ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA - The Springs Close Archives and Close family have partnered with Winthrop University’s Louise Pettus Archives & Special Collections to make available online 40 years of a local textile company’s in-house publication.
The project will involve digitizing Springs Industries’ Springs Bulletin from 1943-1983.
This will be an important learning tool for students researching Southern mill village culture and history, said Ann Y. Evans, archivist for the Springs Close Family Archives at the White Homestead. “The bulletins are an important resource for family history research as well as a rich resource on the history of Springs Industries. The Springs Bulletin was a very important part of the mill workers’ lives.”
Their lives centered around their work, their family and their mill village, Evans said. “Many did not subscribe to the local paper,” she said. “The Springs Bulletin was their news.”
Workers shared their babies’ pictures in the bulletin, their wedding announcements and news of their relatives fighting in foreign wars. The Springs Bulletin also covered local sports: mill baseball leagues championships, bowling teams, women’s basketball league winners and golf championships.
There was coverage of activities and photos of Springs Park, the Springmaid Beach, Twenty-Five Year Club members, employee profit sharing and many other company benefits.
“The Springs Bulletin was news and information just for the mill worker and mill village,” Evans said. “It was about them, their community and their family.”
Work on the digitization will be funded with a Springs Close Archives gift to the Pettus Archives’ Historical Preservation Fund. It will pay for a student to scan microfilmed and original copies, when no microfilm exists, of the Springs Bulletin and prepare the digitized files for inclusion on Digital Commons, which is found online on the Winthrop website.
Archives officials have found that the bulletins are often used in historical and genealogical research, but have never been digitized. “The partnership will drive more traffic to the Digital Commons site and ease the burden for local researchers and families of former Springs employees who have had no other option but to go through boxes of paper files and microfilm,” said Gina White ’83, Winthrop archivist.
For more information, contact White at whitegp@winthrop.edu.
