Child of Erwin Mill Village

by Holly Marlow Hall

I can’t explain how this community came to be. It certainly was strong and breathed on its own. It was ever changing, as life seems to be and yet stayed the same. The entire area that I grew up in from 1952 – 1970 was truly a family community. The mill village of West Durham, NC was glued together by the cotton mill. I have heard stories from the 1920´s and 30´s that were passed down from my parents and grandparents. This was a time of commitment, from the family and the company.

The company committed to take care of her employees by providing them with basically everything they needed in order to work in her mill. The families all lived within walking distance of the mill, in houses that were subsidized by the mill. This was due to the fact that many people could not afford a car. Even so, the mill village had its own little social hierarchy. The title you held in the mill decided the location, size and type of house you were given the opportunity to rent. I learned about this form of society at the young age of 13. Before, I travel down that road, let me start with my earliest childhood memories.

The author, Holly Marlow Hall, in front of her grandmother's house at 710 Bolton Street. Next door was Buchanan's, a local store mainly for people working at Erwin Mills (1954).

My Grandmother, (my mother’s mother) was Ruth Malone Clayton. Nanny to me. She worked in the spinning room at the mill. I am not sure what she did but when she would come home and take off her shoes, there would be small pieces of half moon shaped metal pieces she called travelers, stuck in the soles of her tennis shoes. I would sit at her feet and pull these metal pieces out for her as she would tell us about her day in the mill. Her hair would be full of cotton lint and look as if she had been out in the snow. She was always very tired. Within a block of her house was a little neighborhood store us kids would walk to in the afternoon. It was in the fork of Alabama Ave and Knox St. If we looked very pitiful and sad the owner, Mr. Marrow would give us free ice cream. At a very early age, most of us could have won an academy award from all of the “acting sad”. Always look down at the floor and frown when he told you that you didn’t have enough money - it worked every time.

A few blocks over from Nanny’s were my father’s parents, Frank and Nola Marlow - . Mammy and Pa to me and my brother, Barry. Frank worked in the mill. They lived on 13th Street (Bolton St. today). I have more memories of this area since Nola was the one I stayed with during the day when my mom and dad went to work in the mill.

Frank was a loom fixer, a mechanic by today’s standards. As a young couple, more job opportunities lured Frank and Nola Marlow to move from Selma/Smithfield area of N.C. to the big city of Durham. Farming was no longer profitable.

During my preschool years, both my parents were working the second shift. The hours were from 2:30 PM until 10:30 PM. During this time, I stayed at the Marlow’s on 13th Street. Pa Marlow worked 1st shift. He went to work each morning around 6:00 AM and worked until 2:30 PM. I can still see his grey thermos and lunch box he would take with him every day as he walked down to the end of the street to the big Grey gate.

Pa´s backyard was fenced in on three sides. This was not his choice. This property backed up to the mill fence. Sometimes if Pa forgot his lunch, he would either walk to the big Grey gate and I would take it to him, or he would come to the back fence and I would run to the end of the back yard the throw him a sack over the fence. I would always run to the gate when I would see the "lights flash". Mill employees were very well disciplined plus the noise was so great inside the mill, hearing was next to impossible. Therefore, the lights would flash to indicate it was time to eat, take a break or the shift had ended. I would wait, like a little faithful puppy, for Pa to come through the gate. The fun was waiting to see him come around the building. It was the same thing every day, but it never, never stopped being exciting and fun.

Everyday was like seeing him for the very first time. Overalls were the uniform of the day to work on the looms in the mill. I don’t know if the mill brought them or not. Not being tall enough to reach his corner right top pocket, I could always see the corner of something sticking out. Every day without fail there was some type of candy or gum in that pocket. Everyday he would scoop me up in his arms and carry me the rest of the way home. I was always barefooted in the summer and the rocks hurt my feet. Maybe it the anticipation of wanting to see him that sent me back to the fence day after day but somehow I think it was just that good OLE grandpa love.

The sense of family. This was another component in the glue that held the mill people together. Families lived together and stayed together. Not always because they wanted to, but because they had to. It was survival. Somehow we not only lived through it but we were stronger people because of it.
In the early 1960´s a new bleachery was built directly behind my grandparent’s house. I remember how dusty and dirty it was during the construction. My grandmother, Nola, fussed about the mess for the longest time. Each Monday was her wash day. She hung their wet clothes outside on a clothes line. Many days, they would have to be re-washed.

The mill management decided it was too expensive to cut the mill all summer long. One day 15-20 head of sheep appeared on the other side of the fence. Their job was to eat the grass. That made my entire summer. Every afternoon after supper, I went to the fence to feed the sheep. They were luckiest and fattest sheet on earth. These sheep dined on Mammy’s home-made from scratch biscuits almost every day. The sheep could tell supper time. If I were late, they would come to the fence and bleat.

Caring for farm animals in the mill village.

Nola´s job was to “keep house”. And that she did. I remember her telling me when they first moved into the four-room house on 13th Street, rent was $6 a week. She was wondering how they would be able to pay rent when Frank only made $12 a week. The house was always immaculate. You could eat off the floors, they were so clean.

However, things were not good in the beginning. I remember being told that before they remodeled, the house sat on cinder blocks with no under-pinning, and the cracks were so wide in the floors that when she swept the floor, she would sweep the dirt thru the cracks in the floor. Winters must have been very cold. Everyone heated with coal (the furnace came with the remodeling).

Nola, Frank, William and Holly Marlow standing in front of mill house at 710 Bolton. Note house has no underpinning. Ca. 1953.

The remodeling came when the mill decided it was not financial beneficial for them to own these houses. They gave the employees the opportunity to buy them. I believe this was after the Burlington Industries bought the old Erwin Cotton Mills. I can only speak to the "remodeled" house. It had four rooms. A large kitchen, large living room, a large bedroom and small bathroom and a tiny back porch. The bedroom and living room had hardwood floors. The rest was tile.

The windows stand out in my memory the best. They were ceiling to floor windows. No wonder Mammy always made her curtains. Of course, Mammy made everything. She sewed all of her clothes, mine, and a lot of my mothers. In later years I learned to appreciate having all of the clothes hand-tailored made.

Nola brought all of her fabric or material as she called it for making her "frocks" from Ms. Pearl Dean on Ninth Street. The Remnant Shop was the name of the 9th Street Store. But to our family it was simply known as "Pearl Dean´s." Part of the East-West Express way was name after her husband, "Buck" Dean.

Sometimes I would spend Saturday night with Mammy and Pa. That was the most fun. I can't explain how clean and fresh the boaster pillow smelled (today we call them body pillows, but they have been around a long, long time).

I remember in the summer time laying in the bedroom, with the lights from the bleachery lighting up the room like day time. The wooden back door, wide open. The screen door, most of the time, would not even have the latch locked. There was a gentle humming from the mill. That was her way of singing her children to sleep at night, a lullaby for a hard week´s work. The next day would be Sunday. For most all mill people, that meant church. For us it was Greystone Baptist Church. With a young Malbert Smith. My grandparent´s were very activate in the church and continued to be so until they died.

Sunday would not be complete without a stop at the drug store. The only drug store in this area of town was Bill Holmes´s Ideal Sundry. Mr. Bill Holmes not only had the best lemonade in the county, but he also carried our family from one Christmas to the next. Bill sold a variety of products. More like hardware, drug store, with lots of toys in the back of the store.

Taking a break at the mills: Girls (l) and Whitey (Bill) Marlow (r).

There was another favorite place that my Dad and I would go for Saturday lunch. Across the street from Bills Holmes’s (across the street from Greystone Church) was a small grill named Fent´s Place. Fent Garrard made the best-minced pork sandwiches and very sweet, chocolate pie. I didn't realize until I was grown that it was actually chopped barbecue.

The next street over from Mammy’s and Pa's was 14th St. (now Rutherford St) Mammy’s brother Oscar Thompson lived there his family. Uncle Oscar and my dad worked together in the mill for a while. Every Sunday, our whole family went to visit both sets of grandparents. (even though we had seen them several times during the week). On the way, we would stop at Uncle Oscar’s. But only if we saw some of them outside on the porch or in the yard. And we would never stop if Mom thought they "had company”. It just simply would not be the polite thing to do.

Let’s go up Rutherford Street, by the railroad tracks. We can go a couple of ways. Let’s turn right. This will take us to Pettigrew Street. Pettigrew is most interesting. I can see a very, very large railroad embankment. Very steep. We were never, never allowed to go up to the train tracks. That was certain doom. If not from the train, from my mother.

However, if we were careful, we could pick wild blackberries that grew on the railroad banks. A lot of wild honeysuckle also grew on the banks. The warm summer wind would mix up these fragrances and send them though an open window at night. There was never a need for air freshner. She provided that for us too.

My Mammy’s old home place was on Pettigrew St. Remember back, I told you that Nola had seven brothers and sisters. In the beginning, they all lived with their mamma (Grandma Thompson), her husband, and from time to time Grandma Thompson’s two sisters.

As the children would marry, the new husband or wife would move into the house on Pettigrew Street, until they could make it on their own. More times than not, some stayed and had their own children there.

I remember Mammy telling me that when they all lived on Pettigrew Street, the girls use to sleep head to toe, so they could make more room in the bed for more children. It was very important to have plenty of quilts for the bedrooms were all upstairs and unheated. Old clothes were used to make these quilts. Some quilts often told the childhood of one of the children growing up.

Naturally at meal time everyone could not sit at the table at the same time. First to eat were any men. They had worked hard all day, then other grown-ups, and last the children. I think this is where "take a cold biscuit and wait" came from. If you stuck you finger in the biscuit poured in a little sugar and hot coffee, you would have an instant dessert! That would hold you over until you actually got a place at the table.

The table was no place for conversation and foolishness. My Dad told me that Grandpa Thompson would not put up with any large amounts of conversation or absolutely no laughing. You would be sent away without finishing your food

A few houses down from "the old home place" was the house that Nola´s sister moved into. Ila (Thompson-Wallace) Fields live there. It was only one house away from Southside School. This is where all of the neighborhood kids went to school. My Dad went to school there when it was 1-12th grade. However, when my brother and me went, it was 1-7th.

Mrs. Elizabeth Stewart's First Grade class at Southside. Author is second row, far left (1958).

Whitey, my dad, started working in the mill, right out of high school. He was the first person in his family to actually graduate from high school. My parents were married on September 18, 1946. At - where else- Greystone Baptist church. My father was William E. Marlow aka: Billy, Bill, William Earl, and Whitey. My mom always called him Whitey (because of his blonde hair) His mom, Nola, called him Billy or William Earl. His father, Frank usually called him Son, when talking to him directly and "your daddy" when talking to me and my brother, Barry.
My mom, Pansy Ruth Clayton lived on Broad Street across from what is now the Duke's East Campus. She has told me how she and her sister, Mary, use to swing like monkeys in the tops of the big trees that grew on Broad Street. Today tennis courts occupy that space on the East Campus. She too had a corner store -- Ralph Rickets, on the corner of Broad and Markham.

Pansy Marlow enjoying the snows of East Campus (houses along Markham Ave in the background). Ca. 1945.

Christmas time in the mill village. Oh my... You´ve not lived until you´ve experienced that. She looked after her children of the mill village. Every Christmas the families always received a large basket of fresh fruit and nuts. You know I am not sure why, probably because we couldn´t afford it, but we never had fresh fruit or nuts in our house except for around the Christmas holiday. It was a real treat. And it came from the mill.

Erwin Mills workers waiting for holiday hams.

There were a few years during the end of the 50´s and early 60´s that the Mill gave all of the families with children bags of toys. Depending on the age of the child and the gender depended on the type of toys you got in your brown grocery bag. Looking back these must have been incredible lucrative years for the mill. This was most expensive and was probably in lieu of profit sharing. Santa Claus was always there handing out these presents.

I don´t remember living on Yearby Avenue (off of Anderson Street), but I do have pictures. My earliest years are on 2006 Acme Street. We did not moved from there until I was 13.

Old mill house at 2006 Acme Street: home of the Marlow family in 1963 (near present-day intersection of 15th Street and Erwin Road).

My dad started in the mill as a fixer, like his father before him. However, with a high school education and a little college, Dad moved up fairly quickly to supervisor and then to overseer. Familiar names he worked with were: Jesse Boyce, Ralph Carrington, and Red Smith, others that I can´t remember.

The Weave Room.

Dad was the overseer in charge of the weave room. The problem this presented was that Dad was now in the management ranks. Mom however worked in the sewing room as a inspector. Quickly we are developing another Norma Rae... The mill would not let Mother join the union due to the fact that Daddy was "management." This was OK with her, she reaped the same benefits without the union dues, but some of her peers were not as happy. Never-the-less, some of her life time friends worked with her in the sewing room and the friendship won out over everything else. They even found out that it was a good thing to have a close friend on the "management" team.

At that time we lived in the house at 2006 Acme Street, it was a typical mill house. No under-pinning. One bath, two bedrooms, a den, a living room, a large kitchen and a small back porch. The back porch was large enough for the washer and refrigerator. We had an eat-in kitchen (always green or yellow) with the red and white block tile.

I remember the table and chairs looked like something out of Donna Reed. There was an oil heating stove in the kitchen, but most of the time we would turn on the oven and open the door. The oven heated the kitchen faster than the oil stove. The kitchen is where my brother and I dressed every morning for school. It was also the center and heartbeat of all activities within the house.

Acme St. mill house kitchen, 1955; corner table in mill village kitchen. ca. 1940:

There was a long hall way which all of the other room´s led from. The one thing I never understood is why the bathrooms lined up so perfectly even with the front door. It was a straight shot, so the decision to close the door or not was never an option.

The front and back yard was big. On the side of our house, facing the Anderson Street, was a triangle shaped, cement poured goldfish pond. This pond had a beautiful rock garden around it made from quartz rock. We always had orange fan-tailed goldfish. They would freeze in the water during the winter and begin to swim with the first thawing of the spring sunshine.

That is until that one spring, Easter, when the Easter Bunny brought me a little colored duck. Elmer. Elmer didn’t die immediately like most of the pink, green, and blue little chicks, that were popular during the Easter season in the late 50´s. Elmer actually thought he was a dog and would follow me up and down Acme Street. This lasted though out the entire summer.

By the end of the summer Elmer had grown into a full size duck. One day Elmer discovered the fish in the goldfish pond, unfortunately this was also the day Elmer decided that he really was a duck and not a pet dog. Mamma came outside the next morning before going to work to also make that discovery on her own. Her beautiful fan-tailed goldfish were floating little fish bones.

Elmer was banished to live on my Aunt Bessie´s farm "out in the country" after that. I am still suspicions of the duck dinner she invited us to the next weekend. Mamma turned down the invitation. She said it "just not right." I have never eaten duck in my life.

Our house on Acme Street had the most beautiful embankment of thrift growing on it -- white, pink and light blue. People would stop on their way up and down Acme Street to look at it. We also had a large sandbox between two trees and a swing set Barry and I always played on. Again, under the house was also a shady, cool place to make roads and have an imagination store to sell your mud pies.

A very large and wonderful wisteria vine grew on a large trestle, from the ground to the roof of the house, directly outside the kitchen window. Sweetpeas grew in the backyard, along with the Dogwood tree. This tree grew crooked. Mamma said it was because we planted it on Sunday. This is the same poor Dogwood tree my brother kept running over and over again in his homemade go-cart. Of course this is the same go-cart that Daddy made and wired the left and right steering backwards. So, when you turned left it went right. When you turn right, it went left. This was a lot for a six year-old to remember. Poor Dogwood tree. A lawn mower motor carries a lot of speed when it is wired backwards. I am still carrying a scar from when I drove the go-cart under the picnic-table. I was banished, by my brother, from the go-cart after that.

Our Acme St house actually faced Acme Street, so did the front steps that lead to the road on Acme Street. But you couldn’t get there by car from Acme St. The entrance to these houses was from a back road behind the houses. It wasn’t paved but covered in coal clinkers. This was the little street I first practice my driving abilities. At 13 ½ I was allowed to drive the one and only family Rambler station wagon with automatic, push button transmission, slowly, up and down the back road to our house.

One day, after traveling at 4 mph, I got a little zealous... and the dogwood tree was wishing the go-cart was back. Not only did I run over the poor tree, but also, smashed the picnic table and ran over a 50 gallon metal trash barrel which promptly got stuck underneath the car. It was an ugly mess.
Dad had gotten another promotion, which meant we moved again. We lived almost at the corner of Anderson and Erwin Road. This house was a huge two-story house with a front porch across the entire front of the house. It had 32 windows. My mother was very upset. She had no idea where all of the curtains were going to come from. I did. She used old pieces of sheets and pillowcases from the mill to make the curtains herself. We had a lot of things made from old sheets and pillowcases, short sets, curtains, pocketbooks and more. At least everything matched!

In true "Mill" tradition, the very large eat-in kitchen was painted green. There was a ½ bath downstairs and a full bath upstairs. Upstairs also had four bedrooms. There was no air conditioning. In the summer it was so hot, we would sleep on the floor in the downstairs living room. The front porch was the favorite place to sit at night.

We would watch the cars go up and down Erwin Road. This was great for me at 13. These cars were mainly on their way to "The Blue Light" on Erwin Road. This was a popular hang out for boys! I was certainly in heaven.
Around 1971 Burlington Industry sold the property to Duke University. This was the same time I got married and moved away from home. The Durham Freeway came thru this area and the rest for me as I remember it is history: The history of Old West Durham Neighborhood.

See more photos of Holly's family at our "Photos &
Memories" page.