As a child, Lewis Hine worked in a factory. After saving money for his studies, he became a sociologist, educated at the universities of Chicago and New York. Then he taught at the School of Ethical Culture, taking pictures of his own students. Together with them, he visited Ellis Island, where hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived on steamboats. In his first pictures, we see people who have just arrived in the crucible of the New World. Their poverty, confusion, and unrealizable hope for a better future – for themselves, or at least for their children. Here is the collection of photos that we bring you to see how the world was in the past.
#01. Girls working in Springstein Mills, Chester, South Carolina. Zetella Gallman (by a window) has worked for 2 years. Both girls in the middle said they had been in the mill 8 years, 1908
#02. Group of card-room hands in Richmond Spinning Mills. The smallest girl in the middle is a doffer. Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1910
#03. Group of girls and women working in Aragon Mill, Rock Hill, South Carolina, 1912
#04. Group of workers going to work at 6;45 A.M. In Spring Village Mill, Winchendon, Massachusetts, 1911
#05. Lizzie Davis, the smallest, has been in the mill for 2 years. Nettie Arnet has been in the mill for 8 years. Monnie McCraney has been in the mill for 3 years. Vater Arnet, been in mill 8 years.
Mattie Connor, spinners and Winders. Dillon, SC, 1908
#06. Noon hour. All are working here. Newberry, South Carolina, 1908
#07. Operatives in Indianapolis Cotton Mill, noon hour, 1908
#08. Some of the workers and the Superintendent, Catawba Cotton Mill, Newton, NC. Ten small boys and girls about this size out of a force of 40 employees, 1908
#10. Some of the girls working at the Priscilla Knitting Mills, Meridian, Mississippi, 1911
#11. Some of the spinners in Pell City Cotton Mills. Pell City, Alabama, 1910
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