Sadie Barton, Page Two

The Lancaster Cotton Mills S.C. One of the worst places I have found for child labor. Location: Lancaster, South Carolina, December 1908, Lewis Hine.

"Sadie was my grandmother. All of my family, both on my mother's and father's side, for several generations before me, worked at some point at the Springs Mill in Lancaster. There was nothing else to do here then. It was common then for young children to work in the mill. Things were sort of tough in the South back then. Until the cotton mills came, we really had not come out of Reconstruction. But for children and their parents, it sure beat scraping in the dirt to try to raise crops and chickens. My father said his ancestors sold the family farm and took jobs in town. My father's grandfather and father drove a wagon for the local grocery store. They felt like they were some of the fortunate ones, because they were eventually able to go in the mill and work only 10 hours a day and make money for the family."

"A lot of people will take a stance on child labor and say, ‘What a horrible thing.' But they don't think about what those kids would have been doing if it wasn't for that mill. If it wasn't for the mill, people down here would have starved to death. The kids didn't have to work there. In my family, it was a choice. Do I want to work in the tobacco fields for 16 hours a day, or do I want to work in a cotton mill? You didn't have to know how to read and write to work in the cotton mills. If you were a doffer or a spinner or worked in the sewing room, you could learn that kind of stuff in just a matter of hours. Lancaster wouldn't be there if it wasn't for Springs Industries." -Ed Robinson, grandson of Sadie Barton

"I am the great-granddaughter of Sadie Barton. I've been pouring over the information in your website about the Lewis Hine Project and have enjoyed learning about an aspect of my family history that I knew little about. I knew little about my great-grandmother except a few stories told by my father. I've actually never seen a picture of her. It's been quite spooky looking at the photo, as it looks exactly like my Papa Jim (her only son who survived childhood) and a bit like my father, myself, and my youngest daughter Nora (we all have the same eyes)."

"I've always found the hold that the textile industry had on the South very interesting. I grew up in Lancaster, where numerous members of both my mother's and father's families worked for Springs Industries. I always said that I would leave South Carolina as fast as I could! After graduate school my husband and I moved to Washington, DC, where we lived for eight years. After two children however, we were in need of family and free babysitters, and we moved back this year."

"We live about half an hour from Lancaster, in a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina. We found a beautiful 'traditional neighborhood development' that we love (VillageOfBaxter.com). Then we discovered that our development is owned by Clear Springs Development, the real estate division of Springs Industries. They owned a good bit of land in the area and have worked to create ‘responsible' developments. We now live on Mills Lane (oh, the irony!)."

"So the company that put my grandmother to work as a child now caters to my five and two-year-old daughters as they walk for an ice cream cone or ride in their little wagon to art class in the cute town center designed by Clear Springs (all in the style of the traditional southern towns, of course). What a difference a hundred years makes." -Shelley Howard-Robinson, great-granddaughter of Sadie Barton

"The Springs Mill, located in Lancaster, South Carolina, was once touted as the ‘world's largest cotton mill under one roof,' with about 5,000 employees who produced 4 million yards of cloth per week. At one time, more than 7,000 looms ran full blast in the plant's 13 spinning rooms. The two-story, century-old cotton mill, which sits on 30-plus acres, shut down in September 2003 after the company determined it was obsolete and its design too inefficient to modernize. KMAC Services dismantled the mill and gave the city of Lancaster two worn-down stoops where mill hands used to sit in front of the plant before the start of their shifts and sharpen their knives." -from the website of KMAC Greenworks, Birmingham, Alabama (KmacGreenworks.com)