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By Lanita Withers Goins, University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-3890
Posted 5-5-09
GREENSBORO, N.C. — From tales of grazing cows at Revolution ballfield to the car shared among all the families on a street, history graduate students from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro have spent months listening to stories from former residents of northeast Greensboro’s Cone Mill villages.
Now they’re ready to take visitors down the same historic memory lane.
Students will offer free historical van tours of the Cone Mill village area Saturday, May 9, from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Tours will depart every 15 minutes from Revolution Mill Studios at 1200 Revolution Mill Drive in Greensboro.
The tour’s material was pulled from more than 20 interviews students had with former mill villagers and other research conducted this semester for the Museum Studies class taught by Dr. Benjamin Filene, UNCG’s Director of Public History.
Earlier this year, students canvassed northeast Greensboro with an oversized map of the area they dubbed the “Memory Map,” inviting people to share their recollections of events at different locations in the village areas.
“The response has been more than we could ever have hoped for,” said Filene, who plans to continue the project next year. “This is a story bursting to be told. There are generations of people who built this city and lived its history who feel that they haven’t been heard. Their memories give us new ways of understanding Greensboro’s history.”
In addition to the van tours, the May 9 event will also include a review of photographs of village life in the hopes of finding information about unidentified people in the images, a screening of a 1930s-era film of the White Oak factory, a “story swap” session for former mill villagers and 1950s, pre-TV-era games for kids. The “Memory Map” will also make its final appearance during the event before being installed at the Greensboro Historical Museum, where it will be displayed through May 31.
The interviews conducted by the students will be archived for posterity at the Greensboro Historical Museum, UNCG’s University Libraries and the Textile Heritage Center in Cooleemee. Half the interviews were videotaped as part of the Greensboro Bicentennial initiative.
From the early 1900s into the late 1950s, northeast Greensboro was the bustling home to thousands of mill-work families who made their lives in the Cone Corp.’s mill villages — Revolution, White Oak, East White Oak, Proximity and Proximity Print Works — company-owned towns within a town.
Many of the interviews show a surprisingly rural life in mid-20th century Greensboro — cows grazing on the Revolution ballfield, chicken coops in Proximity, hogs butchered in East White Oak. Former residents consistently recall strong community ties within these relatively isolated villages. Buddy Owens remembers that while every house in White Oak had a garage, his block only had one car — so the families shared it.
Along with the strong sense of community in the villages came boundaries that were seldom crossed. Becky Weaver recalls trying to go outside White Oak to attend Aycock School in the late 1940s. Weaver recalls that school administrators said, “No ma’am, we do not take mill children.” Every day for a week, Weaver says, the students went to the school and were sent back before the administration relented.
There were also boundaries between the villages themselves. All the black employees of the Cone mills lived in the segregated East White Oak village. Buddy Owens recalls that it was a big deal when he and his teenage friends ventured from White Oak to play pick-up baseball against the teams in East White Oak: “They beat us every time, but we went over,” Owens remembered.
Students hope the tales from the past will influence and inform today’s residents. Once, mill villagers “were unified by the company they worked for and where they lived,” said student Miriam Exum. “Now that the textile industry is leaving Greensboro there’s a danger that their collective experience and memories will disappear.”
UNCG’s project is one of a series of mill village-related events happening this spring. Former resident Paul Sams is organizing a reunion of Proximity Junior High School students, starting at 3 p.m. May 9. Historic preservation classes taught by UNCG professors Jo Leimenstoll and Heather Fearnbach are documenting the condition and history of the Proximity Printworks factory, laying the groundwork for future rehabilitation and adaptive re-use of the building.
The Greensboro Historical Museum hosted “Piece Work,” a play about mill life, May 1 and 2, as part of the annual ArtBeat festival. In conjunction with the performance, photographer Lisa Scheer exhibited historical and contemporary photographs of mill village residents at the museum.
UNCG’s mill village project is made possible in part by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities; the UNCG Office of Leadership and Service-Learning, and the UNCG Department of History.
For information on the van tours, contact Benjamin Filene at (336) 334-5645 or bpfilene@uncg.edu.