Naomi Trammel discusses her first job spinning.

Audio Transcript

Allen Tullos

Well, what do you remember about first going into the mill?

Naomi Sizemore Trammel

Well, I didn’t know, hardly, but I just went in and had to learn it. Really, I had to crawl up on the frame, you know. You’ve seen a spinning frame. Well, I had to crawl up on that to put my—what do you call it?—roping in, you know, because I wasn’t tall enough. ‘Cause I never was much big, you know. Then I a little old spindly thing, and I couldn’t reach up there to put my roping in. And I’d have to crawl up on that frame down there, and put it in. I wasn’t the only one, they’s a whole place like that. And they had mothers and daddies. They wasn’t no better off than I was.

Allen Tullos

There were lots of other children your age.

Naomi Sizemore Trammel

Oh, yeah, a lot of them. It’s a lot of them. ‘Specially in the spinning room, that’s where they put the children. You could run a frame, you know, where you couldn’t run—a child couldn’t run nothing else.