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June 1916. Fall River, Mass. "Rhea Quintin, 14 years old. Drawing in on Webb frame. Been at it about three months. Requires great deal of mental application and accuracy and good oversight. Takes over a year to learn. Seemed very young in certificate office. Miss Smith thought she was a little schoolgirl coming for some other purpose." View full size. Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.
Hi, I am related to Rhea Quintin , She is my wife 2nd cousin 1X removed. I can be contact for anything conserning her , I would be happy to answer or get any new information about her or her family. And thanks to the person that post her picture, we didn t have any of her !! Gaston Lepage
Warps are the lengthwise threads in a fabric that run through the loom. In the photo, Rhea is using a narrow metal hook to draw the ends of white cotton warp threads through the little knotted eyes in the dark looped-string heddles (one warp in each heddle, all of them held in webb frames) that will pull selected sets of warps up and down during the weaving process. The webb frames in the loom rise and fall in a sequence to allow the over-and-under interlacing of the side-to-side weft threads with the warps. This loom appears to have only two webb frames of heddles, and is therefore being dressed to make "plainweave" cloth, the simplest set-up. Rhea must take each warp thread in order, and alternate between the first and second set of heddles as she goes. Since a wide loom-width of cloth (such as bed sheeting) can have tens of thousands of warps, the drawing-in of the warps during the loom set-up was a tedious and time-consuming job that had to be done perfectly to avoid money-wasting flaws in the woven cloth.
This is Joe Manning, of the Lewis Hine Project. I have posted my story about this young lady. Sad to say, it is all too brief, since she seems to have left no one who remembers much about her. It's a strange story that begs for more details.
http://morningsonmaplestreet.com/2014/11/26/rhea-quintin-page-one/
What exactly is she doing here? Something with textiles, I assume, but what?
The health risks of breathing cotton and other dusts in textile mills in New England and the Carolinas are well publicized.
We still have to figure out why many kids worked in those mills until they were old adults and still lived to a ripe old age.
Sorta like the tobacco smoking controversy.
It seems a lot of these mill girls lived well into their 90's...
While nearly every picture posted here speaks to me, some speak a little more eloquently or affectingly than others.
Happy Holidays and BTW, God bless Lewis Wickes Hine.
Sounds a lot less condemnatory than the usual Hine captions. Almost admiring...
This is Joe Manning, of the Lewis Hine Project. According to the census and Massachusetts death records, Rhea Quintin was born on Sept 7, 1901, and died in Fall River, Mass, on Feb 15, 1998, at the age of 96. She never married. She worked at the former Boott Cotton Mill.
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