John Kenneth Morland. Millways of Kent. Southern Classics Series. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Plates. xxxix + 330 pp. $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-57003-726-9.

Reviewed by Phillip Stone
Published on H-Southern-Industry (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Tom Downey (Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Princeton University)

A Look Back at the Millways of Kent

As a “first wave” southern industry, the history and culture of textiles in the South has been a field of interest for generations of scholars.  Once the dominant manufacturing enterprise in the southern piedmont, textile production has mostly abandoned the region for foreign lands.  Remaining in its wake are empty mill buildings, economic dislocation, and memories of a lost way of life.  Mill workers themselves are disappearing, and those who lived in mill villages are getting fewer and farther between.  Historians and sociologists today have a difficult task explaining the importance of textiles in southern economic life to an increasingly suburbanized middle class that possesses few connections to that first wave industry.  Such works as John Kenneth Morland’s Millways of Kent can help modern readers better understand that way of life as it was beginning to end.

For those unfamiliar with the background of this work, Millways of Kent had its origins in Morland’s dissertation research.  Morland and two other graduate students undertook to study the town, mill village, and African American sections of York, South Carolina, in the late 1940s.  Other graduate students at the University of North Carolina studied other southern subregions, such as an Appalachian village, a coastal town, and towns in Alabama’s black belt and piney woods.  Morland and his colleagues settled into the routines of life in their areas, rarely communicating with each other and compiling voluminous field notes.  Most place names were changed to protect the subjects; hence, York became Kent.

Published in 1958, Millways of Kent’s eleven chapters explain the background of the study, describe various aspects of life in the mill village, and examine the relationships both within the village and between the village and other subcultures.  The introductory materials focus on the history of Kent and of textiles.  Originally, Kent resisted the textile boom as well as railroads, as the town’s aristocratic leaders feared the disruption to their town’s life.  Prejudice against mill workers was strong in the region even in the 1890s.  Nevertheless, between 1896 and 1907, four mills were built just outside of the town, with villages surrounding each.  By the late 1940s, about one-third of Kent’s population lived in one of these mill villages, though most were not within Kent town limits.

The bulk of the book focuses on five subjects: economic life, family life, education, religion, and leisure time.  The chapter on economic life explains how a cotton mill’s workforce was organized.  A small group of supervisors and foremen oversaw a fairly large workforce.  Morland found that workers resented other workers who tried to earn advancement to supervisory positions in the mill, and most workers admitted to Morland that they did not enjoy their work.  Most worked in the mills because of the steady paycheck.  Also worthy of note is that most mill workers earned the same wages no matter how long they had held their positions.  Mills provided little incentive for self-improvement or initiative in the workforce, and, in fact, workers seem like little more than robots in the industrial machine.  Management and workers alike viewed mill-owned housing as an effective barrier to union organizing, and the assignment of houses could be used as a reward to longer-serving employees.  Housing was assigned by the mill superintendent, and workers were always eager to move to better housing.  Most mill workers would rather own their own homes, and, in the late 1940s, Morland found that more workers were trying to move away from the mill villages.

Family life was of critical importance in the mill culture.  The mill village, as described by Morland, seemed almost to be a group of families.  Though a greater social safety net existed by the late 1940s, mill workers operated as something of a mutual aid society in times of hardship or crisis.  Morland notes that most mill workers lived from paycheck to paycheck, often not saving much money even if they had extra.  Workers who had cars gave rides to neighbors that did not.  Religion in the mill village was highly emotional, though participation in various mill churches was far from universal.

The final part of the book examines the mill’s relationship with the town, with rural areas outside of Kent, and with the African American community.  Morland found that Kent workers were suspicious and distrustful of outsiders, and thus did not especially like to deal with townspeople.  They rightly believed that town professionals looked down on them.  Very few mill workers joined town churches.  Some mill children lived within town limits and thus attended the town elementary school, and all the mill children who went to high school attended the town school.  The mixture of mill and town in the high school caused social tensions, and mill children generally got the worst of it.  Their preparation before high school was generally poor, and many had few choices other than employment in the mill after completing their education, though few wanted to work in the mills.  One study of the aspirations of mill children in the public school found that fewer than 5 percent wanted to work in the mill; the rest wanted to be mechanics, carpenters, farmers, secretaries, or nurses.

Paternalism pervaded the mill culture in Kent.  Workers expected the mill to take care of everything, from their housing to their leisure.  Whether intentional or not, the mill system encouraged this view by building churches and community centers, and maintaining their homes.  Mill workers contributed to this by discouraging initiative on the job.  They were reluctant to take leadership positions even in non-mill settings, such as churches.  The noncompetitive nature of life in the mill village, where everybody simply wanted to get by, also caused a rift between mill, town, and farm.  Most farm and townspeople simply thought mill workers were lazy.  Farmers thought that people wound up in the mill because they had not worked hard enough at farming.  Townspeople criticized their lack of any desire for self-improvement.  Mill workers knew that those outside of the village felt this way about them, and, while they resented the condescension, they also had a terrible inferiority complex about everything--their manners, language, education.  The psychological price of letting mill management take care of so many aspects of their lives was quite high.

It is difficult to find anything with which to quibble about Morland’s work, as he looks at most major aspects of mill life and provides a greater understanding of the mind of the mill village South in its last years.  Though textile employment continued to be high for decades after 1950, mill villages went into decline.  Mill owners grew weary of the expense of maintaining houses and often were happy to sell the homes to workers.  Greater access to cars made it easier for workers to live further from the mill.  Management continued to resist unions, and mill workers seemed to resist efforts to “reform” them to make them more like townspeople.  It would have been interesting to learn what Kent’s mill workers expected for their future, though one gets a sense that the younger ones were beginning to see the need for change.

One of the particular strengths of this book is Morland’s neutrality in recounting mill life as he saw it.  He neither drew conclusions nor made judgments about what mill workers and managers should do.  Workers knew that he was studying life in their town, and they seemed to warm to him over time.  Later in life, Morland spoke warmly of the mill workers who shared aspects of their lives with him, and this new edition contains a subsequent interview he gave about his research and his experience living in Kent.

A new preface by John Shelton Reed explains how Millways of Kent fit within the evolving field of sociology.  The new introduction, written by journalist Dan Huntley, places the work within the context of social research in the middle years of the twentieth century and provides some additional background into textile history and the history of York County, the home of the city Morland and his colleagues studied.  However, the new introduction fails to provide any sense of how this book influenced later works on working-class culture in the South or on the region’s changing economy.  To declare a book a "classic" and then not explain the ways this work has influenced later works on the subject is problematic.  In fact, the book’s actual use in other literature about the history of textile workers appears to be limited.  Classic studies, such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987), Allen Tullos’s Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (1989), and James Cobb’s Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984 (1984), reference Morland's work in their bibliographies and in comments about the evolution of the field, but do little beyond that.  Millways of Kent seems like one of those books that most have heard of, many have read, but few cite.  It seems that the book has come to be viewed largely as a study about a specific place and time, though most of its observations reflect conventional wisdom about textile worker attitudes and mill village life.  That said, as a community study and as a book about the last days of the mill village system in the Piedmont South, Millways of Kent continues to hold value.  The book is largely a snapshot, a very close examination of a specific time, but it leaves the reader wondering what happened to the community.  Either a more comprehensive introduction or a new epilogue to explain the demise of the mill village system would have helped place this work into greater context.  

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Citation: Phillip Stone. Review of Morland, John Kenneth, Millways of Kent. H-Southern-Industry, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=22932

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