by Sarah Ellis
I wonder if Auntie Janet will ever tell Uncle James about our letter. Maybe when they are as old as Granny Whitall. Or maybe never. Maybe that is one more thing I know about families. Sometimes they have kind secrets.
Mungo is pushing the pencil out of my hand. That means, “Stop writing. It is time for bed.” He is probably right.
Epilogue
With much regret Flora agreed that it was not possible to take Mungo on the trip west. She gave him to Lillie, who spoiled him just as much as Flora had. He made the most of his nine lives and lived to be seventeen years old.
Upon their arrival in British Columbia, Flora’s family got suddenly much bigger. The Wilfred Duncans had five children, and late in 1888 Janet had the first of what would be four children of her own. Flora’s world was rich in cousins and she ended up with as much family as anyone could want.
Murdo and his family stayed on at the mill in Almonte. One of the room supervisors noticed Murdo’s engineering interests and recommended him for further training. By eighteen Murdo was a mill mechanic — a job he kept his whole working life. With such a wide country between them, though, the Campbells and the Duncans eventually lost touch.
Life on the ranch turned out to be hard work. Uncle James worked with the cattle and horses. Wilfred said that he believed that James spoke horse and cow. James’s disabled hand made some jobs more difficult, but he always said that if he had ten fingers he would still be weaving his life away. Auntie Janet had to learn many new skills, such as canning and the care of chickens.
And life in the west did not mean the end of child labour. Some days, what with gardening, cooking, washing and child-minding, Flora worked every bit as hard and as long as she had in the mill, but there were three big differences. The first was that the work varied with the seasons. Sometimes it was very busy, but often there was time for lots of fun — Flora never lost her love of the “tobog” and she learned to play the mandolin. The second difference was that their hard work resulted in rewards they could see, improvements to the ranch and to their shared lives. The third difference was that Flora had a chance to go to school. She went right through high school and was the first graduate of the school she helped make possible.
Flora married at age eighteen — a young man who was kind, responsible and could sing the birds out of the trees. He had the extravagant first name of Ulysses, which meant that the apple peeling had been right. He worked in the general store in Kamloops and eventually took over the business. By the time Canada celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Flora had two babies, and by the new century she was the mother of four. Flora and Ulysses settled permanently in Kamloops, building a house, raising a family, running a business and weaving a life.
Flora’s children often helped in the store after school. Sometimes, if they wanted to play hockey or go fishing instead, they complained. Flora, who was a no-nonsense mother, always answered by telling them that if they wanted to know what hard work was, they should have worked in a mill. The children listened politely to their mother’s stories of the olden days, but really they preferred her stories of princesses and fairies, stories she had learned from her Auntie Janet and told over and over again by the fire on cold winter nights or sitting by the river in summer.
When Auntie Janet left the mill she took with her a bag of wool scraps from the mungo barrel. During the first winter in the west she and Flora cut and pieced and made a quilt from the scraps. It was not beautiful, as the colours were mostly dark blues, browns and greys, but it was warm and durable. Over the years, as it became worn, Flora would mend it, and as she sewed she would think back to the brief chapter in her life when she was a doffer, a piecer, and an Almonter — the chapter in which she first found a family.
Historical Note
When we look into the past, the most interesting times are those when things were changing. Flora grew up in a time of change. There were new technologies, with great excitement about the uses for electricity, the invention of the telephone and the mechanization of work. The way people talked about the machines in mills, for example, is like the way we talk about computers. A nineteenth-century writer said of these machines, “Their ingenuity seems not only to supplant human intelligence, but to surpass it.”
Ideas were also changing. In the late 1800s, people were questioning religious beliefs, the role of women, how wealth was distributed in society and how children should be treated. In our time and place we think that the “job” of children is to go to school and to play. In Flora’s time, many people felt that it was right and proper that children should work for ten hours a day, six days a week, in mills and factories, in dangerous, unhealthy, tedious, ill-paid jobs. But the winds of change were blowing. Social reformers were asking society to take a look at the conditions of labour, and of child labour in particular.
By the time Flora went to Almonte, there were laws against children working. Basically, boys under twelve and girls under fourteen were not supposed to be employed. But these laws were not well enforced, and when Canadian federal commissioners toured the country in 1887 looking at working conditions, they found children working in a huge variety of jobs. They found children in factories — making boxes, cigars, nails, shoes, wire, starch, biscuits and matches. They found children in iron-works, bakeries, retail shops, printers, sugar refineries and sawmills. Most of all, they found children employed in textile mills.
The conditions under which these children worked were dangerous and unhealthy in many ways. Loud, continuous noise damaged hearing. Fibres floating in the air caused lung problems. Long hours of work, often in cramped conditions, hampered the development of healthy bones and posture. Workplace safety was often neglected and industrial accidents involving the loss of fingers and toes were not uncommon. Some mill bosses simply did not care. In 1887 a mill commissioner asked, “Is there anything which protects the children when they are around the machines?” The supervisor replied, “No; there’s nothing. Each one has his work to do and if he does not protect himself, so much the worse for him.”
Those in favour of the employment of children — which included, of course, those who used them as a cheap source of labour — made three main arguments. The first was practical. They asked, “If children were not working, what would they do? They would be out on the streets getting into trouble.” The second argument was economic. Factory and mill owners and investors maintained that if they had to pay adult wages for all their labour, they could not make enough money. This argument was also used by the workers themselves. Many families could not survive on the wages of the adults — they needed the children’s wages. The third argument was moral. Work was seen as a moral good, instilling a sense of responsibility in children and saving them from the sin of idleness.
Reformers realized that child labour could not simply be abolished. That change had to go hand in hand with the development of public education and with improvements in wages and working conditions, such as safety regulations and sick leave, so that a man and his wife could raise a family without putting their children to work.
The report of the commissioners who came to Almonte made clear and firm recommendations about child labour: We are firmly persuaded that the continuous employment of children under fourteen should be forbidden. Such prohibition we believe essential to proper physical development and the securing of an ordinary education. Further, medical testimony proves conclusively that girls, when approaching womanhood, cannot be employed at severe or long-continued work without serious danger to their health, and the evil effects may follow them throughout their lives.
Official reports such as these played a role in achieving reforms, but it takes more than recommendations and laws to make people change their minds and hearts.
Reformers used cartoons and poetry to rally support for their cause and to tweak the conscience of those in power. Poet Ernest Crosby imagined factory machines devouring children:
What are the machines saying? They are saying,
We are hungry. We have eaten up the men
and women (there is no longer a market for
men and women, they come too high) —
We have eaten up the men and women, and now
we are devouring the boys and girls.
How good they taste as we suck the blood from
their rounded cheeks and forms, and cast
them aside sallow and thin and care-worn,
and then call for more.
Sarah Nordcliffe Cleghorn, writing in the 1900s, used a simpler and more sarcastic approach:
The golf links lie so near the mill,
That almost every day,
The laboring children can look out,
And watch the men at play.
Journalists created emotion-filled word pictures to reveal the effects of child labour: The cotton mill produces a type that can’t be mistaken anywhere. An under-sized boy, a narrow chest, a shifting and uncertain gait, an expressionless face, and a soul that hopes not, for there is nought in the cotton mill worker’s life but the long hours of toil, repulsive food, bare walls, and at the close a hole in the ground.
One of the most powerful tools that reformers used was photography. In the early part of the twentieth century, a New York schoolteacher and photographer named Lewis Hine went about the United States taking photos of children working. His stunning pictures of ragged, grubby, stalwart children — photos identified with plain, factual captions — played a huge role in the abolishment of child labour. Gradually the laws came to be enforced and children disappeared from the workforce, at least officially.
Child labour reform was one of the great accomplishments of the time in which Flora lived, but the challenge remains. In our time it is estimated that over two hundred and fifty million children under the age of fourteen are employed around the world, many in extremely hazardous environments.
An organization called Human Rights Watch reports some of the worst stories: Working at rug looms has left children disabled with eye damage, lung disease, stunted growth, and a susceptibility to arthritis as they grow older. Children making silk thread in India dip their hands into boiling water that burns and blisters them, breathe smoke and fumes from machinery, handle dead worms that cause infections, and guide twisting threads that cut their fingers. Children harvesting sugar cane in El Salvador use machetes to cut cane for up to nine hours a day in the hot sun; injuries to their hands and legs are common and medical care is often not available.
The forces of reform are again at work. In many cases, young people are at the forefront of change. Canadian activist Craig Kielburger started an organization called Free The Children when he was just twelve years old. This organization continues to be a highly effective tool for education and change, working for a world in which all children can be safe and healthy, in which they can be free to learn and play.
Images and Documents
Image 1: Almonte’s No. 1 Mill was one of the leading woollen mills in Canada in the 1880s.
Image 2: The churning falls on the Ottawa Valley’s Mississippi River powered Almonte No. 1 Mill.
Image 3: A layout of Almonte No. 1 Mill, showing the warehouses, dye houses, counting house and tenement housing for the workers, as of 1872.
Images 4 and 5: Advertisements for two of Almonte’s key woollen factories. The No. 1 Mill was also known as the Rosamond Mill.
Image 6: Lewis W. Hine’s famous photo shows a young worker in a cotton factory in an Augusta, Georgia, mill.
Image 7: A doffer girl pushes a bin stacked with dozens of bobbins full of cotton yarn. As soon as bobbins became full, workers would replace them with empty bobbins.
Image 8: Two very young workers in a Georgia textile mill in 1909.
Image 9: Three doffer girls in a New England mill. Girls often tied their hair back to keep it from getting caught in the huge moving machinery.
Image 10: Doffer boys at a cotton mill in Macon, Georgia, are covered in bits of cotton.
Image 11: A twelve-year-old mill worker stands in the spooling room of a Texas cotton mill.
Image 12: Workers in a cotton mill in Marysville, New Brunswick (now a suburb of Fredericton).
Image 13: The report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, published in 1889, showed underage workers still being employed in various industries. Its recommendation that children under fourteen not be employed was often disregarded.
Image 14: This stamp was issued in 1998 to commemorate the anti-child-labour campaign of the early twentieth century. The photo by Lewis Hine is of twelve-year-old Addie, a mill worker in North Pownal, Vermont.
Image 15: Activist Craig Kielburger founded Free The Children in 1995 when he was just twelve years old, when he read about a Pakistani boy, Iqbal Masih, who was had been sold into slavery at age four.
Image 16: Iqbal Masih worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, tying tiny knots to make carpets. He was murdered at age twelve after speaking out about children’s rights.
Images 17 and 18: Much of Canada’s textile industry was concentrated in the Ottawa River Valley. There were also a number of mills in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario’s Grand River area from Hespeler to Dunnville. Dominion Woollens at Hespeler employed hundreds.
Acknowledgments
Every effort has been made to trace ownership of visual and written material used in this book. Errors and omissions will be corrected in subsequent updates or editions.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Cover portrait: (detail) Avant le bain by William Bouguereau.
Cover background: detail (colourized), Victoria Woollen Mills, Almonte, James Rosamond Esq Proprietor, courtesy of Michael Dunn.
Page 60: “We, who must toil and spin,” by Lucy Larcom from An Idyll of Work, 1875.
Image 1: No. 1 Mill, Almonte, Ontario, Gerald Tennant, courtesy of Michael Dunn.
Image 2: Photo courtesy of the author.
Image 3: Courtesy of Michael Dunn.
Images 4 and 5: Mississippi Valley Textile Museum, courtesy of Michael Dunn.
Image 6: Little Spinner in Mill, Augusta, GA, 1909, Lewis W. Hine, George Eastman House, GEH NEG 2505.
Image 7: American Textile History Museum, P227.38294.
Image 8: Georgia mill workers, Lewis Hine.
Image 9: American Textile History Museum, P2212.5.
Image 10: Georgia doffer boys, Lewis Hine.
Image 11: Selina Wall in the Brozos Mill, Texas, Lewis Hine.
Image 12: Marysville Cotton Mill. Mill workers, including children, posed around machinery to have picture taken, ca 1885 or 1886, George Taylor, Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, P5-416.
Image 13: Detail from title page of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital.
Image 14 (lower): Spinner in New England Mill, 1913, Lewis W. Hine, stamp issued February 3, 1998.
Images 15 (Craig Kielburger) and 16 (Iqbal Masih) courtesy of Free The Children.
Images 17 and 18: Map by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs. Map data © 2000 Government of Canada with permission from Natural Resources Canada. Additional references for the detailed map are from a publication of the North Lanark Historical Society © 1978.
The publisher would like to thank Dr. Joy Parr for providing her expertise on the manuscript. She is the author of Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924, as well as The Gender of Breadwinners, a book about the textile families of Paris, Ontario. She is the editor of two collections on children’s history, Childhood and Family in Canadian History and Histories of Canadian Children and Youth. Thanks also to Michael Dunn for the generous use of his collection of Almonte photographs and for supplying map references, and to Barbara Hehner for her valuable assistance in fact-checking the manuscript.
For Delaney, whose olden days are yet to come
Thanks to the staff of the American Textile History Museum; the Mississi
ppi Valley Textile Museum; Mississippi Mills Public Library, Almonte Branch; Keith Bunnell of the University of British Columbia Library; Vera Rosenbluth and the other generous members of the Association of Personal Historians; and Ruth McBride for her hospitality in Almonte.
About the Author
Sarah Ellis has a rare talent for creating characters that readers identify with so closely, it’s as if they’re making a new friend. Ivy Weatherall in A Prairie as Wide as the Sea, Polly Toakley in Pick-Up Sticks, Megan in Out of the Blue and Jessica Robertson in The Baby Project will be familiar to many young readers.
Once Sarah had decided on a topic for her second Dear Canada book, she travelled to Almonte, Ontario, to do research at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum, because Almonte was one of the key mill towns in Canada in the late 1800s. One item she saw there helped her create the character of Flora and the conflicts that a young mill worker like Flora might have in her life. In the museum Sarah saw “a beautiful set of doll’s clothes, made by a young girl in the late nineteenth century. Adjacent to this display are examples of the various huge, heavy machines used in the mill in the same period. This juxtaposition of the delicate and the mighty led me to thinking about work and industrialization. I thought about the girl who had made the doll’s clothes, likely a middle-class child with time to play. I thought about the girl who laboured in the mill, a working-class child whose days were regulated by the rhythm of the machine and the demands of industry. A story was cooking.”