Tag: Factory workers

From Farm to Factory

by Ilene Jones Cornwell.

“I got my first job when I was thirteen years old, working from six in the morning ‘til six at night . . . six days a week, making fifty cents a day,” recalled Josie Coleman (1901-1986), during an oral history interview in 1972. She was referring to the summer of 1914, when she left her family’s double-log home in Spring Hill, Tennessee, to work in Nashville. Her father Jessie, a farmer supporting ten children younger than Josephine, drove the girl and her shawl-wrapped belongings the thirty-five miles to the city in a mule-drawn wagon.

Tennessee farm children, ca. 1918 (photo from NHN collection)

The previous few years had been unfortunate ones for the Colemans and other Tennessee farmers. Texas fever, a disease caused by micro-organisms transmitted by tick bites, had invaded the state and killed or quarantined most livestock. That calamity, compounded by the summer drought of 1914 and Maury County’s epidemic of hog cholera that affected the crops and hogs raised by the Colemans, had brought the farm to a standstill. Thus, when Josie’s uncle, preacher Joshua Nellums, reported in glowing terms on the ready market for labor in industrialized Nashville, first-born Josie decided that Nashville was the place to be. She could lodge with her aunt and uncle on Tenth Avenue North after she secured a job at one of the many factories and mills in the city.

At that time, Nashville already was established as a thriving commercial center. Flour had been the city’s chief product since 1899, when Royal Flour Mill was established. Royal adopted the innovative marketing practice of Ford Flour Company, offering five- and ten-cent sacks of flour to consumers instead of the usual barrel quantities. Homemakers immediately embraced the practice and established Royal Flour (later Martha White) as the area leader in flour sales. The brisk lumber trade had made Nashville the leading hardwood center of the South, and numerous factories—including Warioto Cotton Mills, Jamison Spring and Mattress Company, Tennessee Manufacturing Company, May Hosiery Mill, and Hartsford Hosiery Mill—offered steady employment to anyone willing to work.

Josie Coleman was more than willing to work; she was eager. Her first job was at Hartsford Hosiery Mill on Twelfth Avenue North at Harrison Street. She and “lots of other young girls” and women worked for fifty cents a day, six days a week, feeding the machinery that turned out long-length ribbed stockings for boys and girls. She threaded loops of cotton and wool on the large needles of a pre-set pattern or form; the needles created “everything . . . the toe, ribbing, and ends.” Then she had to transfer the stocking to a footer for finishing. The stockings of white yarn were later dyed black, a hue obtained by sulphuric dyes. This process was performed away from the processing factory, since the dye was extremely toxic. “And that dye really did smell,” Josie laughed. “It was a combination like rotten eggs and spoiled food. . .I don’t see how those folks stirring the dye vats stood that job!”

Josie remained at Hartsford for four years. “I paid fifty cents board to my Uncle Josh, kept a precious fifty cents for streetcar fare during the week, carried a tin pail with my lunch each day, and sent two dollars to my folks in Spring Hill,” she said, adding with a chuckle, “I felt I was making big money!” During that time, her father sold the Spring Hill farm and brought the family to Nashville, buying a residence in the 1700 block of Fourth Avenue North. Josie moved in with the family and obtained a job with the H. G. Hill Flour Mill on Van Buren Street. At the seasoned age of sixteen, she acquired a “better paying job” with the Tennessee Manufacturing Company on Eighth Avenue North. She began by sewing sacks of starched calico cotton used for packaging flour and meal. “Ladies really loved those sacks,” she laughed. “When they were empty, the sacks were washed and the stitches cut out so that curtains and clothes could be made from them. I’ve wondered if the ‘free’ fabric ladies got when they bought flour wasn’t more important than the product!”

During the ten years Josie Coleman worked for Tennessee Manufacturing / Werthan Bag, she married and had her first child. Motherhood prompted her to leave the work force in 1928. Looking back on those years, she observed philosophically, “Maybe the years have made me forget a lot of the hurtful things, but fifty cents a day was good money in 1914, especially for a kid right off a Spring Hill farm. I was paid hard cash for my work, and it bought a lot for the whole family. Getting paid money to work gave me a good feeling, and I liked it . . . I have no regrets.”

The Werthan Bag Company building on Eighth Avenue North is the largest surviving nineteenth-century factory in the Middle Tennessee area. The first of the buildings was constructed in 1871 by the Tennessee Manufacturing Company, and the mill began operation early in 1872, according to W. W. Clayton’s History of Davidson County, Tennessee (p.222). Plant additions were made in the 1880s. Werthan Bag Corporation bought the plant in the early 1900s and continued to offer steady employment for the flood of workers forced off rural farms by drought and livestock diseases. (photograph courtesy of the Tennessee State Library & Archives.) 

From Knickers to Body Stockings

by Doris Boyce.

German-born Jacob May, 18 years old, came to America in 1879, a passenger in steerage. He arrived in this country unable to speak the language and carrying only seven dollars in his pocket. His first job was peddling dry goods from a pack on his back. When he had earned enough to purchase a horse and wagon, he peddled his wares throughout New England. He eventually married and settled in Laconia, New Hampshire, a hosiery mill town, where he opened a general store. When on buying trips for the store, he sold his suppliers hosiery from the Laconia mill.

A series of photos from November 1910 indicates that the May Company employees were primarily women and children. (Lewis Wickes Hine Photography, from Library of Congress Prints & Photo Division, reproduction number LC-DIG-nclc-01889; Call number LOT 7479, v. 2, no. 1750.)

It was an advertisement in a Boston newspaper that brought Jacob May to Nashville. He and a friend successfully bid on a Tennessee prison labor contract – 50 men at approximately 50 cents a day. May moved his family and several French-Canadian fixers (knitting machine repairmen) to Nashville and started the Rock City Hosiery Mills in the old Church Street penitentiary in 1895.

Jacob May and his partners acquired the six-and-a-half-acre Nashville property for the hosiery mill in 1908. May himself served as president and then as chairman of the board until his death, after which time his sons Mortimer and Dan operated the mill. The May company was noted for the quality of its socks. The crew of Apollo 2, which landed on the moon in 1969, wore socks made by May Hosiery under contract to NASA.

The May building in recent years

By 1908 May and his partners had opened for business on Chestnut Street. In the following years, May Mills counted as customers Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward, Spiegel, Woolworth, Kress, and the Boy and Girl Scouts, as well as Nashville wholesalers J.S. Reeves, Neely-Harwell, W.S. Riddle, and Eskind & Greenspan. In the 1930s May became one of the first licensees of Walt Disney, and his company was a prime contractor for mortar fuses during World War II.

During the years leading up World War II, Jacob and Mortimer May made five trips into Hitler’s Germany and managed to rescue more than 200 Jews before the flow of visas was cut off. Mortimer maintained an association with the network of underground movements in Europe who succeeded in saving some intellectual Jewish leaders the Nazis were eager to destroy. After the war Mortimer took part in the efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Israel.

The family sold the mill to the Wayne-Gassard Company of Chattanooga in 1965, operating it for nearly 20 years. They sold it to the Renfro Corporation in the summer of 1983 but slow sales forced Renfro to close it soon after (1985), displacing 147 employees.

Today, the expanse of unrenovated buildings still retains the aura of the hosiery mill. It is currently the headquarters for a variety of enterprises including the Tennessee Repertory Theatre, art and photography studios, video productions, scenic design, drapery fabrication, stained glass manufacturing, food products, and more. (2000)