USA > North Carolina > Chowan County > Economic and social history of Chowan County, North Carolina, 1880-1915 > Part 8
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1 Some of the big cotton raisers and most of the negro tenants bought the greater part of what meat they used, though many of them used but little.
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ble origin. All lumber was hand-dressed, and all mould- ings and most other trimmings were hand-made. The babies cut their teeth on home-made pacificators, and the older children played with toys of either their own or their elders' production. The number of physicians was small and the ability to pay them smaller, hence many of them secured a large part of their living from their own farms; while the people when wounded did the most of their own sterilizing and bandaging, and when sick, in no small degree made their own diagnoses, prescribed their own remedies, and filled their own prescriptions from drugs largely compounded from roots and herbs grown in their own fields and woods.
RÔLE OF WOMEN
In manufacturing, the rôle played by the women was of no less importance than that played by the men. For the most part they had charge of the food and clothing, while buildings, tools, furniture, and utensils were chiefly constructed by, the men. In other words, the men made most of the articles that were of leather, wood and iron. The products of the women were turned out almost entirely by each in her own home. There was virtually no division of labor among them, each doing in her own home what the others were doing in theirs, and while some did certain work better than did others, there was the same kind of work for all. With the men, while each was to a greater or less degree his own carpenter and repairman, there nevertheless was some division of labor. Different men made specialities of different things which they did for the public when not working on their farms. For instance, some tanned, some cobbled, some coop- ered, some carpentered, and so on down the list of do- mestic manufactures.
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CAPITAL AND LABOR
As previously stated, certain manufacturing demanded an outlay of several hundred dollars for the erection of each plant in which it was carried on, and certain manu- facturing demanded the cooperation of two or more persons. But the capital expenditure, except in the case of saw-mills, went largely to neighboring farmers for the labor of construction (only those parts were bought outright that could not be made locally), and the plants requiring the largest force for operation could run at full capacity with five or six hands. Thus it is seen that little capital left the county for the construction of plants, and little organization was needed to operate them. Fre- quently these plants were either owned in co-partnership by two or three people who did their own work, or by individuals who had sufficient force of their own to man them. In any case, the plants were owned and the labor furnished by the neighboring farmers.
With the possible exception of some of the millers of water-mills, and eight or ten people in Edenton, few, if any, depended entirely upon manufacturing for a living. Most men were farmers first, and carpenters, blacksmiths, cob- blers, or whatever else they were, afterwards. By far the greater part of all manufacturing and building was done out of crop season, it being customary for all plants, except grist-mills, to lie idle most of the time when the farmers were busy in their fields.
PERMANENT PLANTS
Water-Mills .- There were in the county five water- mills, all of which ground corn, three of which had ma- chinery for making wheat flour, and two of which had saws. To man these, when grinding corn, only one person was needed; when grinding wheat, two were
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frequently on hand; when sawing, from two to four were required. The water grist-mills ground every day when they had corn, except during occasional dry spells in the summer when they had no water.
Steam-mills .- The steam-mills, of which there were some four or five in the county, were erected first for sawing only, but later some of them added grist-mills for corn. They got little grinding to do, however (except when protracted dry weather temporarily threw the water-mills out of commission), because everybody preferred water-ground meal to steam-ground. Meal made by water power is no better than that made by steam power, when all other conditions are the same in each case, notwithstanding the fact that many think the contrary.1 The trouble was, other conditions were not usually the same. The chief work of the miller at the water-mill was grinding, hence he became more or less of an expert. The millers of steam-mills, on the other hand, ground but one day2 each week, and generally had but little to do then. The meal from the steam- mills was usually either too fine or too coarse, and occa- sionally burnt.
The steam-mills were small-ten or twelve horse-power boilers and engines-and did but one thing at a time. To man them when grinding, two men were required, and when sawing, from four to six.
Gins .- So far as I have been able to learn, all the gins in 1880 were driven by horse power. Of these there were probably twenty or thirty. Many of the larger planta- tions had their own gins. They could utilize their men
1 No later than May 1915, I saw this old fiction being exploited by one of the biggest grocery firms in New York city.
2 Usually Friday, but if they failed to get through on this day they finished on Saturday.
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and teams for this work at times when otherwise they would have been doing comparatively little. The usual capacity was two bales a day, working four horses and four men. By using two shifts of horses, driving hard, and working both early and late, some gins occasionally put out four bales a day.
BRICK-MAKING
Making brick, the only other manufacturing process not considered which called for the labor of several peo- ple, required little but water, clay, sand, and labor. First, the prospective brick-maker picked out the least fertile spot on his place that had good accessible clay; then, with a hammer, hand-saw, axe, some nails, and a few boards and poles obtained from the near-by woods, he knocked together, within a few hours, a crude mill for grinding and mixing his material, and a shelter of simi- lar rough character for protecting his dry bricks from the rain; next, he dug a hole in the ground near-by for water, and, finally, he made five or six molds, which completed his special equipment. It took one horse to pull the mill, and from four to six men to tend it. Thus manned, the output was from four to six thousand bricks a day, or about a thousand per man. This has reference to the actual making of the bricks and put- ting them on the yard; the work of hacking them and putting them under the shelter being extra. Quite often, however, one was not troubled with this latter work, for showers frequently came up and melted them down before they were dry enough to hack. On an aver- age, one year with another, something like a third of the bricks put on the yards were lost in this way. The cus- tomary size kiln was around thirty thousand. Some sea- sons, when the weather was especially unfavorable, it was
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necessary to put out twice this number in order to have the usual size kiln.
Most of the bricks were made in July and August after crops were laid by. Then in the late fall, after crops were housed, twenty-five or thirty of the neighbors would be asked to meet at the brickyard on a certain Monday morning and help "set" (kiln) them, which was an all- day job. If one had " good luck," in other words, if his bricks had been properly kilned and he had good wood and knew what he was doing, he finished burning by the following Friday or Saturday night. Occasionally, however, when he had "bad luck," it was necessary to burn over Sunday.
SUMMARY OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY
In infancy, the people of the Chowan of 1880 were swaddled in home-made clothes, rocked in home-made cradles, and placated with home-made toys ; in childhood, they pulled home-made wagons and stole home-made jams; in youth, they courted their sweethearts on home- made benches and took them " joy-riding " on home-made carts ; all thru life they dressed largely in home-made ap- parel, fed on home-grown and home-prepared foods, shel- tered themselves in houses constructed from home-made materials, slept upon home-made beds and under home- made covering, exhilarated their drooping spirits with' home-made cordials, salved their wounds with home-made ointments, and stilled their pains with home-made rem- edies ; when the death-angel finally summoned them to their reward, they were laid out on home-made mattres- ses, encased in home-made coffins, carted off to the grave in home-made vehicles, and their last resting place, were marked by home-made tombstones.1
1 They were usually of lightwood, or red cedar, with the name, date of birth, and date of death cut on them with a pocket knife.
CHAPTER IX
MANUFACTURING IN 1915
FACTORIES 1
The following is a list of the factories that were oper- ated in Chowan in 1915:
CLASS I
RURAL PLANTS WHICH RUN INTERMITTENTLY, AND SUPPLY ONLY NEIGHBOR-
HOOD DEMANDS
Steam Power
No.
Saw mills 2 12
Shingle mills 6
Planing mills 6
Grist mills
3
Cotton gins
15
Water Power
I Saw mills
Grist mills 3
1 Blacksmith shops, carpenter shops, and general repair shops, of which there are several, have not been included, although they produce a few articles, especially carts. They have been left out of account because (I) the amount of machinery used is small, (2) they are usually operated as one-man establishments (except in heavy work, when a helper is needed), and (3) the work is principally that of repairing.
2 One of these shipped 75,000 feet out of the county during 1914, one "only a very little" (it cut only about 300,000 feet during 1914, and principally for local trade), and one other from which no definite re- port was obtained, shipped out a very little.
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CLASS 2
PLANTS 50 PER CENT OR MORE OF WHOSE PRODUCTS ARF CONSUMED IN CHOWAN, AND 90 PER CENT OR MORE OF THE REMAINDER IN THE FIVE OR SIX ADJOINING COUNTIES
Saw mills I
Sash, door, and blind mills I
Grist mills I
Brick mills
.2
Fertilizer mills I
Ice factories
I
CLASS 3
PLANTS PRODUCING ALMOST WHOLLY FOR MARKETS OUTSIDE OF THE COUNTY
Peanut mills .
I
Cotton mills
I
Veneer mills
I
Saw mills
I
Planing mills
I
Cotton-seed oil mills
I
Canneries 2
NUMBER, SIZE, AND CHARACTERISTICS OF FACTORIES
The above table of factories lists sixty plants. Strictly speaking, however, this number is too large, since in many cases four or five of the units listed actually constituted one plant. For instance, in "Class I" all the shingle-mills, planing-mills, steam grist-mills, and several of the cotton gins are run in connection with saw-mills. Counting as only one plant the various units which in each case are located together and operated as one plant, there are only thirty-five.
We have now arrived at a period when we have real factories that contribute to world markets - factories whose office and managerial force are equal in size to the whole crew of the largest plant in operation in 1880-factories whose laborers follow factory work for their entire subsistence, rather than as a mere supplement
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to their agricultural activities. As yet, however, only a beginning has been made. The manufacturing interests which help supply outside markets are small, and the people who depend solely on factory work for a living are few. The forty-one units in " Class I" run intermittently, have their labor supplied mostly by persons whose chief busi- ness is agriculture, and with the three exceptions noted, cater only to neighborhood wants. Another feature of this class of plants is that for the most part they work up only the raw material brought to them by those who are go- ing to take the finished product away, and, omitting the cotton, use it in their own families. Except the water grist-mills (which probably operate, on an average, from one hundred to one hundred and fifty days a year each at full capacity, and require only one man to run them), these units in 1914 operated from twenty to ninety days each, and required from two to ten men each to man them.
In 1914 there were in the county only four manufactur- ing firms, namely, "Edenton Cotton Mills," "Wilks Veneer Co.," "Branning Manufacturing Co." (saw-mill and planing-mill), and " M. G. Brown " (saw-mill, sash, door, and blind-mill, and grist-mill), that employed as many as ten men each for 150 days during the year. The total number of employees of these four firms fluctuated around 350, and the plants were operated from 270 to 314 days each. The other plants of "Class 2" and "Class 3" either required fewer than ten hands, or operated less than half time. The brick-yards, for instance, operated about eight months in the year, but more than half the time they required only from four to six men each. Several of the extra men tended little crops. One of the canneries oper- ates only in the herring-roe season, which is of but few days duration each spring. The other cans roe, green peas and tomatoes. It probably runs on an average about forty
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days a year, all told.1 These canneries work from ten to seventy-five hands (mostly colored women) each, the number depending upon the kind of material they are putting up and the amount they have on hand. For instance, a much larger force is needed when canning tomatoes than when canning roe, because in canning tomatoes the greater part of the work is peeling.
PASSING OF HOUSEHOLD MANUFACTURING
As for manufacturing in the home, it is fast becoming a thing of the past. The hum of the spinning-wheel, the chuck, chuck of the shuttle, and the bang, bang of the loom, are no longer familiar household sounds. Knitting has gone out of fashion, and the few who do occasionally knit a little buy their yarn already spun. The point was reached some years ago where "ladies wear silk hosiery and never knit a stitch." Probably forty per cent of the entire clothing of women and children and eighty per cent of that worn by men, is now either bought ready-made, or tailored to measure by some merchant tailor. This buying of clothes instead of making them is confined to no class or color. It is no uncommon sight to see a Negro day-laborer wearing a suit of just as high-grade tailoring and material as the suits worn by the best-to-do whites in the county. Hardly any of the men and boys now wear home-made outer garments even for every day working clothes. The' ubiquitious overalls-the presence of which in any place, along with tin-can goods, is a sure sign that it has been hit by civilization-can now be had for the three-year-olds as well as for the grown-ups. In 1880 there were few if any
1 In July 1915 the owner of the plant which handles both roe and vegetables, told me that in 1914 he ran about ten days with peas, six weeks with tomatoes, and with herring-roe in 1915, a day and a half. Much of this time, however, he was not running full capacity.
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overalls, and in the nineties they were like certain "shows" at county fairs-" for men only." Few are likely to for- get the keen sense of delight they experienced when at the age of fifteen or sixteen they slid into their first suit. No military or naval officer ever donned his first stripes with greater pride than did these lads their first dollar suits of blue overalls and jump-jackets. It was a proclamation to the world that they at least thought they had " arrived."
The manufacture of household and kitchen furniture has now almost entirely left the domestic stage; practically all furnishings now being acquired, except a few tables and some bed clothing, are bought from the stores, which in turn receive them from the factories. With farming ma- chinery it is the same story over again. Except carts, cart- wheels, and cart-saddles, nearly all farm tools and imple- ments are factory-made. As for local coopering shops, they remain largely as a memory only. In the matter of foods the showing is much better. The more substantial farm- ers-almost all farm owners-still put up their own meat, lard, and fish, and have their own corn-meal ground. A considerable amount of home-canning also is being done, a practice not known in 1880. Nearly all good housewives now try to put up some fruit each year. Not nearly so much of this is done as should be, but a beginning has been made, and during the past three or four years some have canned a few vegetables. The people now buy all their flour (notwithstanding the fact that they consume five or six times as much per capita as in 1880) and most of their soap, though many of the older housekeepers still make their own laundry and kitchen soap. Nearly all the yeopon bushes have been hoed up, and the tea now drunk is usu- ally Lipton's, or some other foreign brand costing from thirty to seventy cents a pound, though not one whit better than the yeopon, which each family formerly cured for it-
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self, or else bought from a neighbor at thirty or forty cents a bushel (a bushel being sufficient to supply a big family from six to eight months, even though each member im- bibed quite freely twice daily).
Much of the construction material for dwellings, out- buildings, and fencing now comes from factories. All of the brick and much of the roofing are factory-made. Probably forty per cent of both dwellings and out-buildings put up within the past two years have been covered with paper, slate, or tin-all factory stuff. When shingles have been used they have been mostly sawed ones rather than the hand-drawn article of other days. Formerly most out- buildings were covered with boards. To make these, first- class timber is required. Since this has nearly all been cut, few, if any, boards are now being riven. All heavy timbers formerly were hewed, but now they are sawed, and all dressing, beading, tonguing, and grooving are done by machinery. The carpenter finds comparatively little use for his plane any more. In fact he is fast approaching the point where he is a mere assembler of materials already prepared for him. Nearly all dwelling doors, mouldings, and trimming are machine products. Gardens are no longer enclosed with wattled pales, but with poultry wire, and probably sixty per cent of the farm fences are woven wire, while iron posts are already beginning to replace the wooden ones.
If civilization means marketing what you make and buy- ing what you use, a survey of the past thirty-five years would seem to indicate that the people of Chowan are well on the way to that goal.
CHAPTER X LUMBERING
LUMBER SITUATION IN 1880
IN 1880 practically the whole county, except the culti- vated land and the retimbered old fields, was in virgin for- est. A good part of the timber cut for home use was cut on land soon to be cleared, and if it had not been, the annual growth was more than equal to the small annual cut for local purposes. Most landowners had more timber than they thought they could ever utilize, and since it had little or no market value, they ascribed little value to it. Thousands of feet were heaped up and burned for no other purpose than to get it off the land that was to be brought un- der cultivation.1 Farmers would gladly have given away the timber on land which they intended to clear, simply to get rid of it.
HUMBUGGING TIMBER OWNERS
When the railroads were projected, lumber men asso- ciated with the railroad companies came through and bought up for almost nothing the majority of the timber lying near the proposed tracks. Conditions being as stated in the previous paragraph, it was easy for the buyers to make their own terms. They paid less than twenty-five cents a thousand feet (board measure) for much timber that now, only thirty years afterwards, would sell for from $5 to $6 a thousand, and was worth then from $1.50 to $2,
1 Cf. supra, pp. 42, 43.
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according to the selling price of lumber in the open market. They stipulated in their contracts that they were to have free right-of-way anywhere they chose to run across a man's land, all the free timber they needed for construction purposes, and the privilege to cut the timber whenever they pleased. Since much of the timber was bought by the acre, this last clause was of much value. Some of the lumber was not cut for several years after it was bought, and by the time it was cut the natural increase during the interven- ing years was of more value than the purchase price agreed upon. Only part of the price was paid when the timber was bought.
The first railroad (Norfolk & Southern) in the county was opened for business in 1881, and the second (Suffolk & Carolina) reached the county in 1887. With the rail- roads came in the big lumber companies, and in ten or twelve years they had cut over most of the best timber that was easily reached. They were eager to make the biggest possible profit in the shortest possible time, and as they had paid so little for the timber they hardly had to consider this item of cost at all. Even when they bought it by the acre, it paid them to cut only the best, and then move on to other virgin stands.
LOCAL OPERATORS
Their Disadvantages .- In the wake of the big companies followed numerous small operators, principally natives. However, the timber owners by this time had begun to wake up and so these small operators had to pay something like market value for what they cut, usually from four to eight times the amount paid by the companies who bought early. Not only that, but most of the timber they bought was either a considerable distance from the railroads, or else on land that previously had been cut over by the big firms. The
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great majority of them had little capital, and so were neither able to put in tramways to reach the timber, nor able to buy large enough bodies of timber to make it pay to put in tramways. The result was they had either to "scrap " after the big operators (handle inferior stuff which they had refused), or else haul their timber a long distance.
At times there were probably fifty or sixty people in the county owning some logging apparatus, and from five to eight hundred men all told engaged in cutting and hauling lumber and ties. Many of these loggers had less than a hundred dollars worth of equipment. A goodly number started with only one yoke of small oxen, or of cheap horses or mules. Some few of these prospered and eventually be- came fair-sized operators, but many did not. The "little fellows" were at the mercy of the railroad companies, who showed much favoritism in sending out cars. After one had worked and strained for weeks with his one little yoke of oxen, and pulled several thousand feet of timber to the railroad tracks, it frequently would lie there till it was damaged from a third to a half of its value before the com- pany would send cars on which to load it. Since the oper- ator did not know enough to make the company pay for the damage, he simply suffered it himself. In this way many lost the little they had previously made either logging or otherwise.
Effect on Agriculture .- Logging became very popular. Almost everybody for hire preferred working in the woods to working on the farm. In fact it soon began to be diffi- cult to hire farm labor, while at the same time people were almost begging to be hired for the log woods. Accompany- ing the growing difficulty of obtaining farm labor was a slump in cotton prices.1 These two facts, taken in con-
1 From 1880 to 1890 "middling staple" (the best grade of cotton produced here) averaged on the wholesale markets well over ten cents
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nection with the fact that the lumber men seemed to be mak- ing more money than any other set of people, caused many farmers, who, as a matter of course, knew nothing at all about lumbering, to start logging as a side line to their farming. This all too frequently meant the neglect of their farming interests.
Local Saw-mills .- For twenty years or more the vast ma- jority of timber cut was shipped out of the county as logs, and so the money paid for working it up went to those outside of the locality. Only two big saw-mills have ever been located in the county-one at Montrose and one at Edenton. The first ran only a few years. The second began operations in 1888 and is still in service. The greater part of the timber it has handled, however, has come from outside the county. Since the cutting of most of the best timber, a few mills sawing from three to eight thous- and feet a day have been put down at various places in the county. But none of these run regularly, and besides, they saw principally for home consumption. At present, of the fifteen mills in the county, only five ship any of their pro- duct whatever.1
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