Photo: Lewis Hine, September 1911. Carmino Fascinoe, a worker in the Ayer Mill. National Archives, public domain.

In September 1911, a photographer with a heavy camera and a notebook came through Lawrence. His name was Lewis Hine, and he worked for the National Child Labor Committee. He had visited the city once before, in November 1910, and taken about 15 pictures, mostly of children at the Pacific Mills. This time he took more than 50.

His method was simple. He photographed a child, asked for a name and an address, wrote it down, and moved on before anyone could stop him. Massachusetts law said workers had to be at least 14. Hine's captions record, one by one, how close to that line, or under it, the children of Lawrence were.

Some of those captions describe kids at the Wood Mill, the building that is now Riverwalk. John Endyk, of 90 Springfield Street, had been in the Wood Mill's mill room for a year; his birth certificate made him 14. Thomas Levesque, of 82 Margin Street, was the smallest boy in one photo, standing beside Wilfred Valliere of 79 Margin Street, "probably 14," both mill-room workers at the Wood Mill. Across Union Street, Hine found Jacob Black working as a loom boy in the Ayer Mill's spinning room. He looked 11 or 12 and earned $5.15 a week. One group caption notes that everyone in the photo worked, even the smallest girl and boys, and that they went in at 12:45.

Four months later, Lawrence went on strike.

A century on, researcher Joe Manning tracked down the families of ten of the Lawrence children Hine photographed, for the strike's 2012 centennial with the Lawrence History Center. Their stories turned names on captions back into people: who they married, where they worked, how long they lived. (One of them, Wilfred Valliere, gets his own post in this series.)

Hine's photographs are now held by the Library of Congress, and they helped shame the country into child labor reform.

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