Griffin, Georgia: We Could Have Been Famous... Volume 2: Heroes, 1890-1949

By KyL Cobb

Located south of Atlanta, there is a small, all-most forgotten Georgia town called Griffin. While this city is virtually faded from memory today, once it was a thriving center of commerce and culture. From one of the most important Secession speeches given in the pre-War south to hosting the second largest Confederate training camp, Griffin was integral in the War effort. With innovations such as the first paved section of the Dixie Highway and the Georgia Experiment Station, there was a time when Griffin was at the forefront of modern towns. This three part series takes a look at the real history of this sleeping town from fresh research using primary source documents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365018053

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Griffin, Georgia: We Could Have Been Famous... Volume 2: Heroes, 1890-1949

Griffin, Georgia: We Could Have Been Famous… Volume 2-Heroes

Griffin, Georgia: We Could Have Been Famous…

Volume 2-Heroes

KyL T. Cobb, Jr.

LastGasps.com

2016

Copyright © 2016 by KyL T. Cobb, Jr.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. All photos and illustrations remain the property of the various copyright holders and appear in this work for educational purposes only.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN 978-1-365-01805-3

Last GASPS Publishing

1643B Savannah Highway, Suite 366

Charleston, SC 29407 USA

www.SirKyL com

Dedication

This book is written for my mother, Marian Tarpley Cobb Perry, and my father, Senator Kyle Trueman Cobb. My whole life they embraced everything that was good about the South and showed me what it means to care about the world around me. My mother taught a dyslexic to read and never stopped believing in me. My father loved Spalding County and spent a lifetime making it better.

My hero brother, Tonja Pasha Cobb, is one of those people that has spent his life making a difference to the people of Spalding County in the fire department. So many people in Griffin owe him, and his co-workers, thanks for their lives and property. He is really a great man.

I also need to mention Coleman and Wanda Putnam. For a time, when my mother was ill, they helped raise me. Uncle Coleman was Cherokee and grew up in Brooks, Georgia when being a Cherokee in Georgia was not easy. I still remember how he could walk through a plowed field and almost instantly find a Muskogee arrowhead in the dirt.

There are so many other family members in Spalding that contributed to my evolution. In the old south, uncles, aunts, and cousins were part of your life virtually everyday. We spent our Summer nights at fish fryes at my Uncle Bo’s home. Our summer days were spent at the lake or in the pool with my cousins, Sammy and Penny. Cousins Kim and Ginger were always welcomed visitors at my grandmothers. Grandpa Bill would always keep me and my brother in laughter.

Words are also not sufficient to express the gratitude for the caring education I received while growing up in Griffin. So many of teachers cared and made sure I stayed on course. While it is a real crime not mention all of them, two high school teachers, Gayle Goodin and Patricia B. Lee helped form me.

Stephen McKelvey, more than any other college professor changed my life and introduced me to the world.

In part, this book is also for my nieces, Laural Ashley Cobb and MaryAnne Pasha Cobb. I hope that as they grow old, they will be able to look around Griffin and tell their children about how the city changed after this book was written.

And, finally, this book is for you… This book is for everyone that was born or grew up or cared about the City of Griffin. I hope you will have the chance to explore both what the city was and inspire it for the future.

Figure 1 Map of Spalding County in 1883

Figure 2 Griffin in 2016

Acknowledgements

Without Quimby Melton Jr., much of the history of Griffin would have been forgotten long ago. His books provided a great starting point into the odyssey of Griffin. Before the digital age and the ability to research millions of historic documents from home, Mr. Melton did the hard research work manually.

Lewis Beck’s history book detailing the first forty years of the Elks’ Club in Griffin is an invaluable resource for Griffin historians.

A special thank you goes out to former director of the Griffin Historical Society Kay Landham. Without her, there may have never been a book.

Bill Dunn (and his Doc Holliday museum) deserves far more respect that the city bestows upon him. Not only has he brought international prominence to Griffin with his museum, but also Mr. Dunn has worked tirelessly to preserve Griffin’s historic relics.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Mayors, the City Managers, the City Council, and the many unelected rulers of Griffin. Without you, Griffin could have achieved greatness. Even with a history of so many missteps and cowardly decisions, Griffin has survived. Greatness is not as easy to write about, so thank you for your contributions.

Figure 3 Seaton Grantland Bailey (1847-1919)

Preface

Welcome to Volume II of this book. As I mentioned in Volume I, this book started out as a 90-page brief look at the history of Griffin in one of my paranormal investigation reports. Before I realized it, I had written 900 pages of a history book about a town that few people outside the region knew existed.

Even so, I thought it was important to keep going with the project.

In reading this book, I beg your indulgence as a reader. This book was the first written (third published) non-commercial book that I have written. The scope and complexity of this project was mind numbing. Aside from taking over five years to research, as I worked I discovered that the history was constantly shifting around me. Griffin’s heroic days were a dynamic and chaotic time. What constitutes the truth would often shift from source to source.

Whenever possible, I tried to use contemporary sources. Thanks to technology that proved both easier and harder than expected, I made amazing discoveries. For instance, the City of Columbus has sixty years of newspapers online. I am shocked to say I have now read every one of them. Thanks to these newspapers, I discovered H.O. Wood and chased him around the world. Thanks to the Columbus newspapers, I also was introduced to the Colonel coward that deserted his post in Griffin on the eve of invasion.

From court cases to wills to newspapers, the story of Griffin demanded to be told.

As this worked developed, I tried to make sure that facts were cited to the original source and that credit was given to those that created the historical records. As a history book, this work can change with each new discovery, so please help make this a living work by contributing any new historical information for review.

For this ebook version of the history, every effort has been made to preserve the feel of the original. Because of variations in ebook formats, some formatting has been changed.

As a child growing up in rural Spalding County, Georgia, we were too far out from Griffin to get cable service. This meant our high-quality television choices were limited to the major networks and public television. In the fuzzy but acceptable range of television broadcasts that we could watch, Channel 17 (WTCG/WTBS) and occasionally the independent channel 46 provided child-friendly quality programming.

So, for most of my childhood, my afternoon programming choices were the WTBS rebroadcasts of 1950s television programing like Leave it to Beaver and The Addams Family.. Channel 46 broadcast THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN as well as BATMAN.

Thanks to an over-exposure to the heroes of the 1950s, I developed an appreciation for concepts of Truth, Justice, and the American Way that was in many ways anomalous to the youth of my generation. I believed in the morals of the Lone Ranger. I embraced the ideals of Superman. Batman and Robin always defeated the colorful villains that they faced in each cliff-hanging episode.

Even as I entered adulthood, I never let go of the ideas that my childhood heroes taught me.

In today’s world, there is a shortage of heroes. The media (and the public that they suckle) takes great pride in destroying virtuous people. Christianity is on the verge of becoming a dead religion. Once America fought against Communists, today the Democratic Party embraces most of their ideals. The American people have lost their drive and lost their way.

In telling this part of the story of Griffin, there are heroes. Some of these great people have statues and others have virtually been forgotten by time.

A personal unknown hero of mine is Lt. Colonel Jessie Pearl Rice. At the time when America needed a hero the most, Rice was there to do her duty for the war effort. While Lt. Colonel Rice is exceptional in many ways, her normality stands out in my mind. To me, Rice came to represent the sacrifice and determination of every person from Griffin that struggled against the Axis powers in World War II. Moreover, even in the victory that followed the war, everyone that returned to Griffin left a little behind.

While Griffin celebrates one Wild West hero, it has forgotten the heroism and adventures of Paden Tolbert, the Wild West marshal. Sadly, he is virtually forgotten everywhere, including his hometown.

Martha Drummer is not the kind of hero that often is remembered in a book like this one. Growing up poor and black in Griffin in the 1870s and 1880s is not the way most amazing stories begin. In spite of the odds being stacked against her, Drummer had the strength of character and intelligence to succeed in life while devoting her life to helping the world to be a better place. As a missionary and surrogate doctor, hundreds owe their lives to her.

Spalding County has also been the birthplace of so many aviation pioneers. From daredevils to fighter pilots, aviation history repeatedly has links to Griffin.

In researching the stories in this book, I was able to know many of these people through their personal writing and the reflections of those that knew them. I wish I had gotten a chance to know them personally.

Even more, I wish that more of that caliber of people existed today.

The period of the 1890s until after World War II marked a clear period of transition for Griffin. The War of Northern Aggression had brought the City into prominence throughout the South. Choices that the city made had also meant disaster. The turn of the century gave Griffin a chance to be important… to be famous again.

Griffin could have been famous but try as it might, that was not to be a part of its legacy…

Introduction to Part 2

Square Dance

Figure 4 Bales of cotton being loaded in downtown Griffin, circa 1910

An old adage says that the victor writes history. In the case of Griffin, the few men that cared enough to devote months or years of their lives to making a permanent record have written the history. After the first hand witnesses have passed beyond the veil, official written histories have a tendency to become dogma. The job of a historian is to find the truth about events regardless of the politics that shaped the written records.

The official history of Griffin is based only on a few sources. The canonical version of early history of Griffin was mostly preserved in Melton’s book from the recollections and research of Lucien P. Goodrich. A cornerstone of life in Griffin, Goodrich spent his life in the city from 1881 until 1954. As a Griffin historian, Goodrich also had access to some of the surviving older records of the time. Fortunately, from a historical perspective, Griffin was also important enough to have independent reports of its events recorded in the newspapers of other Georgia communities. While these papers certainly have biases, they present unfiltered views of Griffin’s development. This was particularly true of the Macon and the Columbus newspapers that had their cities developments intertwined with Griffin’s prosperity through the 1880s.

The most important source of Griffin history after 1880 was the local newspapers. Quimby Melton used these sources extensively in his two versions of the History of Griffin. The first-hand accounts in the Griffin Daily News extended back to 1881 when C.A. Niles started the paper; [1] however, there is some question about the state of the preservation for the earliest Griffin News even during the 1950s.

Lewis Beck has also been a crucial asset in the preservation of Griffin’s history through his publication of the history of the Elks’ Club in Griffin from 1910 until 1950. In fact, Melton cites Beck’s history in the second version of the History of Griffin.

While both of these works are extremely important reflections of Griffin’s past, they both suffer from the same common flaw. Both works have minimized many of the negative elements of Griffin’s past. Whether these omissions were intentional or inadvertent, darker sides of history have been ignored. The most obvious of these omissions has been the racial problems that permeate Griffin’s history. From Griffin’s being the lynching capital of the United States to Griffin’s segregated work forces, most of these elements have been ignored by the official history books.

It is important to understand that neither of these two cornerstone works acted with malevolence, they were simply both reflections of Griffin culture at the time of they were written. These works were also the creation of two individuals that were city leaders and members of the Griffin city power structure.

When thinking about Griffin and Spalding County today, the popular delusion is the City and the County are composed of a homogenous culture with similar dreams and aspirations. While the truth that lies behind the curtain may be different, that debate rests outside the scope of this work.

What is certain about Spalding County is that from the 1880s until the 1940s Spalding County was far from the solitary culture that the history books advance. Beyond the ever-present racial divide that has existed in the County since the end of the Civil War, prior to the 1940s there existed at least three other classes of citizens. While vast amounts of the history have been lost, fortunately small amounts were preserved. One source for understanding the striations of Spalding’s past rests in a linguistic study conducted on speech patterns in Spalding County prior to World War II.

Before 1883, the people of Spalding County had one goal following the War of Northern Aggression… to survive. Black and white, city and county, every day was a struggle to find the next meal. At the end of the war, 7,672 people remained in Spalding County and all of them were destitute. While the white population was poor, they were poor with land and income potential. The 3,242 blacks in the county were left without land, without homes, without jobs and without direction.[2]

A number of Spalding County’s black population eventually found work as farm workers with many of the county’s former slave owners. Blacks in the city worked for Griffin homes or businesses as cheap, unskilled labor. The city jobs for the black population were exclusively the low-end, undesirable jobs.

Nevertheless, in spite of the economic and social gap between these two different cultures in Spalding County, as a primarily agrarian economy, the cultures found most of their differences secondary to the daily struggle.

Figure 5 Spalding County towns circa 1900

While Griffin was on the verge of death at the end of the 1870s, the most radical change in the town’s destiny came in 1883 with the opening of Griffin’s first cotton mill, the Griffin Manufacturing Company.[3] Employing around five hundred people, ten percent of Griffin’s 5,439 white population were Kincaid employees.[4] When labor was not found in Griffin, it was imported from the displaced farm workers in North Georgia. The 7,146 blacks in the city were excluded from these high paying jobs.

Figure 6 Locations of some Griffin Mills

As will be discussed later in this work, one of the necessities for the mills in the 1880s was ensuring that the work force was conveniently located to the mill. As a result, many of the mills opened their own mill villages. These tiny communities were in effect their own cities built to support the mill operations. While looking at a modern map of Griffin, the mills seem to be embedded in the heart of the city, for workers without transportation, the distance between downtown Griffin and the mills made life difficult. By providing workers with low-cost housing, company grocery stores, company restaurants, and even company entertainments, many of the mills created a work force utterly dependent and involved in the prosperity of the company.

The segregation of the mill villages from other populations had a variety of benefits for the mills. First, by providing housing to employees and their families, mill villagers were prevented from transferring to competing mills because such a transition would require moving out of their homes. Secondly, the mill village could discourage unionization. If you acted against the wishes of mill management, not only would you lose your housing but your peers would also act against you.

Because of the self-sufficiency of the villages, the residents there developed an identity separate from that of a Griffin citizen.

By the 1890s, Spalding already supported a number of towns outside of Griffin including Sunnyside, Pomona, Vineyard, Orchard Hill, Experiment, Drewryville, Rover, Zetella, and Strickland. While these small towns were governed independently, Griffin was still the economic hub for their activities. Farmers in these small towns were required to interact with Griffin to get their products to market.

Because farming required a different skill set than was needed from the city, many Griffin citizens looked down on the farmers.

This feeling of separate classes was reinforced by the establishment of the Griffin schools as separate from the county schools. When the Griffin School system was first established, it charged students from the county a higher rate than students from the city were charged. The Griffin schools were also impossibly far for a student living near Vaughn or Drewryville. The creation of the Spalding County school system and its network of one-room school houses around the county provided rural students with an education but often at a level below the one provided in Griffin City Schools.

Even the high schools’ structure isolated rural students. While private and public schools were available in Griffin as early as the 1870s, Spalding County did not offer rural students the high school experience until 1930. If county residents wanted to attend the public Griffin High School, they were expected to pay additional monthly fees.

While Griffin had paved roads, the County did not until much later. When Griffin received electricity, the County was dark. As Griffin experienced the wonders of indoor toilets and heated water, the County would not receive such modern miracles until decades later. While the leaders of Griffin drank in their private clubs, the Griffin-based judges and County Sheriff pursued moonshiners along county roads.

Figure 7 The Patrick family circa 1915

Over time, it was inevitable that social differences would develop. One Spalding citizen that grew up in the 1920s summarized the rivalry between the three white cultures with, the town folks looked down on everybody, the farm kids called the mill kids lint heads, and the mill kids said the farm kids had cow [dung] between their toes.[5]

Beyond just the social gaps, even variations in speech developed. Griffin had originally been populated primarily from settlers that had descended from the Georgia and South Carolina coastal regions. The version of English they spoke more closely resembled a corruption of British English.

Rural farmers’ primary speech interaction was with their family units and other distant rural neighbors. As a result, rural speech patterns we reinforced among farm families. The coastal regional language origins were strengthened.

Initially, many of the early mill workers had been born in Griffin. Once the mills had become operational, over a very short time, workers of original Griffin descent became the minority, being superseded by the influx of workers from northern Georgia. The North Georgia workers were the descendants of Scottish and German settlers and as a result, their Appalachian accent was different from the Southern accent native to Spalding County.

In the city, townspeople were constantly exposed to travelers from the railroads and the influx of new residents from around the south. Because of the transplant factor, the residents of the City developed a blended southern accent.

Figure 8 Language pattern distributions[6]

It is worth noting that the language isolation also occurred across racial lines. Where rural blacks frequently interacted with rural whites, both groups retained a similar accent and dialect.

In the City of Griffin, blacks increasingly found themselves in one of the three segregated housing areas: north of the City Park, east of the city, and northeast of the city. These pockets of black culture had virtually no interaction with the mill villages and a limited interaction with the proper citizens of Griffin. As a result, previous Southern Coastal accents and slave dialects were left to develop internally within their neighborhoods.

The racial divide in Griffin was so distinct that well up into the 1960s, the whites in the area north of the City Park’s black neighborhood would talk about going to nigger town to hire day laborers to assist with tasks.[7]

Therefore, for almost sixty years of Griffin’s first one hundred years of existence, there were four different cultures cohabitating with little regard for each other. There are no post cards of the black sections of Griffin. There are very few photos of the mill villages. The rural county life is almost forgotten by outsiders.

Figure 9 Fishing in rural Spalding County circa 1907

The 1940s gradually saw the breakdown of some of the cultural barriers. As roads in the county were paved and the school systems merged, the language barriers became less distinct. The introduction of radio also had a great deal of influence in the language normalization process.

The slow death spiral of the mills in Spalding following the war helped to break down the barriers between the village people and the townspeople. The deathblow to mill villages came in the 1980s when the last of the mill villages were sold off to their residences or developers.

As stated before, the histories of Griffin and of Spalding County were not always the same. There are stories of triumph and failures of the farmers of Spalding County that are every bit as important as the fragments of Griffin history that have been preserved. Unfortunately, most of those stories have been lost.

---

[1] Columbus Daily Enquirer; January 3, 1882

[2] History Of Griffin: 1840-1900; Melton, Quimby, Jr.; 1959

[3] The National Cyclopaedia Of American Biography: Being The History Of The United States As Illustrated In The Lives Of The Founders, Builders, And Defenders Of The Republic, And Of The Men And Women Who Are Doing The Work And Moulding The Thought Of The Present Time. Volume Vi. Copyright, 1892 And 1929 By James T. White & Company. Ann Arbour, Michigan: University Microfilms A Xerox Company, 1967. Page 126.

[4] Southern World, Article By H.H.J., Sep. 1, 1884, Page 6

[5] McNair, Elizabeth Dupree; Mill Villagers and Farmers: Dialect and Economics in a Small Southern Town; 2002; P. 9.

[6] McNair, Elizabeth Dupree; Mill Villagers and Farmers: Dialect and Economics in a Small Southern Town; 2002; P. 6.

[7] Quoted by multiple sources to the author in exchange for anonymity; 2015

Chapter 1: 1890s

Mill Town

The story of Griffin can be told as three separate events. Part one of the story is one of discovery, struggle, and the glory of success. The middle portion of the story is about growing up and deciding whether life can be better. This was the time of heroes. Part three is the story about what happens after the party is over and the time comes to clean up.

During the first part of the story, Griffin found itself at the economic and cultural center of Georgia. After the war, most of the fame and glory was gone. In its wake, Spalding County and the people of Griffin were suffering. Quite literally, they were starving to death.

Then a hero came.

william Kincaid-photo.jpg

Figure 10 William J. Kincaid[8]

When William Joseph Kincaid came to Griffin, no one could have guessed the impact that the Confederate Captain would one day have on the citizens of Griffin. Kincaid began life in Griffin running a general store from 1871[9] until 1883.

In 1883, both the destiny of Kincaid and the destiny of Griffin changed when Kincaid, along with investors Seaton Grantland and J.M. Brawner, opened Griffin’s first cotton mill, the Griffin Manufacturing Company.[10] As the south’s first steam powered mill,[11] Griffin Manufacturing featured a simple design and initially worked as a specialty mill. While Griffin Manufacturing was small, it served as an experimental laboratory for Kincaid’s next large project, Kincaid Manufacturing.

Figure 11 Kincaid Manufacturing in 1915

In 1888, Kincaid and J.M. Brawner laid the groundworks for what would quickly become Griffin’s largest employer. As Georgia’s agricultural industry was transforming, many former farmers found themselves without land or serving as tenant farmers for wealthy landowners as de facto serfs.

While the transformation eventually occurred throughout Spalding County, it was far more prevalent in the farmlands of North Georgia that had experienced the extreme levels of destruction in the war. Because of this transition, many families found themselves migrating from the rural farms in North Georgia into the cities looking for work.

Fortunately for the uneducated former agricultural workers, the new Kincaid Manufacturing cotton mill needed many unskilled, cheap laborers. Griffin Manufacturing and Kincaid Manufacturing brought in enough revenue and jobs to start resurgence in Griffin.

Kincaid’s two mills grew to three in 1900 when Kincaid opened the Spalding Mills, which he directly managed as president for two years.[12] With Kincaid’s three mills and the newly opened Rushton Mills, Griffin was well on the way to becoming a town dominated by the gravity of the mills.

For Kincaid, the mills would be his most enduring legacy.

Beyond the mills, Kincaid directed many of Griffin’s other key businesses. He was on the Boards of Directors of the Merchants and Planters Bank, the City National Bank, the Griffin Banking Company, the Southern Securities Company, the Central Georgia railroad, the Georgia Midland Railroad and the Towlaiga Falls Power Company,[13]

Even after the death of Kincaid in 1923,[14] Griffin still found the mills to be its most important industry.

When Kincaid’s burdens had been lifted, John H. Cheatham was there to carry the mills forward. Under Cheatham’s rule, Kincaid became Georgia-Kincaid and saw itself grow into five mills across Griffin. Even the hardships of World War II did not stop Georgia-Kincaid. The mills’ line of towels, which were marketed as Dundee brand, were so successful that in 1942, the company changed its name to Dundee.[15]

In 1982, Dundee opened what would become the last of its new mill operations. The 150,000 square foot plant in Gainesville, Georgia was dedicated to the production of baby-related products. On 7 February 1995, Springs Industries from Fort Hill, South Carolina announced a $118 million merger deal between itself and Dundee. In mid-1999, the original Kincaid Plant (number 1) was closed and converted into storage. Concurrent with expansion, 300 employees were terminated.[16] In February 1985, Springs Industries announced the closure of the last towel weaving plant in Griffin, Georgia.[17] On 25 April 2001, privately held Heartland Industrial Partners L.P. purchased Springs Industries for $905 million. For Griffin, this also meant the closing of the weaving and yarn production at Plant 2, eliminating 320 jobs.[18]

Figure 12 Location of Kincaid Mills Number 1

While Dundee was not Griffin’s only remaining mill, the impact of Dundee’s death was substantial to Spalding County.

As part of this work, the other mills that made Griffin a mill town will be explored. The 1899 Rushton Cotton Mill[19] created by Benjamin Rush Blakely would persist until 1927 and only end with it being absorbed into Dundee.

The 1916 Griffin Hosiery Mills created by T.L. Shepard would create the 1929 subsidiary Dovedown Mill. Dovedown would then persist until 1957.

By 1924, former Kincaid Manufacturing investor William Franklin Ingram opened his own velveteen weaving plant. Ingram’s Highland Mills would be purchase in 1928 by Crompton Company and operate in Griffin until 1988.

In 1922, Robert Paine Shapard decided to create a mill to produce infant socks. By 1938, Spalding Knitting Mills line of women’s stocking and children’s’ socks had met with enough success to warrant a larger building and experiments in new product lines. The 1938 creation of the American Throwing Company revolutionized women’s fashions with the introduction of nylon stockings. Becoming American Mills in 1954, the mill has watched as all of Griffin’s other mills closed.

For over 120 years, mills were the lifeblood of Griffin and Spalding County. In the shadows of the mills, generations of workers formed their own communities. With schools, churches, and even graveyards separate from Griffin, the mill villages grew and prospered along the fringes of Griffin’s borders. While they were a part of the tapestry of Spalding County, they also lived in relative isolation. Members of the mill villages formed their own culture and married among themselves.

As the era of the mill villages passed, Griffin mill culture remained a unique subculture as the ways of metro Atlanta sprawl encroached on Griffin.

Figure 13 Griffin mill timeline

Without the mills, Griffin was set adrift in a struggle to redefine its identity and determine its future.

Beyond the heroes that saved Griffin with the mills, when the time came, ordinary people from Griffin were willing to make the sacrifice to help each other survive and prosper. These mill people were not giants or kings. They were the kind of people that stitched together whatever materials they found around them to forge the sails to make the world a better place.

For decades, these heroes created the tapestry of Griffin’s future.

The inside of a mill in the 1900s

The mill buildings were described as well lighted and ventilated, heated in winter and cooled in summer. Exhaust systems pulled the lint from the air. Cool-water spray systems were used to humidify the air in summer and warm water was used during the winter season. The goal was to keep the temperature between 70 to 75 degrees. Some of the mills would use an ice room and fans to pull cool air through the mill.

Many of the mills provided cool drinking water to their employees from a fountain. Most often, this was provided from the deep wells that each mill dug to support itself. Georgia-Kincaid maintained reservoirs at most of its facilities. The bleachery alone supported a million-gallon concrete water reservoir.[20] Georgia-Kincaid had so much water, in fact, that when the City of Griffin faced a water crisis in 1926, John H. Cheatham gave the city access to the Georgia-Kincaid water system and provided the city with 30,000 gallons of water per hour.

All the major mills provided some form of medical support. While most provided a trained nurse in the mill, many also offered nursing services to the residents of the mill villages. To supplement the nurse services, larger mills like Kincaid had arrangements with local doctors to provide on demand services.[21]

In spite of the modern amenities offered by the mills, external inspections commented on the poor hygienic condition of the toilet facilities. In May 1899, Kincaid had tried to bring three black workers in to provide janitorial services but white mill workers beat and nearly flogged the black workers to death.[22] In spite of that incident, mill owners continually tried to improve the toilets. One mill superintendent noted that because the mill hired the rough class of people many of the workers had no exposure to indoor toilets. Exposure to the simplest level of hygienic education was foreign to the workers. Even once janitors were hired to clean with antiseptics twice daily, employees failed to use the provided soap and towels.[23]

The workrooms of the mills were primarily filled with single women and small children. Prior to the introduction of labor laws in the 1910s, most of the labor force in the mills averaged twelve years old. The mothers would stay at home, the children would work in the mills, and the husband would assume more physically taxing jobs. Children under twelve usually worked in the spinning process while the children between five and seven were used to sweep the floors.

While child labor may seem extreme, when faced with the choice of the family starving or allowing a child to work, there was very little moral debate.

Prior to 1916, the complexities of the mills meant that during a shift, workers would have routine down time while the belts and pulleys from the steam engines were inspected and replaced. This allowed mill workers to have scheduled lunch periods where they ate lunches brought from home or even returned to their home in the mill village. As the mill systems were improved, the necessity for the down times decreased and the formal lunches were eliminated. As a result, mill workers were expected to continue straight through their shifts. As a result, dope wagons or dope carts sold sandwiches and drinks to employees. The employee had to stretch their time to find a time in the day when they could eat. In the South this meant a dramatic increase in the consumption of easy to maintain and easy to eat work food like pimento cheese sandwiches.[24]

Figure 14 Griffin Manufacturing ad

Mill shifts generally ran for ten to twelve hours, five days a week, and half a day on Saturdays. In the 1900s, Kincaid changed the game in Griffin by introducing an 8½-hour workday for six days a week in all the mills he operated. While fifty-one work hours per week may seem