Quite unreal, made of dreams
A description of a cotton mill in 1898

The memory of my first visit to the factory is particularly vivid. It was the first glimpse of the industrialization of which we who lived in the country had but the vaguest notion. Its instant as well as its lasting effect was that of beauty. Surely there was nothing beautiful about the rambling maze of one-story brick buildings and certainly nothing of the sort when I went inside and found myself within a cluster of low-ceilinged rooms that served as the offices.

But, passing out into the factory, I found myself in a great room with what seemed to me to be acres of machines, whirring and thud-thudding looms, canopies of cotton gossamer in patterns of vivid reds and greens and blues, and, among all these machines and finding their way in the maze of millions of threads, a few men and women who at first sight hardly became part of the picture itself. Then into other rooms where the cotton was carded and spun, where the hundreds and hundreds of big spools were wrapping themselves into what might have been fatter and fatter white candles disposed on dozens of rectangular candelabra -- to me truly a beautiful sight. Then the melange of sight and smell in the dyehouse, where the cotton yarns were being immersed in their smelly baths that ran the whole gamut of color from red to violet. It seemed to me to be something quite unreal, something made of dreams.
It was not so many years later that I came to know that this was an old-fashioned mill, that its business of carding, spinning, dyeing, and weaving all in one factory was an outmoded process, soon to perish before the intensification of specialized processes. Quite soon I was to learn that its machinery was obsolescent, its methods behind the times, and the establishment itself but a marginal venture hanging on to existence out of sheer faith in the conservative traditions of an older generation of textile manufacturers.

Almost at once I was to come to the realization that the price of its existence was inseparably linked with the exploitation of the people who swarmed in the maze of two-room houses that lined the muddy unpaved streets of the slums that surrounded the mill.

-- Louis Brownlow, A Passion for Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 181-81.

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