The Kent Trilogy, consisting of Blackways of Kent (1955), Millways of Kent (1958),and the previously unpublished Townways of Kent, forms a remarkable southern ethnography that maps the social stratification of the Piedmont mill town of York, South Carolina, in the late 1940s, after the effects of the Great Depression and preceding the coming civil rights era. In 1946 the University of North Carolina's Institute for Research in Social Science commissioned a series of southern community studies under the direction of anthropologist John Gillin from which these volumes resulted.
In Millways of Kent John Kenneth Morland's skill as an oral historian and his fundamental respect for his blue-collar subjects allowed him to describe the anonymous textile mill workers of York as sympathetic, three-dimensional human beings, something more than their insular white neighbors in the town of York might have viewed them as. Morland discovered that the segregation of poor white mill workers from the existing town of York mirrored the experiences of early waves of European immigrants as they settled in established American cities. The plight of working families in the mill village, their daily joys and disappointments, and the governing call of the mill whistle are all brought vibrantly to life through Morland's words, creating a powerfully detailed snapshot of an American subculture that no longer exists.
This Southern Classics edition is expanded with a new preface by John Shelton Reed on the origins and impact of the Kent Trilogy and a new introduction by Dan Huntley assessing the lasting importance of Morland's telling case study. The volume is further supplemented with a 1995 interview with Morland and his wife detailing their experiences with the "Kent" research and including photographs from the period.
A well-balanced portrait of Southern textile mill culture. If you're interested in sociology, or in the culture of the South, this book is worth reading. It's a sociological study of the types of people who worked in textile mills in an unnamed medium-size city in an unnamed Southern state in the late 1940s/early 1950s. The author, John Kenneth Morland, lived in the mill community for an extended period of time (almost a year) while observing the interactions amongst the mill workers, and between them and the other segments of society (the mill "townies" and the rural farming society from whence came the mill workers). Morland writes well enough that the prose is not stultifyingly academic, and the statistical tables are numerous enough to illustrate the points being made, but don't overwhelm the book. So, if you're of Southern descent and wish to learn a little about how your grandparents or other relatives may have lived in the mill culture (which extended from the late 19th century to the mid 1970s), then this book is worth reading. I'm looking forward to reading the companion volumes, which examine the African-American society of the time, and the remnants of the plantation culture, as soon as I can find those out-of-print books.
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