Three young women stood in front of a mill in 1912 and asked to have their pictures taken. But a hundred years later, when scientists looked more closely, they uncovered something that astonished them. Cotton lint floated around the area since it wasn’t well-ventilated, and the Porte Mill shook with the deafening roar of its machinery.
Pearl Turner straightened her back and shifted her garments around. The photographer told them to go outside for a little.
Viola, Pearly’s older sister, encouraged her to hurry up and fix her own plain clothes.
Mr. Himmel says we can’t leave our posts for more than a few minutes. Pearl said, “I’m coming,” as they went outdoors into the strange fresh air, trying not to cough.
Pearl had been working in the mill for three years when she was nine, but she would be ten in a few months. Her tiny fingers rapidly picked up the perilous skills needed to operate the spinning machine.
The man with the camera, Thomas Himmel, put the women in front of the mill’s office. Pearl stood to the left with a stern but dignified look on her face. Her dark eyes made her look much older than she was. Viola, who was 14 years old and standing on the right, already looked quite tired, as if her bones were hurting.
There was a girl named Penelope who was 12 years old and lived next door. She also worked on the same floor. “Now stand still,” Mr. Himmel said as he hid behind the black cloth that covered his camera. The flash went away a second later, forever recording the girls’ images.
Three stiff, young faces look out from the frightening site where they labored for much of their lives. None of them could have imagined that this one photo would last for more than a hundred years and then come back to show something astonishing from a scientific point of view.
Before going back into the mill with her sister, Pearl looked at the man with the camera one final time. The mill was always loud and full of drifting lint that made her head go blank.
More than a hundred years later, Professor Sonia Abernathy looked up from her computer and noticed Marcus, her research assistant, standing in her doorway with a manila folder and a smile of joy on his face. What did you learn? She inquired after she took off her spectacles. As soon as Marcus went to her desk, he unwrapped the package.
We have been making the Thomas Himmel collection available online. This photo of Three Mill Girls in Gastonia was taken in 1912. Sonia looked at the picture of three young girls with stiff faces standing in front of what looked like an office.
What do you think? We have seen hundreds of Himmel’s photos of kids working. Check this out. Marcus pointed to the girl on the left.
Himmel’s notes show that this is Pearl Turner, who is not quite 10 years old and has worked at the mill for three years. But that’s not the interesting part. He turned the page.
I found her obituary. She was alive till 1964. That was pretty unusual for mill workers back then, especially those who started working there when they were so young.
There are more. There are records of her kids talking to people in 2006 and 2007. Sonia leaned down.
She became quite fascinated. During the day, she was a professor, and in her free time, she worked as an archivist. She put historical information in order for enjoyment and research. She basically went back to a time when child labor was more common.
Even though the problem made her feel bad most of the time, she kept her feelings to herself and dealt with them. Marcus, her research assistant, was totally different from her and incredibly thrilled. He never really asked for in-depth research unless it was absolutely necessary, but he always thought the little things were significant.
It seemed like this new case was at least a little bit important to him. Can facial recognition software help you get more information from the old picture? Marcus begged, “I’m almost excited, or too excited now.” It would be really beneficial for our research if we could improve this picture.
The letter I wrote asked for something. I only need your okay. After thinking about it some more, Sonia swiftly nodded in agreement with his suggestion.
Marcus was in a strange yet interesting state of excitement. For some reason, it made her feel hopeful that she would find a way to make things better. During their research, she didn’t sure how reliable the results would be.
Sonia spent three weeks looking at her computer screen, comparing the superior picture to other pictures and articles from the Thomas Himmel collection.
She searched other places, such as weaving archives and medical publications, but she didn’t find anything useful. Most of the work has been done by Marcus. He has talked to and found everyone who was in the weird photo.
The first thing they did was look at the picture and figure out who Penelope was. She was the only one of the three girls who didn’t have a past. But when they looked into it more, Pearl became the main person they were interested in instead of Penelope. The picture was of her when she was the youngest person.
For some reason, the two of them didn’t trust her or her narrative. Sonia carefully cut slits in the photo of Pearl to obtain a close-up look at every facet of her personality.
She glanced at her face, skin tone, hair, and posture in the sepia light and compared everything to the medical journals that were scattered over her desk.
For two days, she worked on it until she got it right. The university’s high-tech digital imaging tools revealed something in the original shot that had been hidden for more than a hundred years. Her heart started to race as she thought about what she had found and how important it was.
She called Marcus on her phone and said, “This changes everything we thought we knew about how healthy textile mill workers are.”
Please call Dr. Harold from the department of medical history. That night, Sonia talked in front of a gathering of historians and professors, most of whom were medical historians.
A giant screen behind her exhibited the 1912 Thomas Himmel photograph, which had been digitally augmented to show things that the human eye can’t perceive. “Hey, everyone,” she said. This could be one of the most important medical discoveries of the last ten years.
In 1912, three young girls were seen outside the Porte Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina. They worked long hours in risky places, much like a lot of kids their age. They were always among lint and cotton fibers, which made them sick and killed them young. She picked the following slide, which was a close-up of Pearl Turner’s face.
