"I Give the Best Part of My Life to the Mill": An Oral History of Icy Norman

Abstract

Bounded by the fall line and the coastal plain on the southeast and the Appalachian Mountains on the northwest lies the southern Piedmont, the first part of the South to undergo industrialization. By 1880, southern farmers were leaving the land for the textile, tobacco, and furniture factories springing up on the banks of the region's rivers and the outskirts of dusty market towns. By the eve of World War II, the country's tobacco and textile industries had concentrated in the South, and southern workers looked more often to the factory than the farm for their livelihood. The timing of southern industrialization presented a unique opportunity to record the experiences of and women who left behind the working rhythms of sun and seasons to live by the mill bell and the time clock. In 1978, the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the industrialization of the Piedmont. At the end of two years, approximately 250 interviews had been conducted with tobacco, furniture, cotton, hosiery, and glove workers in five core communities in North and South Carolina.' Icy Norman was one of those workers; she lived in Alamance County, North Carolina, in the Piedmont Heights mill village of the town of Burlington. Alamance County was the site of some of the South 's pioneer cotton mills, the earliest built in 1837. Nearly a century later, Alamance witnessed the birth of Burlington Industries, now the world's largest textile company. Alamance County textile workers not only knew the shift from farm to factory, but they also suffered the transformation that took place on the shop floor when water-driven, familyowned mills gave way to corporate-controlled factories that stressed scientific management and employed technologies that stretched the endurance of mill workers. J. Spencer Love, who founded Burlington Industries in 1923, was the prototype of the new mill men who emerged after World War I, leading the southern textile industry in rationalized mill management.2 When Icy Norman retired from Burlington Industries in 1976, she had worked for the company longer than any other employee, nearly fifty years. She was unusual in remaining at one mill for so long; the southern textile labor force as a whole was highly mobile. But Icy had the common experience of moving from farm to factory, and she lived through the technological and managerial revolutions of the twentieth-century textile industry. Icy never married, and her brothers and sister left Burlington. She lives alone in a small, neat mill house, but Icy-by no means-considers herself lonely. She uses the simile, like a family, to describe her relationship with her fellow workers and bosses. The phrase, like a family, cropped up in dozens of interviews. Workers used this image not to invoke a picture of Norman Rockwell family life, but to encompass the complexity and density of the family dynamic that pervaded mill life. In many cases, family was literal. Southern mills encouraged the migration of whole families to mill villages. Mothers taught daughters how to spin, fathers and sons worked side by side. But the bonds offamily extended beyond blood kin. Interdependence, warmth, and tolerance, as well as arbitrary authority, competition, and disagreements, knit together the men, women, and children who peopled the South 's mills and mill villages. Icy Norman 's story is, in more than one way, a family history.