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The Industrial Revolution began in textile mills in England. The same process played out in America with the American Industrial Revolution beginning with textile mills in New England duting the early=19th century. We have realitively limited information about child labot at these early mills. Even after photography appeared in the 1840s, textile mills and child labor was not something that early photographers focused on. We mostly see studio portraits. We do begin to see images after the turn-of-the 20th century and those images played an important role in the Progrssive Movement and the effort to address child labor in America. Here Louis Heins was very active in creating an archive of child labor images. We note image which seems to be
the owner's or overseeer's son (figure 1), but we can not yet confirm that. We first loaded this image to provide a view of the mule room at a mill. A reader pointed out that the boy is too well dressed to be a worker. That may well be the case. He is certainly much better dressed than most of the children we see working in the mills. Notice that his knickers are even pressed with creases. Unfortunately the only definitive information we have about the boy at tyhis time was thast he was 14 years old. We do know that the photograph was taken at the Berkshire Cotton Mills, Adams, Massachusetts. One of the problem Heins had was getting access to the mills and other work sites to take photographs. We wonder if this was part of his efforts to ingratiate himself to the mill owner. Hopefully we can eventually lear more about this image.
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