Living Conditions Improved in Gaston County Mill Towns, Says Beulah Martin, March 30, 1921

Miss Beulah Martin of the rural social science department at the State University, recently visited Gastonia and Gaston County to make a study of the standards of living in the mill communities in this section. Her findings are an interesting revelation.

Four years ago the only visible welfare work done in the mill villages was in the maintenance of a public nurse for the entire community and a small library in one of the villages. Today there are numbers of community houses, dormitories, recreation houses and grounds, nurseries for children whose mothers work in the mills, and numbers of community nurses and social workers in the manufacturing districts. In many places dormitories have been built with modern conveniences for the unmarried employes of the mills. Better churches have been built and modern school buildings erected. Boy Scout troops have been organized and there are among the women and girls parent-teachers’ and little mothers’ clubs.

The greatest welfare agency is the community house where the people gather for recreation and social purposes, for reading and other forms of instruction, and where the children are cared for in a systematic and sanitary way.

Other bright aspects of mill life in Gaston County pointed out are the facts that at one mill 40 per cent of the operatives own their own homes and that at another 49 per cent of the stock in the mill is owned by employes of the mill.

This is the liberal and forward-looking policy that mill owners and corporations are following in Gaston County.

From the Gastonia Daily Gazette as reprinted in the University of North Carolina News Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., March 30, 1921