They worked in demanding conditions for just dimes a day. Now they’re finally being honored
For more than a century, Burke County workers toiling at furniture factories, textile and hosiery mills helped power Western North Carolina’s economy. With those industries now in decline, their workers will get an overdue salute to their labor.
A 24-foot-long monument called the “Dignity of Work” will be dedicated in front of the History Museum of Burke County on Saturday. It’s a project of the Workers’ Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit group that opened a related exhibit in the museum in January.
Founder and principal Jim Warlick, a Burke County native, says the exhibit and monument were inspired by his late mother, Mary Harrison Warlick. She started work at a Morganton hosiery mill at age 16, and operated the same sewing machine for 33 years.
“The whole project for me was to honor my mother, and then other workers,” Warlick said.
Mary Warlick, poised at a hemming machine, is at the center of three larger-than-life figures the monument depicts. Also in it are Claude Moore, who worked for Drexel Furniture, and Anne Forney Ramseur of the textile mill then called Burkyarns.
Their ancestors in labor were thousands of early 20th century furniture and mill workers, many coming from small farms. They swapped the precarious freedom of a life outdoors for the noise, heat and repetition of factory work. They also earned the security of small but steady paychecks and, often, mill-village housing.
“I’m glad my children didn’t have to work all those years in the mill,” Ramseur, who still lives in Drexel, says in a video interview that’s part of the museum exhibit. “Standing up all those years, on my legs, I hurt my back, I walked all eight hours and you used both hands. It wasn’t a one-hand job, you had to learn to use both of your hands…. I got plenty of exercise at that time.
But “on the whole,” she adds, “I’m going to say I enjoyed it.”
Rise and fall of bedrock industries
Cotton and hosiery mills first opened in Morganton in the late 1880s. Drexel Furniture, a major Burke County employer, was organized in 1903.
Furniture makers were drawn by North Carolina’s vast hardwood forests, access to transportation – and a ready supply of cheap labor. Whole families, including young children, sometimes went to work in cotton and textile mills.
In 1905, N.C. textile and apparel workers labored 10.5 hours a day, six days a week, the North Carolina in the Global Economy project at Duke University reported. For that, men earned 75 cents to $2.75 a day, women 60 cents to $1 and children 40 cents. N.C. furniture workers earned about $821 a year by 1929, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, or about half the pay of workers in New York.
Their labor gradually made North Carolina a national leader in both industries. The decline, in the face of growing global competition, came much more quickly.
In 1992, North Carolina led the nation in textile and apparel jobs. By 2020, it had lost a staggering 85% of those jobs but still ranked fourth-highest in the U.S., the Duke project says.
After peaking in the late 1980s, furniture jobs in the state fell by more than half between 1999 and 2009 as consumers turned to cheaper Asian-made products, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond reported.
Burke County has found new opportunities amid the remains of its bedrock industries. Morganton’s City Hall now occupies a restored textile mill it bought in bankruptcy. The old Henry River mill village became a set for filming of “The Hunger Games” and is now a tourist attraction. The Industrial Commons, which launches employee-owned social enterprises and industrial cooperatives, is redeveloping the former site of a Drexel plant near downtown Morganton as its new Innovation Campus.
Monument honors the sweat of workers
Warlick yearns to honor the sweat of the workers who filled those old buildings.
“We always knew who the mill owners were, but we never acknowledged the actual millworkers, who were the backbone of the industries,” he said. “This monument is a tribute to the people who worked hard and selflessly in the textile, hosiery, and furniture industries to provide for their families.”
Warlick began his career as an entrepreneur selling political campaign buttons. Over the years, he focused on presidential memorabilia. His first Presidential Museum, in Branson, Mo., featured a replica Air Force One fuselage and a full-scale Oval Office, among other pieces. His American Presidential Experience, including two limousines used by President John Kennedy, has traveled from political conventions to inaugurations and state fairs for nearly 20 years.
The monument was itself a labor of craftsmanship six years in the making. Joe Wider and Joel Hughen of Pinehouse Design in Columbia, S.C., designed it.
The three figures in it are composites of photographs of the three workers and models wearing period clothes, poised at their work. The images, produced in California, were printed on stainless steel, carefully cut out and coated with enameled porcelain for permanence. Although the images are flat, the technique makes them appear three-dimensional.
The figures are mounted on a base of Corten steel, a form that develops a weathered surface layer of rust. The monument is designed to last a century or longer.
A second tribute, interpretive signs featuring silhouettes of four workers, will be installed later on brick pavers outside the museum. The foundation hopes families will support inscribing the pavers with the names of local workers.
“We love the design work, but this is really narrative history,” said Wider, whose firm did most of the assembly of more than 600 pieces. “We’re not doing our impression of what it is to be a factory worker or mill worker. We’re showing it.”
