Behind the Walls of Mills

To prepare for our chat with Jamie in class we watched a video he had previously made. It taught us about how the Mills really worked and what went on inside. We read things about the process of how cotton turns to thread, then thread to cloth. In small groups we use Google keywords to find the definitions of commonly used words that might come up in our chat with Jamie. We also took time to make questions prior to chat so so that when Jamie asked if there were any questions we would have questions to ask.

During the chat I learned that the textile process is very complicated but if you have the proper system that it can run smoothly. There are many people involved in the process. This is because there are many jobs to be done. The abundance of jobs comes from the abundance of steps it takes to get cotton to cloth. After talking to Jamie with the class I came to realize that the text to process has changed so much over the years. At first it was just at home process that could take 2 to 3 weeks to make one nice piece of cloth. Then it was taken into the factories and much more cloth could be made in a shorter time period. Now a days it is a speedy process that take no time at all. Not to mention a million times safer. Less people are involved it is all more mechanic so there are less opportunities to get hurt. Like no one needs to risk their life to go under the machines an clean the floor anymore. I learned that it helped and hurt families because the cloth was more accessible and more job opportunities, but it hurt families because now they didn't have to money coming in from when they would sell the cloth they made because people just got it from the factories. When Jamie was showing us how all the machines worked I had never really thought of how much time and thought he had to put into remember all the facts and details. Also it struck me that he probably knew more about the machines then the actual workers did.