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GREENSBORO — They range in age from 60 to 101 . They represent the thousands of people who lived in the five former mill villages owned by Cone Mills. They recall those days — the hard times and the happy times — with nostalgia.
Finally, they have a chance to tell their stories. And, they couldn’t be happier.

“Why, I’m thrilled to death,” 71-year-old Buddy Owens , who grew up in the White Oak village, said of his interview. “It’s just one of millions (of stories) out there. It feels good to relate it to somebody. It’s Greensboro’s history.”

This semester, a group of nine graduate students at UNCG has collected oral histories from 23 former mill village residents.

The interviews, some of which were videotaped, will be archived at UNCG, the Greensboro Historical Museum and the Textile Heritage Center in Cooleemee .

“This is a story bursting to be told,” said Benjamin Filene , UNCG’s director of public history , who headed the project. “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.”

Filene said the students found so many people who wanted to talk about life in the mill villages that another class will continue the project next year.

“It’s a big deal,” Lynn Rumley , director of the Textile Heritage Center , said of the effort. “In order for there to be a public memory of the cotton mill people — who they were in their own voice — they have to be recorded.”

But the current project features a number of threads.

The students also constructed a 7-foot-by-7-foot “memory map,’’ a device that allowed mill residents to show where important events in the lives took place.

Next Saturday , the students will use the map to guide free tours of the former villages. A printed version of the tour will be available for those want to follow the route later.

The students also want the public’s help in identifying the people in some of the nearly 10,000 Cone photos archived at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Most of the people in the pictures, which depict life in the Cone villages and plants from 1899 to 1990 , aren’t identified.
The students want to put names with some of the faces.

“This is our way to try and fill in the gaps in the historical record,” Filene said. “ ... Who are these people?”

Moses and Ceasar Cone founded their textile empire in the late 1890s . The brothers opened their first cotton mill in what is now northeast Greensboro in 1896 . It primarily produced denim.

Over the years, their company built three other plants — Revolution , White Oak and Proximity Print Works — nearby.
Around them, the Cones constructed villages where their workers lived.

They built a fifth village called East White Oak for the company’s African American employees.

The villages included 1,600 three-, four- and six-room houses.

“By today’s standards ... they would have been condemned,” Buddy Owens said in his oral history. “I can remember many a time going in the bedroom when it had snowed ... and seeing streaks of snow on the floor ... where it had come through (the cracks) in the walls.”

On the bright side, the workers’ rent amounted to just pennies a day. And the company furnished water, lights, garbage pick-up and maintenance on the houses.

“You name it, we got it,” Lillie Crum, 86, who grew up in White Oak, said in her oral history. “ ... We had it all.”

The workers shopped in company stores, where they bought flour and meat produced by the Cones. The villages also had banks, theaters, post offices, drug stores, dry cleaners, shoe shops, barber shops, playgrounds and YMCAs.

White Oak, the largest village, had a hotel.

The Cones, who were Jewish, even provided land and money to help mill workers build churches. They also operated a summer camp for employees’ families, and provided for bands and athletic teams.

The brothers pioneered social welfare in the state by hiring a worker to teach women how to cook, sew, can vegetables, manage money and care for children.

The mills offered free kindergarten and nine-month schools. Village nurses cared for the sick.

At Christmas, parents got free hams and their children got dolls and pocketknives. On the Fourth of July, the company put on parades and picnics.

People knew their neighbors and looked out for one another.

“It was just a wonderful place for me to grow up,” 70-year-old Sarah Murray, who lived in White Oak and Revolution villages, said in her oral history. “ ... It was just a marvelous childhood for me.”

But those who worked in the mills found the conditions loud and dirty.

“The conditions in the mill then were atrocious,” Buddy Owens, who worked in White Oak during the summer, said in his oral history. “You could stand outside the mill and see people coming out with lint hanging from their hair and all over their body .... People never complained a lot.”

The workers also found their pay low.

“We didn’t know that we were poor,” Murray said. “ ... Everyone around us was in the same fix.”

The villages offered a sense of security, even for African Americans.

“East White Oak was sort of isolated from the black communities in the city area,” Franklin Richmond , who grew up on 10th Street , said in his oral history.

“ ... We sort of stayed within the boundaries here. We didn’t know about the cruel things of ... segregation and Jim Crow in this community because we were not exposed to it until we went outside of it.”

The folks in the white villages didn’t socialize with residents of East White Oak — except on Sunday.

“We’d get in somebody’s car and go over and find a black team playing baseball,” Owens recalled. “They beat us all the time .... But we loved to play with them.”

Those interviewed said that in the mid- 20th century the villages had what Filene calls as a surprisingly rural feel — cows grazing on the Revolution ball field, chicken coops in Proximity, hogs butchered in East White Oak.

Many workers had gardens, fruit trees and grapevines.

Plus, they had a garage, but nothing to put in it.

Owens said, “17th Street was three blocks long and we had one car ... on the whole street .... (But) we appreciated things more. That’s the secret right there.”

In 1957 , Cone began to sell the homes in its villages. In 1978 , the mills began to close. Now, only White Oak remains, and its employment numbers have fallen from a peak of 2,500 to around 300.

Workers wonder how much longer it will survive.

Soon, memories may be all that remain of the city’s rich textile heritage. That’s why the UNCG students see their project as important.

“We’re using the stories of the people who live in the mill villages to tell the history of Cone Mills,” said Miriam Exum , a Nashville, Tenn. , native who’s working on a master’s degree in history. “It’s not coming from history books. It’s not coming from the Cone family. It’s coming from the people who lived it. That is what makes it significant.”

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com