Charles LeRoy Lewis - Special Collections - University of Baltimore

Anywhere you went they hired you,
LEWIS #099 1:1:9
Harvey: Did you want to continue your education?
Lewis: f figured on continuing my education; then after I
started to work I worked through the spring and summer; then
I finished school in February and in the fall I went down
and enrolled, but I never went. I decided against it.
Harvey: OK, eo then the first job you had was in Meadow
Mill in the spinning room.
~ewis: That" sight.
Harvey: Can you describe the whole process of the mill from
the the the cotton comes in until the time it goes out?
Lewis: Well, in those days it came in and they put it
through blowers and blow it up through pip@
about 12 inches in diameter and went into the card-
ing room and it went in there in long sheets . . .
Harvey: Excuse me, Mr. Lewis . . . [loud record player
interrupts]
Lewis: When it went through the carding they took all the
foreign particles out of the cotton and when they came out the
other end it was about an inch in diameter and it was twirled
around in a fiber holder about three foot tall, a foot across
and when that would get full theyJd put it in another one.
Then after they'd take those up to another machine, run it
through another machine, which they called a spinning machine,
that was ithe first process. And that reduced it down to a thread
about the size of ordinary thin cord. Then when it was re-
duced down to that it was taken down to the spinning mach-
ines it run faster, and they would take maybe four of those