Child labor at Bibb Mill No. 1 (1909)
Bibb Manufacturing Company mill in Macon, Georgia was a high-output textile mill. By 1895, the mill processed 20,000 bales of cotton and was growing. Bibb Mill advertised itself as “one of the largest and most important enterprises in the South.” By the late 1800s, it employed 700 workers. But the unspoken issue, seen in this photograph, is that many of those employees were children. Photograph Lewis W. Hine captured these boys, and other child laborers, working at the Bibb Mill.
These boys were too small to reach the top of the machinery to perform their task of removing empty bobbins and resetting thread when it broke. In order to perform their job, they had to climb up on the spinning frame. While the photograph, and the other in the series, does not identify these boys, it shows the extend of child factory work before the establishment of child labor laws.
