TAC Talk: Making a Mill Village Life

The Cone family is justly recognized for building North Carolina’s textile economy in the twentieth century, but what about the workers who ran their factories? How did they build and sustain their lives, and how do they look back on their experiences now? Drawing on dozens of oral history interviews conducted by his graduate students at UNCG, Benjamin Filene, Chief Curator at the North Carolina Museum of History, explores day-to-day life in Greensboro’s Cone mill villages: its opportunities, its constraints—and the dilemma of the Christmas ham.