Continental Mills Card Room, photograph by Henri Larocque, Lewiston, Maine, 1885-1889. Courtesy of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.
Continental Mills Card Room, photograph by Henri Larocque, Lewiston, Maine, 1885-1889. Courtesy of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.
These girls and women work tending the slubbing machines at the Continental Mill in Lewiston. After cotton fibers are straightened with carding machines, they are put in the cans that the girls in the photograph stand behind. Slubbing machines then draw cotton strands out of the cans and twists it into desired thickness and yarn weight.
Working children sometimes hid in slubbing cans, like those seen here, to escape the truant officers looking for children avoiding school. By the early 1900s, officers began enforcing new child labor laws that required children under a certain age to attend school.