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Lewis Hine took this family photo in 1909. The caption at Shorpy reads:
January 22, 1909. Tifton, Georgia. “Family working in the Tifton Cotton Mill. Mrs. A.J. Young works in mill and at home. Nell (oldest girl) alternates in mill with mother. Mammy (next girl) runs 2 sides. Mary (next) runs 1½ sides. Elic (oldest boy) works regularly. Eddie (next girl) helps in mill, sticks on bobbins. Four smallest children not working yet. The mother said she earns $4.50 a week and all the children earn $4.50 a week. Husband died and left her with 11 children. Two of them went off and got married. The family left the farm two years ago to work in the mill.” Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.
Not long after the photo was taken, the seven youngest children were sent to an orphanage. Historian Joe Manning wondered what happened to the family. He did the research and reconstructed the story of Catherine Young, her children, and their descendants. It’s a fascinating read, which includes the history of Georgia’s cotton mills and evolving child labor laws. Link -via Metafilter
Since kudzu was imported from Japan, it has grown the cover the southern United States. Now another Asian import is flourishing by eating kudzu. The globular stink bug (Megacopta cribraria), native to China and India, has spread across Georgia and has now been found in Alabama. They also come inside during cold weather, and emit a bad odor when threatened.
University of Georgia entomology Professor Wayne A. Gardner said he’s found them 30 stories high, coating the window sills of Atlanta condo high rises, and he has seen them swarming in roadside kudzu patches.
“You smell them when you get out of the truck,” he said.
More seriously, the bug likes to munch on plants other than kudzu, including soybeans. It also could be a threat to other legume crops such as peanuts, Gardner said.
In November, Auburn University researchers collected two individual specimens in east Alabama border counties, Cleburne and Cherokee. They now expect them to spread quickly across our kudzu-rich state.
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Dungeness Mansion on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia looks, to all intents and purposes, like a European ruin. However, this little visited island ruin has a long history of its own. In fact it is almost a miscrocosm of US history, with battles with the British, civil war, emancipation and boom and bust all playing their part.
Thomas M Carnegie and his wife Lucy bought land and started to build a new Dungeness in 1884. It was inspired by castles that the couple had seen in Scotland and although Thomas never saw it finished (like the unfortunate Mr Greene he died before it was finished) his wife lived in Dungeness with his huge brood of nine children for many years. When complete, it must have been (after her family of course) her pride and joy.
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Antisa Khvichava is celebrating her 130th birthday today in Sachire, Georgia. She worked as a tea and corn picker until she was 85 years old, then retired and now lives with her 40-year-old grandson.
“I’ve always been healthy, and I’ve worked all my life — at home and at the farm,” said Khvichava, in a bright dress and headscarf, her withering lips rejuvenated by shiny red lipstick. Sitting in the chair and holding her cane, Khvichava spoke quietly through an interpreter since she never went to school to learn Georgian and speaks only the local language, Mingrelian.
Her age couldn’t immediately be independently verified. Her birth certificate was lost — one of the great number to have disappeared in the past century amid revolutions and a civil war which followed the collapse of the Russian Empire.
But Meurnishvili showed two Soviet-era documents that he says attest to her age. Scores of officials, neighbors, friends, and descendants backed up her claim as the world’s top senior.
Suspiciously, Khvichava’s son is 70 years old, which would mean Khvichava was 60 years old when she gave birth to him. Link
In a cave in the nation of Georgia, American, Israeli, and Georgian scientists discovered the oldest human-worked fibers ever known. The flax remnants date to about 30,000 years ago:
Flax was growing wild at the time. And it turns out not only to be a source of edible grain, but of fiber. These fibers were twisted — a sure sign that the flax had been spun.
Flax fibers woven together make linen, but in this case, linen doesn’t mean crisply pressed summer suits. Bar-Yosef says the fibers they found in the cave were probably braided together, macrame style.
“You can make headgear, you can make baskets, you can make ropes and strings, and so on,” he says.
Bar-Yosef didn’t find any of those objects in the cave — that’s too much to hope for 30,000 years later. But the researchers report in Science magazine that they did find evidence that the fibers were knotted and dyed — black, gray, turquoise and even pink. That’s consistent with other artifacts that show an artistic flair among these early people.
Photo: Eliso Kvavadze/NPR
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More than 70,000 beads have been excavated on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, site of the northernmost outpost of the Spanish empire in the U.S. Consisting of French and Chinese blue glass, Dutch layered glass, and Baltic amber, the beads are enlightening archaeologists about past trade routes and comprise the largest repository ever discovered in Spanish Florida. Most of the beads were found in the cemetery under the church and were intentionally deposited with individuals as grave goods, indicating that it was a relatively wealthy outpost.
“This is the northernmost outpost of the Spanish empire, but we see evidence of ancient trade routes from China via Manila’s galleons to Mexico and Spain,” says Lorann Pendleton, Director of the Archaeology Laboratory at the Museum. “We also have found perhaps the first evidence of Spanish beadmaking, along with beads from the main centers of Italy, France, and the Netherlands.”
Link – via holeinthedonut
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