Dig Deeper
It often pays to look a little deeper into the lives of our ancestors. You never know what you might find there.
As I was doing research for a previous blog entry regarding Edwin Bradway, (See Telling the Truth) I did what I always do and looked to see where he came from. Not only geographically, but what his childhood might have been like. So I also researched his parents, Charles and Rachel Bradway. Both natives of New Jersey, they were married there in 1843. Charles was a blacksmith, and in the 1850 census, was listed with his young family in the town of Chester, New Jersey. However, by the 1860 census, he had apparently moved his family to the thriving mill town of Elysville, in Howard County, Maryland. Here, he was listed as a machinist who owned $500 worth of real estate and $300 of personal property. Not too shabby for 1860.
I have worked with the 1860 Federal census many times before. It provides the names of everyone in the household, their age, gender, race and where they were born. For every person over the age of 15, their occupation is given, along with the value of their real estate and personal property. There is a column titled “Attended School within the year” usually with a check mark for all the school-age children.
However, on this census page, that column was completely empty. To my shock, every child was listed as a “Factory Hand.” And there were several pages just like it, where most children over the age of 9 were not in school, but working in the mills.
You can see the census pages here.
Think of the famous pictures of children working in the cotton mills taken by Lewis Hine in the early 1900’s. These photographs were taken to document the plight of the children laboring in the factories of the day. The pictures were used to push for laws banning child labor. See the famous photo of little Addie Card. Another excellent site is The History Place. (See more Child Labor links at the bottom of the page.)
The Bradway children were working in similar conditions in the Elysville mills. Only 6-year-old Charles and 3-year-old Albert were not in the mills.
Built in 1846 to manufacture cotton textiles, by 1860, the Elysville mill was owned by James S. Gary. His company operated the mill until the 1940s when the C.R. Daniels Company took control, and, today, Elysville, aka Alberton, is known as Daniels. In the 19th century, an industrial village existed in this sheltered, wooded valley, including stores, a railroad station, a school and several mill workers' houses. In 1973, the mill complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places. You can read their application here.
In 1860, the Elysville Mill was the only textile producing operation in Howard Co., Maryland. It employed 50 men and 120 women [and apparently children] to operate its 120 looms and 3000 spindles. It made twill, yarn and oznabrug fabric. Oznabrug was a coarse, plain fabric. In the American South, it was the fabric most often used for slave’s clothes.
Hiring children for factory work totally offends our modern sensibilities. However, in Gary’s defense, it is only fair to point out that, at that time, having the children working in the mills was socially acceptable. Their parents often encouraged it, since it brought more money into the household. Gary was as much a product of his time as we all are. In fact, his father’s early death had forced Gary into the textile mills at the tender age of 5, so he knew exactly what the children had to go through. He does appear to have been more humane than many of the mill owners we have all heard about. He is not employing any children younger than 9 years old, he paid his workers in cash and Elysville was not the classic “company town,” where the mill workers’ wages went straight back to the mill owners through the “company store.” You can read more about James Gary on page 54 of the book, Looking Beyond the Surface: History, Memory and Place in the Lost Cotton by Jaime M. Bradley. (See an excerpt below)
Gary actively recruited large families from rural areas to work for him, and that may well be how Charles Bradway found his way to Elysville. But he didn’t stay long. In the 1800’s, like today, the country was considered the healthiest place to live and, in the spring of 1862, Charles moved his family to Jackson County. It must have seemed like heaven to them after life in a mill town.
You can find the 1889 Biography of Charles Bradway and his obituary on Jackson County’s GenWeb site.
© 2012 LuAnn Goeke
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Excerpt from: Looking Beyond the Surface: History, Memory and Place in the Lost Cotton ...By Jaime M. Bradley, Page 54-
“A Model Mill Village
“James Sullivan Gary appears to have taken careful steps in the molding of his mill village at Alberton. From his experiences working in the New England textile industry, beginning as early as 1813, he would have been an eyewitness to the development and evolution of early American mill systems and management strategies at different levels. As a child, his labors would have been on the earliest machines utilized for carding and spinning, followed by a coming-of-age coinciding with the introduction of power looms and the height of the American transition away from the putting-out system. As a young man, Gary would most likely have heard discussion and read trade publications extolling the advances mechanization and labor management in Massachusett's corporate mills, Southern New England's small-scale mills, and other mill sites beyond. His model at Alberton appears generally influenced by both the famous Waltham-Lowell system and the smaller scale Rhode Island family labor system. Dissimilar to the Lowell System, which initially employed young women in dormitory style housing, Gary instead recruited large families and workers from nearby farming communities and utilize the majority of the family -- men, women and children -- in the operations of the mill. In this model, just as in the smaller mills in Rhode Island in southern New England, child labor became critical. At Alberton, employees were paid in cash, similar to the Lowell system, and did not have accounts at the company store as was preferred in the Rhode Island system. Furthermore Gary may have experienced the effects of immigrant labor on his family and other local laborers, most likely in the form of lower wages, at the Lowell system transitions into larger scale manufacturing reliant on Irish immigrants, which perhaps explains the Gary's preference to employ mostly native-born workers, with only a very limited number of immigrant families. Both systems incorporated a paternalistic, controlling influence on the lives of mill workers through on site housing, prohibiting the sale of alcohol, encouraging the attendance of religious service and company supported churches, and company organized recreational activities, all methods which Gary's also employed. Albertson also took on the look of a New England mill; the factory entrants included a bell-tower cupola, Rosette window and picket fencing. Therefore, influenced by his childhood familiarity, early training and experiences in New England mills, Gary fashioned a village at Alberton that took different characteristics from both the Rhode Island and Waltham-Lowell models.”
The Luddite Rebellion:
Also see:
The History Place
Child Labor in the Cotton Mills
The Lives of Textile Workers
