Photo of The Month – Mar 2006

Spooler Room Help

Picture contributor: Betty Luckadoo Wall

Actually it's the help and their bossmen. Fifteen women, five men and a young boy pose in two rows at a rock wall near the new mill office building. The female wear long dresses, several made from the large-pattern gingham material made in the mill. — Spooler Room Help

It was around 1912 when photographer Will Hames posed this group beside the mill office. The men in the back row are, from right: W. K. Collins, ? Pearson, Maurice Hendrick and Rucker Bland. The train tracks seen at the bottom of the photo ran across the entrance to the mill to the coal dumping trestle on the east side of the mill.

This photograph was found in the household of Alfred Luckadoo who died in 2001 in Rutherford County. On the back of the photo is written “Clemmie McCraw” and underneath her name is the puzzling phrase “Black M. or W.” Clemmie is very likely in the picture. In the 1910 Census, as abstracted by Mr. and Mrs. Bud Crow, she is recorded as being 21 years old and working in the mill as a spooler. Her full name was Clementine Hesentine McCraw, daughter of Willis and Frances McCraw. She never married, and died in 1917 of pellagra.

Research by Joyce Atkinson Hunter