It has been 100 years since Lewis Hine began his work as a child labor photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. He had spent the first few months of 1908 in New York City, taking pictures mostly of newsboys and families doing work in their tenement homes for the garment industry. In August, Hine began his first extended journey, travelling to Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, documenting mostly children working in glass factories and the street trades. By the time he headed to North and South Carolina in November, Hine would have been acutely aware of the conditions under which young children toiled.

At that time, the Carolinas were fast becoming the center of the textile industry in the South, and children were a significant part of the labor force. Much of the work in cotton mills required only a little practice to learn, so children and otherwise unskilled people adapted quickly. Apparently Hine was not completely prepared for what he saw, because his captions became increasingly critical, occasionally even sarcastic, as he found himself exposed to what he would later describe as some of the worst child labor conditions he encountered.

In December, he made a brief visit to the Whitnel Cotton Mill, in the village of Whitnel, on the outskirts of Lenoir, North Carolina. He photographed one girl twice, one of those pictures later becoming one of Hine’s best-loved and most exhibited portraits - and for good reason - the girl is strikingly beautiful and the lighting and backdrop is haunting.

When I first saw it, I was very disappointed, because there was no name in the caption. Up to that point, I had been choosing photos with at least one person named. But I couldn’t resist this one. After giving it some thought, I decided that the best way to identify the girl was to get the local newspaper (Lenoir News-Topic) to publish the photo and an article about my search, hoping that some reader would recognize her. A reporter, Gina Story, took an interest in the idea, and soon after, the photo appeared.

Within days, I received an email from Joey Hoyle, who was almost certain that the girl was his grandmother, born Cora Lee Griffin. He told me that his mother, Esther Hoyle (Cora’s daughter), wasn’t quite as sure, but that her eyesight was gradually diminishing. There were no photos available of Cora as a child, or even as a young adult, but they did have several of her when she was in her seventies, so they sent me those. I was immediately persuaded, but decided to refer it to Maureen Taylor, a well-known expert in the field of photo identification. She concurred convincingly that Cora Lee Griffin and the girl in the Hine photo were the same persons. See more about this identification process later in this story.

Cora Lee Griffin was born July 12, 1896, in Caldwell County, North Carolina. She was the daughter of Daniel Perry Griffin and Caroline Collins Griffin. She married David Cresson. In the 1910 census, Cora is listed as a spinner in the cotton mill, and her father and four of her sisters also work there. In the 1920 census, she is living with her husband and two children, two houses away from her parents. She is still a spinner at the mill, and her husband also works there. In the 1930 census, she is no longer working, her husband works at a furniture factory, and they have four children.

Cora’s husband, David, passed away in Lenoir in 1968. Cora passed away on June 3, 1985, just short of her 89^th birthday. She was survived by two sons, three daughters, eight grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, one brother and one sister. A hundred years after she was photographed by Lewis Hine, she has finally been identified, and her little place in history is firmly established.