Interview continued with Peggy Smith, Fannie's niece

JM: What did Fannie like to do when she wasn't working?

PS: She liked to sew and quilt and crochet. She loved what she called ‘her shows' on TV. And she loved to intertwine with her family and have family gatherings.

JM: Did she have the family over at her house and cook for them a lot?

PS: It was probably just drop-ins, because our family was so large we had to rent a hall when we all got together.

JM: When were you born?

PS: 1935.

JM: When you were born, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. Was the mill running at the time?

PS: I've heard talk about the struggles people had, but the mill ran the whole time. The wages weren't very good then, but the mill never closed. The owner was a local person who started the mill here, and from what I heard, he was good to the employees.

JM: When did the mill finally close?

PS: The mill was sold in the ‘60s or ‘70s to a North Carolina company, but it's still there. Somebody bought it, and I think they rent it out for storage space.

JM: What else can you tell me about Fannie?

PS: She had a kind of strange way of speaking. A lot of people in the family would try to imitate how she talked. She had a facial stroke from a car accident, and after that she would talk from the side of her mouth. She kind of had a nasal quality to her voice. There were a lot of times when she was going to tell you something and she would say, ‘Here! Here!'

JM: Her obituary says she died in a nursing home. How long had she been there?

PS: A very short time. She had congestive heart failure. She went to the hospital, but because she lived alone, the doctor said she couldn't go home.

JM: So right up to that point she was functioning well?

PS: Yes, she was never sick. She wouldn't go to the doctors. She'd say, ‘They'll kill you.' She hardly ever took medicine.

JM: You told me that you had seen the Lewis Hine photo a while back. How did you learn about it?

PS: I was doing genealogy research about six or seven years ago. I searched ‘old cotton mills,' just to see what I would find, and the Library of Congress child labor photos came up. I put in Fannie, and her picture came up. I was just spellbound. The sister in the picture, the one with her back turned, was Ella.

JM: What do you think about the fact that Lewis Hine was using the pictures to expose child labor, and that he thought laws should be passed to prevent this from happening again?

PS: It was not that the children were being forced to do it. It probably wasn't any harder work than they would do at home, because people did all their own work at home by hand. In fact, being out of the house in order to do something else might have seemed kind of fun to them. I'm sure there were some families who made the children work. I've read stories of some of them, some parents who made children work under tough conditions when they were just too young to be working. I know that happened. What I noticed about Fannie's picture is that she and her sister were fairly well dressed. They weren't shabby looking or scruffy looking; they were very neat.

JM: I see what you mean. Fannie's hair is very neatly combed; of course, it's combed back like it should be when you work in the mill. And she's got this nice print dress on.

PS: And her sister has on a very pretty print dress. I'm sure it was homemade.

JM: It looks like Fannie is wearing decent shoes. A lot of the pictures of girls in mills show them barefoot.

PS: Well, as I said, it was a close-knit family. They had hardships, but I think they did well with making do, for the times they lived in.