The Last Ballad(125)

In 1935, the Firestone Corporation bought the Loray Mill and changed its name, and the story of the strike and the murders of Orville Aderholt and Ella May Wiggins disappeared from history.

I know this because I grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina, and I never heard a word about Ella May Wiggins, Orville Aderholt, or the Loray Mill strike until 2003 when I enrolled in graduate school in Louisiana. This despite the fact that my mother’s maiden name is Wiggins, and despite the fact that my grandfather Harry Wiggins at twenty-two years old worked in a South Carolina mill only a few miles from where a woman who shared his last name was murdered; despite the fact that my grandfather would eventually move to Gaston County and retire from millwork there; despite the fact that my maternal grandmother Pearly Lucille Owensby Wiggins was born in Cowpens, South Carolina, in 1914, just a few short years before Ella and John arrived. But I was not alone in my ignorance. My mother and father, both born in mill villages not far from where Ella May Wiggins lived, worked, and was murdered, had never heard of her either. Anyone who remembered the violent summer of 1929 must have remembered it in private and spoken of it in whispers.

I know little of my parents’ childhoods in the mill villages. My mother has talked of my grandmother’s work in the carding room and of my grandfather’s work as a supervisor. She has told me stories of going with my grandfather to the mill on Sundays when it was closed and she was allowed to explore while sipping an RC Cola. My father, who passed away before I finished this book, told me stories of working the register at the mill store as a teenager while the store’s manager pushed the dope wagon through the mill during the afternoon shift.

One story my father told me not long before he passed away has stuck with me. He grew up in the Esther Mill village in Shelby, North Carolina, which is about twenty miles west of Gastonia. When my father was a child, his mother and father would go to work and leave my father’s older sister in charge of him and his younger brother. According to my father, he had been hanging on to a nickel for weeks, trying to decide how he would spend it, when one day he dropped the nickel between the planks of the porch floor. He could peer between the boards and see the nickel on the ground below, but he could not reach it. There was talk of using a hammer to pry the boards loose, but the house belonged to the mill, and he and his siblings were afraid of damaging the house while trying to retrieve the money. They eventually moved out of the house, but my father said he had spent the rest of his life thinking about that nickel and what it could have bought.

This book is for Ella May and her children. This book is for people like me who learned of her bravery and her family’s loss much later than we should have. This book is for Orville Aderholt, a man who, by all accounts, was virtuous and fair. This book is for my grandparents who were born on farms and saw hope in the mills. This book is for my mother and father who were born in mill villages and dreamed of the suburbs. This book is for everyone who is still reaching for nickels.