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Chapter One: Discovering Addie and Her World
If you drive about two miles north on Route 7 from Williamstown, Massachusetts, you cross the border into Pownal, Vermont. As the road curves around to the left, there is an abrupt change in the topography. The land opens up to the Green Mountains and the vast valley formed by the Hoosic River. The road rises gently for several miles, making it feel like you are taking off in a light plane. Looking west into the valley, the uncluttered, rural landscape looks magical - a church steeple here - a barn there. You are tempted to reverse direction and turn down the road you just passed, Route 346, and see Pownal close up.
That’s when the magical becomes the melancholy. Almost immediately, it appears that the area has somehow been untouched by the celebrated economic and cultural changes of the 20th century. Except for the (mostly) paved roads, cars, telephone poles, and an occasional satellite dish, the scene looks like an old postcard, or like the Appalachia towns of depression-era Kentucky and West Virginia.
The winding road passes a few farms and then comes to a crossroads in the village of North Pownal. The first thing you notice are the shacks and tiny houses on French Hill Road, and the badly maintained wood-frame duplexes that look like what they once were - mill housing. The mill is long gone, but it has left its legacy. By the river, there is a glass-enclosed sign on the spot once occupied by the North Pownal Manufacturing Company, a cotton mill that prospered in the 1800s and early 1900s, later becoming a tannery. It was demolished after it closed in 1988, resulting in a daunting and expensive hazardous waste cleanup project.
The sign includes a picture of the mill, and another of a young mill girl, once erroneously identified as Addie Laird, who was photographed by Lewis Wickes Hine, one of the world's most renowned and influential documentary photographers. He referred to her in his notes as "an amemic little spinner." From 1908 to 1917, Hine took thousands of pictures for the National Child Labor Committee, exposing the dangerous and unhealthful conditions that children endured working at textile mills, coal mines, vegetable farms, fish canneries, and as late-night "newsies" on urban streets. In 1910, Addie became what would later be one of Hine's most famous subjects, her 12-year-old frail body leaning against a spinning machine, her tired eyes staring out as if to say, "Hey, mister, what are you gonna do about me?"
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