Alabama

Alabama's mill era arrived with the new century. By 1900 an estimated 31 mills employed about 8,000 millhands, and growth accelerated as Northern investors sought cheaper labor and nearby cotton. In Huntsville, the Merrimack Manufacturing Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, broke ground on July 4, 1899, and opened its mill on July 9, 1900; a second mill in 1903 made it one of the largest in the South, and its village grew to 279 houses with a school, hospital, and company store. In Birmingham, Braxton Bragg Comer opened Avondale Mills in 1897. Comer, elected governor in 1906, opposed child-labor restrictions; one historian counted 187 children aged eight to fifteen among the mill's 774 workers in 1900. Lewis Hine photographed Avondale's doffer boys in November 1910 and Merrimack's child workers in December 1913. Under Donald Comer, Avondale expanded to Sylacauga with the Eva Jane plant in 1913 and practiced a paternalism of cheap rents, schools, and profit-sharing that earned loyalty and kept unions out. In 1934 Alabama moved first: workers at Gadsden's Dwight Manufacturing Company walked out on July 12, Guntersville followed on July 14, some 4,000 Huntsville millhands struck on July 16, and the next day the state's United Textile Workers leaders called for statewide action. As many as 23,000 of Alabama's 40,000 textile workers joined. Closures mounted from the 1970s and accelerated after NAFTA; Merrimack, renamed Huntsville Manufacturing, closed in 1989, and Avondale ceased operations in 2006.