Darkness closed  in , replacing the dusk of the evening.  Supper was finished and the women were washing dishes.  The factory whistle had long since blown.  The men sat on the edge of the porch smoking roll your own "Bull Durham" cigarettes , talking of the war in Eyrope.  Children chased lightning bugs and imprisoning them in jars.  The older children drew the last buckets of water for the night from the well.  This was a typical picture of hundreds of southern mill towns before WWII.

It  was 1939 when we moved  to a small southern mill town.  After living in the mountains during the depression , it was like moving to heaven.   The children were happy and the men were glad  they could once again support their families, meager as it was.

We lived in a mill house,within walking distance of the mill.  The houses were on a hill, a few blocks from the factory.  Most of the houses had two bedroom, a few had three. Each had a small front porch and they all looked  like replicas of one another.The  houses were owned by the mill and rented to the workers for a small sum.

The children enjoyed playing and although we had little; we never felt underpriveleged  The  groceries were bought (usually charged by the week) at the conpany store.  The only grocery store in town.   Practically none of the workers had cars.  They walked to work and many carried lunches in lard buckets ;others walked home for lunch.

Early in the morning a loud whistle blew signaling it was seven o'clock and time for the men to start work.  No women worked in this mill at this time.  Soon after the mill whistle blew, the children walked to school and we all walked home together to the hill after school.  I remember generally we were happy children.

Little did we dream that this would not last forever.   We all thought the men would  be able to feed their families generation after generation working in the mill.  Not  knowing that in the future , the work done in the southern mills would be moved to foreigh countries like China where labor was cheaper.  The mills shut down, the mill houses torn down, the mill grocery closed and all the mill workers laid off.  They were unable to get work elsewhere because the other mills  were also closing.

I left the mill town as a teen.   My sister chose to stay and raise her family like our parents , all working in the mills , until they closed and  now they are all out of work.  Many people went elsewhere, many stayed and are unemployed and many like my parents worked until they grew older and died.

Sadness llingers over the town where men dedicated their lives to something they thought would never change.  The days of prosperity are gone but not forgotten by those children like me who grew up in the shadow of the mill, listening to the whistle blow day after day.  In the future our families will be buried with our parents in the  town cemetery..  No one will hear a whistle blow.