Anatole Grenon (left), 12 yrs old, Winchendon, Massachusetts, September 1911. Photo by Lewis Hine.

Smallest is Anatole Gernon, Maple St. Apparently 11 or 12 years old. Doffs on top floor spinning room of Glenallen Mill. Speaks no English. Location: Winchendon, Massachusetts, September 1911, Lewis Hine.

"My mother was one of Anatole's sisters. Uncle Anatole was a mason for a while and did a lot of work on an opera house in Troy. His father was also a mason. All the kids had to work in the mills when they were young. They had a hard life." -nephew of Anatole Grenon

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I can't begin to imagine the struggles that immigrant families must have gone through to travel to the US, and then establish themselves securely in a strange community. Anatole, the little boy on the left in this photo, belonged to one of those families. When he was photographed in Winchendon by child labor activist Lewis Hine in September of 1911, his future must have seemed bleak, though all he might have been contemplating that day was when he was going to go home. At that time, he lived at 51 Maple Street, with his parents and 11 siblings.

On my first visit to Winchendon in September 2008, I brought a binder with copies of all of the 40 photos that Hine had taken in there almost exactly 97 years before. I drove down the bumpy dirt road through the woods and found the Glenallan Mill, now an empty brick building that was once a thriving denim factory owned by the White Bros. It took me almost no time for me to spot the location where Hine stood when he took this picture of two boys standing near a tree. So I got out my camera and took the same picture, but with two important things missing: the tree, and the boys.

My photo from same location, September 2008.

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