JM: How did you feel when you realized that the girl in the picture was your mother?

EH: I guess I wasn’t totally shocked, because I knew her background. She often spoke of those early years when she had worked. One thing that came to mind is the fact that she used to talk about how much she took pride in her work. She also said that her boss man, as she called him, liked her work and liked her. So I think it was likely he would have chosen her, if Lewis Hine had asked for a child to pose for a picture.

JM: What was your mother like?

EH: She was about 5’ 3”, not a very tall woman. She was of medium build and had dark hair. Her heritage includes some Cherokee blood. Most of the time, as I remember when I was growing up, she had long hair and wore it in a bun in the back. She was one month short of 89 when she died, and her hair was about half dark and half white then. She had gray eyes. She always got compliments about her skin, which was really clear and smooth. She didn’t have any wrinkles until she was old. She was not a flashy person. I don’t remember her wearing gay colors, mostly grays and greens and blues. But she always dressed me in bright colors.

JM: When were you born?

EH: April 15, 1926. Grace was the oldest child, born in 1915.

JM: How long had your mother been married when Grace was born?

EH: I think it was two years.

JM: Did you mother marry somebody at the mill?

EH: No. My father had come from Little Switzerland, which is a town in the Carolina mountains. His name was David Cresson. His ancestors were from France, and he pronounced his name Cress-′ahn. He came to Lenoir to work in the furniture factories. They were beginning to boom then, and they needed workers. I think they met at church, but I am not sure about that. She was a Baptist, and he was, too.

JM: Did your mother work at the mill when you were a child?

EH: No. As far as I know, she stopped when she got married. She was a stay-at-home mom. She never worked again outside the home.

JM: Where was your family living when you were born?

EH: In Lenoir.

JM: How far from the Whitnel Mill?

EH: About four miles.

JM: Is the village of Whitnel still there?

EH: Yes. The mill buildings are still there, but they have been converted to other things. The textiles have gone elsewhere, so there are other businesses there now.

JM: Did you ever see the place where your mother worked?

EH: Yes, I have been in that mill. I remember as a little girl, I had an aunt who worked there, and several times, I had occasion to go with her and see the inside.

JM: What did your mother do in the mill? In the photo, she was standing in front of a spinning machine.

EH: That’s where she did most of her work, I think. She used to say, ‘I kept my spools going.’ Her boss thought she worked as well as an adult. But she had to stand on a box to do it.

JM: When you were growing up, did she ever talk to you about working in the mill?

EH: Yes.

JM: Were you interested?

EH: Not especially, although it amazed me that someone at my age then had been working and earning money.

JM: When Lewis Hine photographed your mother, it was the first year he was taking the child labor photos. He visited the textile mills in the Carolinas and in Georgia, and reported that the conditions were terrible and that many of the children were under the legal age to work. Looking at it 100 years later, do you think your mother was in a bad situation, and that it shouldn’t have happened?

EH: I do, because I know that she had regrets about not getting the education she had desired. She only got as far as the sixth grade. At that point, she started working full time. I was glad she had a kind, considerate ‘boss.’ Many of the children were not so lucky.

JM: Was she doing it to help support her parents?

EH: Yes, she was helping out the family. Also I am not sure her parents recognized the importance of an education at the time. Her mother and father were farmers. Eventually, her father acquired quite a bit of rather valuable property, and they were pretty well off by the time he died, but by no means were they rich.

JM: How many brothers and sisters did your mother have?

EH: There were nine children, I think – seven girls and two boys.

JM: Did all of them work at the mill?

EH: I don’t think all of them did. I think the youngest one, a boy, finished school and worked in the furniture factory.

JM: How long did your father work in the furniture factory?

EH: Until he retired. He worked for several different ones. The last one was called Kent-Coffey. Most of the time, he worked in the finishing room. He did the last coating before the furniture was shipped out. He was a very loving man, and also very faithful to his work. He had asthma, but he would still get to work every day, even when my mother thought he shouldn’t.

JM: What kind of house did you grown up in?

EH: It was just a wood frame house. It was in the Lenoir city limits, within walking distance of downtown. But I was born at my grandparents’ house because, at that time, my parents were building our house, and we didn’t move into it until I was six weeks old. I lived in our house, except for four years when I was in college, until I got married. It’s still there. I had a nice grandparent’s day the year before last. All six of my grandchildren came and we visited some of the places I thought they should remember. So we went to the house, and the lady who lives there let us go through. She’s made some changes. My parents lived in that house the rest of their lives. My father died in 1968. In the last couple years of her life, my mother sold the house and lived with my oldest sister. The house was on Reform Street. The Reform Church was down the hill from us.

JM: When you were a child, did you ever work?

EH: When I was in high school, I worked on Fridays after school and all day Saturday at a dry goods store in Lenoir.

JM: Did you graduate from high school?

EH: Yes. I graduated from Lenoir High School in 1944. I graduated from UNCG (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) in 1948, with a degree in English and Greek. And then I got married and went back and got my master’s degree in English from Appalachian State University. I also earned graduate certification in library science. And then I taught for 33 years, the first 10 years in high school, and then 23 years at Caldwell Community College.

JM: How old were you when you got married?

EH: I was 24 when I married Joseph Hoyle.

JM: What did your husband do for a living?

EH: He owned a dry cleaners in Lenoir. When he retired, he started helping our son Joey in his furniture store. The store is close to the mill where my mother used to work.

JM: You said that your mother regretted that she didn’t finish school. I’ll bet she was thrilled that you went to college.

EH: She was determined that all of us would graduate from high school and then go as far in college as we wanted to, so all of us went to college. One of my sisters and one of my brothers chose business schools. My oldest sister was business manager for Patterson School, which is a private school in Lenoir. My older brother was traffic manager for a trucking firm and eventually owned his own trucking company. One sister graduated from UNCG ten years before I did, and she taught in public schools in the elementary grades for more than 30 years. My younger brother graduated from Wake Forest University, earned a Master’s from Southeastern Seminary and received his PhD from Duke University. He was a professor for 37 years at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He’s also an archaeologist, and for 25 years, during the summer term, he did archaeological digs in Israel with students from Baylor. My younger brother Bruce and I both made Phi Beta Kappa.

JM: In the last few years of her life, was your mother in good health?

EH: She had several falls and broke some bones, but she recouped from them and did pretty well, and took care of herself until the last year. And her mind was good until the last couple of days of her life.

JM: When she was a lot older, did you have any discussions with her about her childhood?

EH: Yes.

JM: Did she tell you things that you don’t remember her telling you when she was younger?

EH: No, they were always the same.

JM: Did she talk fondly of her childhood?

EH: Well, yes. She was not ashamed of her work. She seemed to think she did well with what she had to do at the time. But she wanted an education, and really valued it, and it was a priority with my parents that we got a good education, whatever it took to send us to college.

I’d like to tell you a couple more things. My mother loved music. I have fond memories of her singing a lot and teaching us little songs. Some of them are published in Appalachian folklore books. She played the pump organ very well. We had one in the house. When she was first involved with church work, the church had a pump organ, so she played for the church. Then the church got a piano, and we got one, too, but she was never as proficient with the piano as she was with the pump organ. I like to sing, too, though I’ve had only a couple of semesters of professional training. I still sing in the church choir.

The other thing is that she was very devoted to the church. In my earliest remembrances of her, she was a Sunday school teacher, and she worked with the young children. I know she did that for at least 55 years, until she was in her eighties. She was a good Christian woman. She was a strict disciplinarian, and I used to say, ‘I’m not going to do that; I’m not going to be that way with my children.’ But, you know, I did become just like her.

There is another thing I remember about my mother from my teen years onward. My mother seemed to be the confidante of all her sisters and one of her brothers. They always shared their problems with her, and often they sought her advice. They evidently felt they could trust her. Her parents also trusted her, for she was the one they appointed to be the administratrix of their estate.