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GREENSBORO — Stare at Lisa Scheer’s portraits, the family pictures she collected, and you see a Greensboro you probably won’t recognize.

It’s a Greensboro grounded in the past, along streets like Hubbard and Walnut. The Weavers wear their Easter Sunday best, circa 1962, and Polly Frye sits straight-backed and proud in her father’s favorite chair in present day.

These are some of the things Scheer uncovered when she got lost.

She threw into her car her 20-pound orange bag — filled with legal pads, field journal and camera equipment — and canvassed the streets that cut through the 2,000 acres of Greensboro’s mill villages hugging Yanceyville Street.

She drove down streets and knocked on doors, trying to find the personal stories framed by life around the mills known for generations as Revolution, Proximity, White Oak and Proximity Print Works.

It took her five months. It was her first big project. And it was tough. There were times when she’d wake up in the middle of the night, after weeks of little headway, and think, “Can I really pull this off?’’

But she did. She’s a former journalist, a mother of two teenagers. So she knows the need to be thorough. She also had this vision: to honor the mill families as people, not cogs in a huge machine.

Her vision must have worked. Just ask a fourth-grader named Madison, the granddaughter of a mill worker.

“I never knew my family’s history was important,’’ she told Scheer.

Scheer ended up finding five families. She photographed them, wrote about them and borrowed family photos for an exhibit that’s running through Sunday at the Greensboro Historical Museum.

It’s mill life in still life, in color and black and white. Walk the maze of 41 photographs, read the panels of text, and you’ll get a grip on this sentence: “This is a glimpse of what was, and what remains.’’

Of what is our city’s working-class history. The photos reveal the simple pleasures of mill life in a self-contained town where the company oversaw everything, from the money you made to the food you bought.

But what remains? Catch this quote on a panel from a retired mill worker: “Cheap labor is what took all those plants out. I hate to see (White Oak) die a slow death.’’

The only mill still operating is White Oak denim plant, which once employed 2,500 people. Today, after a layoff of 100 workers in April, White Oak employs 250.

Scheer’s exhibit, funded by a $5,000 local grant, is a snapshot of a textile South that’s vanishing with each passing year. The reason: competition and what’s found way beyond our American borders — lower production costs and cheap labor.

Scheer opened a window into that vanishing past. Back then, the company was king. Here’s the interesting twist:

For decades, the company was run by the Cone family. Scheer is married to a Cone, journalist and local blogger Ed Cone. And during every sit-down, Scheer told the families she met about her marital link.

She says that didn’t hinder her work.

She sat in living rooms and on front porches, gathering color about their every day lives — and the lives of their ancestors — from the beginning of the last century to today.

She had people cry, laugh, show her their tea cup collection, and give her gifts of corn bread and pound cake to take home.

But mostly, she listened. She came away with a deeper appreciation of Greensboro, her husband’s hometown. And the more she listened, the more she remembered people like Papa and Nana, her maternal grandparents.

“My grandfather was an electrician, and my grandmother worked in a department store, and even though I come from the North and a different cultural experience, I recognized something driving around,’’ says Scheer, a New Jersey native.

“It felt like family.’’

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com