B. B. Comer - Avondale Mills

Avondale Mills

Another of Comer's enterprises was the Avondale Mills, which with his sons' help, became one of the largest textile companies in Alabama. The Trainer family, who had a textile business in Chester, Pennsylvania, planned to expand its business into the South by way of the new and growing industrial city of Birmingham. It offered stock to business leaders, such as Frederick Mitchell Jackson, Sr., who agreed to commit $150,000 to bring the mills to Birmingham. Jackson, president of Birmingham’s Commercial Club, a forerunner of the Birmingham Area Chamber of Commerce, pledged in order "to help give employment to those badly in need of it in the young and struggling city of Birmingham." B.B. Comer’s son, James McDonald Comer, later recalled that his father was motivated to participate in the new business by "feeling that Birmingham needed an industry which could employ women as well as men."

Accepting the businessmen's pledges of financial participation, the Trainers sought a local investor to assume presidency of the mill. In 1897, they approached Braxton Bragg Comer. The future governor accepted the offer, and invested $10,000 in the enterprise. From 1897 until his death in 1927, he served as president of Avondale Mills, directing continued expansion to new sites over the years.

In 1897 Comer built the first mill in Avondale, land that would become part of Birmingham. During the first year of its operation, Avondale Mills used 4,000 bales of cotton. By 1898, Avondale Mills employed 436 laborers and generated $15,000 in profit. By the time B.B. Comer became governor of Alabama in 1907, Avondale Mills declared $55,000 in profit and produced almost 8,000,000 yards of material. By the turn of the century, Avondale Mills had set the course for future development.

"Avondale Mills began with 30,000 spindles in the first mill in Birmingham and grew over the next thirty years to include ten mills in seven communities, with a total of 282,160 spindles. The mills : Eva Jane, the Central, the Sally B, and the Catherine in Sylacauga; the Alexander City Cotton Mills, the Sycamore Mills, Mignon and Bevelle Mill, and the Pell City Manufacturing Company."

As cotton prices fell, poor white farmers lost their land and turned to sharecropping and tenancy; some of those were willing to give up farming and move to mill towns. One white mill worker said, we "made good money compared with the farm." Another white sharecropper said, "Mebbe we ain’t got much, but we sure has got more." And at least one white ex-farmer remembered the move with considerable enthusiasm: "Yeah! Oh we just thought we had almost come to heaven when we got up here. We didn’t have to pick cotton, chop cotton, like that. Just go to work and come back and nothing else to do. And we really had it made when we come here."

Lewis Hines, an American sociologist and photographer studying industrial conditions, visited the mills during 1910 and documented his findings with photographs. Hine's photographs and interviews in 1910 revealed that numerous children were employed at Avondale Mills with "mere weeks of education if any." The state law required that children be educated and that none younger than twelve work in factories. At first the children were not "officially" employed, but were recruited to assist their parents in completing strenuous twelve-hour shifts in the mill.

Hines noted numerous examples of child labor and abuse of children at Avondale Mills, including that of the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls Mary and Miller Gilliam. Their father, had removed them from school to work at the mills; he had no job at the time. Hines recorded that "none of the children would admit to being younger than twelve years of age ". He wrote, "The Mill bosses...arrived at school anytime during the day to remove children to work at the Mill.". When demand for textiles was low, the children were allowed to return to school. The children comprised a source of cheap labor who could be flexibly employed according to the needs of the mill managers.

At twelve years of age, children could begin work at Avondale Mills as bobbin doffers. This was a fast-paced job that required dexterity but little technical skill. The room where the children worked became filled with lint from the operation. This got into their lungs, and the children often later developed brown lung disease as adults.

When Hines exposed the conditions, Governor Comer responded that the children were working at the insistence of their parents, and neither he, nor the state, had any right to interfere. Stopping the exploitation of child labor might have undermined the financial success of Avondale Mills. Cotton mills in the South were successful because of the abundance of cheap child labor, whose families were willing to have them work and who could be used according to the managers' needs.

Cotton mills provided worker housing at inexpensive rates, which tied the families more closely to their work. While the family occupied the dwellings, the tenants were obligated to work in the mill and supply labor. In the paternalistic system, mill operators monitored worker behavior outside the mills. If a worker missed church or drank alcohol, he or she faced discipline and possible loss of housing and mill employment.