony and devastation upon the closing of the mill, which more than anything else bound their lives together and provided a reason for their existence. Read of one woman's family and how the closing of the mill affected every fiber of their being. |
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