Laboring Day

     Some old working photos from Alabama History on this Labor Day...what kind of work did your Great-Grandparents do?

 

A farm equipment demonstration held in Elmore County, Alabama, in February, 1928.

 Children working in a Cotton Mill in Pell City, Alabama. The photograph was taken in 1910. Notice the cotton fibers on the children's clothing.

 




Bessie mine, Jefferson County, Alabama

 

Charlie Foster has a steady job in the Merrimack Mills in Huntsville. School Record says he is now ten years old. His father told me that he could not read, and still he is putting him into the mill.

 

School children rehearsing Maypole festivity in Gee's Bend, Alabama: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, May 1939 (Farm Security Administration)

 

Tenant farmer Charlie McGuire plows his field with a team of mules on his Pike County farm in this April 1939 photograph by Marion Wolcott.

Dexter Avenue, late 1800's

"The Sam McCall family of Wilcox County, Alabama" 1910. 1998 print from the original glass plate negative.
Records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics.
(83-FA-5005)













locomotive number 209 in Decatur, Alabama, taken around 1915.

Looking at pictures: Brown McDowell working as an usher in the Princess Theater in 1911. He worked 12-hour days but could barely read in Birmingham, Alabama.

Whatever your work, a Happy Labor Day 2014!