A Natural-Born Linthead

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In my mother's picture box was an old black and white photograph of her and my daddy as a smiling, young Alabama working-class couple, wearing their Sunday best. They were standing across from village kindergarten, at south end of Fairfax Mill where they both worked, along with thousands of other employees. The cotton mill, a blue-paned, three-story, red-brick monolith, rose grand and mighty in background, and they seemed small and shy before it; and incredibly young and happy. I am sure many Chattahoochee Valley families have a similar photograph in their family albums; my parents' story was not uncommon. It was repeated by countless other young people in first half of last century. They had their pictures made in front of mills to commemorate their arrival in a strange land and a new beginning--in my parents' case a beginning that would lead to four generations of my family working in West Point Manufacturing textile plants. Like many Valleyans, my parents grew up in rural Randolph County, Alabama, and joined a steady migration of friends and relatives to what everybody simply knew as the which lay hard against Georgia line in eastern Alabama, seeking jobs and a better life, and they found it. They left backwoods farms, that were basically unchanged since 1800s, for a mill house with electric lights, running water, coal fireplaces, and an inside toilet--they never had it so good. They might as well have been on another planet. Riverdale and Langdale were company's first mills, starting production in 1866, powered by water wheels turned by Chattahoochee River. The founders of what was to become West Point Manufacturing were area planters, merchants, and former Confederate soldiers who started two cotton mills with money scavenged from smoke and rubble of Civil War. One of mightiest textile manufacturing enterprises in history of world began as much with desperation as with hope; as it turned out, Providence smiled on their bold venture. By early 1900s, West Point Manufacturing owned five Alabama mill villages in Chattahoochee Valley. Each of villages was built around its own mill, starting with Lanett at northern end, and then, in descending order, Shawmut, Langdale, Fairfax, and Riverdale. The mills were electrified and no longer depended on waterwheels for power. The boundaries between each village were amorphous, with one blending into other, but each mill village possessed a strong self-identity that fueled fierce rivalries, mainly concerning their respective athletic teams. Their baseball teams, particularly, were revered and supported with a near religious fervor. (In later years, Valley and Lanett High Schools would produce a steady supply of football players for college and professional ranks.) Of such intensity were animosities that a wedding between residents of different villages was seen as a mixed marriage. Each West Point Manufacturing Company mill village was a self-contained universe of employee housing, churches, schools, grocery and drug stores, cafes, barber shops, beauty parlors, shoe repair shops, filling stations, dry cleaners, doctors, including chiropractors, and picture shows. A person could live without ever setting foot off mill village, if so inclined. (Indeed, it was rumored that only way some mill village folk could find West Point, Georgia, mill company headquarters a few miles away across state line, was to follow Chattahoochee Valley Railroad tracks out of town.) The only item not easily obtainable was alcohol. Because of teetotalers who ran Valley, strong spirits were prohibited. But they were available, if you knew right person--and most people knew that person, and several more just like him. It was a time and a place that we shall never see again, and it was not by any means a bad place. …