Three young women posed for pictures in front of a mill in 1912. But scientists found something that startled them a hundred years later when they examined more closely. Cotton lint floated around the space that didn’t have good air flow, and the Porte Mill shook with the loud roar of its machinery.
Pearl Turner adjusted her garments around and straightened her back. The photographer had told them to go outside for a little.
Pearly’s older sister, Viola, encouraged her to hurry up and fixed her own plain clothes.
Mr. Himmel says we can’t leave our posts for more than a few minutes. Pearl muttered, “I’m coming,” trying not to choke as they went outside into the strange fresh air.
When Pearl was nine, she had already worked in the mill for three years, but she would be ten in a few months. Her tiny fingers rapidly learned how to run the spinning machine, which was very dangerous.
The man with the camera, Thomas Himmel, put the women in front of the mill’s office for accounting. Pearl stood on the left with a stern but dignified look on her face. She seemed a lot older than she was because of her black eyes. Viola, who was 14 years old and standing on the right, seemed very tired, as if her bones were hurting.
Penelope was a 12-year-old girl who lived next door and worked on the same floor. “Now stand still,” Mr. Himmel said as he hid behind the black fabric that covered his camera. The flash went away a second later, leaving the girls’ pictures forever.
The eerie sight, where they worked for most of their lives, shows three stiff, young faces. They all had no idea that this one photo would persist for more than a hundred years and then come back to show something startling from a scientific point of view.
Before going back into the mill with her sister, Pearl looked at the man with the camera one final time. The mill was always loud and full of lint that made her thoughts numb.
Over a hundred years later, Professor Sonia Abernathy looked up from her computer and noticed Marcus, her research assistant, standing in the doorway with a manila folder and a big smile on his face. What did you learn? After she took off her reading glasses, she asked. He opened the packet as he arrived to her desk.
We have been digitizing the Thomas Himmel collection. This photo is from Three Mill Girls in Gastonia, and it was taken in 1912. Sonia looked at the picture of three young girls with stiff faces standing in front of what looked like an office.
What do you think? We have looked at hundreds of Himmel’s images of kids working. Check this one out. Marcus pointed at the girl on the left.
According to Himmel’s notes, this is Pearl Turner, who has been working in the mill for three years and is not quite ten years old. But that’s not what makes it interesting. He turned to a new page.
I found the announcement of her death. She survived till 1964. That’s not something that happened very often to mill workers back then, especially those who started working there when they were quite young.
There are more. There are tapes of interviews with her kids from 2006 and 2007. Sonia bent over.
She became quite fascinated. She worked as a lecturer during the day and an archivist in her free time. She put historical information in order for research and amusement. She basically went back in time, when child labor was more common.
Even though the problem usually made her angry, she kept her feelings to herself and dealt with it. Marcus, her research assistant, was incredibly excited and completely different from her. He never asked for in-depth research unless it was absolutely necessary, but he always thought the little things were significant.
It seemed like this new case was at least a little important to him. Can facial recognition software help you get more information from the old photo? “Please, I’m almost excited, or too excited now,” Marcus begged. It would help our research a lot if we could improve this picture.
I composed the letter to ask for something. I only need your okay. After thinking about it some more, Sonia swiftly nodded in response to his plea.
Marcus was in a weird yet interesting state of excitement. It gave her hope that she would find a way to make things better for some reason. She didn’t know how accurate the results of their research would be.
For three weeks, Sonia glanced at her computer screen, comparing the superior photo to other pictures and articles from the Thomas Himmel collection.
She searched in other places, such as weaving archives and medical journals, but she didn’t discover anything useful. Marcus has done most of the work. He has talked to everyone who was in the unusual photo and discovered them.
The first thing they did was look at the picture and figure out who Penelope was, as she was the only one of the three girls who didn’t have a past. But when they looked into it more, Pearl became the person they were most interested in, not Penelope. She was the youngest person in the picture.
For some reason, the two of them didn’t like her or her narrative. Sonia utilized meticulous cuts to zoom in on Pearl’s photo, which let her see every bit of her personality.
She stared at her face, skin tone, hair, and posture in the sepia light and compared them to the medical journals that were spread over her desk.
After two days of work, she finally got it. The university’s high-tech digital imaging technology revealed something in the original shot that had been missing for more than a hundred years. Her heart started to rush as she thought about what she had found and what it meant.
“This changes everything we thought we knew about the health of textile mill workers,” she stated as she picked up the phone to call Marcus.
Please call Dr. Harold from the medical history department. Sonia talked in front of a group of historians and academics that night. Most of them worked in the medical history department.
A giant screen behind her exhibited the Thomas Himmel picture from 1912, which had been digitally altered to show things that the human eye can’t perceive. She said, “Hi, everyone.” What you’re looking at could be one of the most important medical discoveries of the last ten years.
In 1912, three young girls were photographed outside the Porte Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina. They worked long hours in risky places, much like a lot of kids did back then. They were always among lint and cotton fibers, which made them sick and killed them young. She picked the following slide, which was a close-up of Pearl Turner’s face.