“Back in the day,” if you were a mountain or foothills family, one of those “hillbilly” clans that were looked down upon in the 1920’s and 30’s, life was very much a hand-to-mouth affair. A bad season, a bad illness, a financial setback, a death in the family, any of these things might upset the delicate balance of life and plunge you into real or worse poverty.
In those days, there weren’t many things an uneducated dirt farmer could do to better their situation if disaster struck. Disability could be a death sentence. There were no social nets to catch you if you fell. And so, those with deficits mental, physical, and financial had little recourse.
There were, of course, small jobs one might take that could help sustain a household. Washing clothes, for example was a popular way to make extra money. But even such a simple task was some times too much for the elderly or infirm.
In those days, the tobacco industry was still an economic force south. If you weren’t growing tobacco, you were selling it, if you weren’t selling it, you were buying it or using it.
While many old timers today remember growing, tending, and priming tobacco, one spinoff of this industry that is almost forgotten now is “tobacco bag stringing“.
Back in the early part of the 20th century, tobacco came loose and had to be rolled into cigarettes or loaded into pipes. When you purchased your tobacco from a store, it would generally come in a small cotton bag with a drawstring. This drawstring had to be inserted into the bag by a person.
“Tobacco stringing” then, before there were machines to complete the task, was the physical act of adding these drawstring to the loops of the small cotton bags. For a time, this was a massive cottage industry, especially in North Carolina.
And while the work required to insert strings into small cotton bags over and over was surely quite tedious, for the most part it was not as physically taxing as farm work. It was able to be carried out by women, children, the elderly, and even sometimes the blind. When you were not able to work in the mill or swing the hoe, stringing tobacco bags was a viable option to keep money coming in.
However, what would become the sticking point in all this was how tobacco bag stringers were paid. Before there was a “minimum wage” families and individuals were paid based on the number of bags they completed, with a thousand bags being worth about 50 cents in wages. A good and experienced stringer might be able to produce about that many per day. Which means if they worked at stringing 6 days a week, with Sunday set aside to rest, they might make $3.50 per week. That doesn’t sound like much, and it wasn’t even back then, but it might have been enough to pay an electric bill or supplement what food they were growing. For some people, it might even be their only source of income.
Enter the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. in June of that year, the 75th congress drew up new rules regarding employment, with a number of new regulations and most importantly for tobacco bag stringers, essentially established what we think of now as “minimum wage”.
After being readily signed by FDR, the new laws immediately became a problem for the whole industry of tobacco bag stringing. Were these people earning a minimum wage based on the number of hours they were working? No, they weren’t.
As a result, the “Virginia-Carolina Service Corporation” (which I can find very little information about outside of their involvement here) lobbied for an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act that would make exceptions for people working at home, allowing tobacco bag stringing to continue. The Corporation argued that the work was necessary for the sustainment of households that otherwise couldn’t earn wages from “normal” professions outside the home. To strengthen their argument, a report was prepared with information from people working in the tobacco bag stringing trade, including the agents who were delivering bags to the homes. Most interesting, however, were the photos and information collected regarding people who were actually assembling the bags in their homes. The report included not only pictures of families, but many times glimpses of their homes, and usually detailed information about their finances, disabilities, property, and general lifestyle.
The report furnished information about these people from a couple different places. Rockingham county in North Carolina, Richmond and South Richmond in Virginia, and most interesting to me, Wilkes county here in North Carolina.
Here, for example, is the Royal home in the Reddies River community, just slightly west of North Wilkesboro.
And here is Mrs. Royal and her children inside their home.
The entry for these photos describes her home life.
Mrs. Leacey Royal and six children are pictured sitting inside of their house next to an open cabinet filled with jars. There are pages from the Southern Agriculturist and the Southern Planter magazines on the walls.
Report Text MRS. LEACEY ROYAL, aged 27, married and has 4 children. Husband is 29. They reside in Reddies River, N.C.
INCOME: Husband works on P.W.A. sixteen days a month and gets $24. They have no other income.
EXPENSES: They use everything they make for food. Taxes are $2.
HOME CONDITIONS: House has 2 rooms and there are 35 acres of land. He owns a cow and 2 steers. The house is like all the rest in this section. They own a sewing machine and a new stove. She has been stringing bags for about 5 years and makes about $7.50 a month. This work sometimes hurts her eyes but she likes to make this money which she needs very much.
“Leacy” is actually “Lecia” Royal who died in 1976 in Wilkesboro and no doubt has grandchildren and maybe even children still living.
The collection is full of poignant stories like the one above of common people from not only Wilkes, but Rockingham county and Virginia too. The transcripts contain the sorts of details that many of us searching out our own family history wish we could find. The little bits of information that humanize our ancestors and bring them to life.
Talking with a coworker about his family history one day at work, the topic of these photos came up. He gave me the names of some of his ancestors from Wilkes county and sure enough, there was a photo of his great grandmother’s family and his own grandmother as a little girl. I have to wonder how many people might be out there and not know that these photos and this information exists for their own families.
If you’d like to search the collection for yourself, you can do so via the UNC Libraries digital collections.
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