Then Again: Finding Addie

Lewis Hine relied on subterfuge to accomplish his mission. He couldn’t just walk up to a factory’s gates, or to a coal mine, vegetable farm or fish cannery, and explain that he was there to document the often brutal working conditions endured by child laborers. Instead, Hine would take on a persona — Bible salesman, fire inspector, postcard peddler or industrial photographer — and try to talk his way in.

When that didn’t work, Hine sometimes faced threats of violence, death threats even, from security guards and factory foremen. Undaunted, he would wait just off the property and photograph the children as they left work.

Surprisingly often, however, Hine’s ruses worked and he was able to create poignant portraits that captured the hard realities of young workers’ lives during the early 1900s. Hine, a sociologist and social reformer, was in his mid-30s when the National Child Labor Committee, a leading advocacy group for reform on this issue, hired him as a photographer. His work would take him around the East Coast and into the Midwest, where children, sometime younger than 10, were working more than 10 hours a day, often under dangerous conditions. The photos he took along the way offered Americans a shocking glimpse of a world often hidden from view.

Of the thousands of photographs Lewis Hine took of child laborers, a handful have become iconic, perhaps none more so than an image he took in Vermont in August 1910 of a slender, barefooted girl standing in front of the spinning frame she was operating. Dressed in a smock splotched with stains, her left arm resting on the machine, she looks directly at the camera with weary eyes. Other workers told Hine the girl was only 10 years old — she looks it — but she explained that she was actually 12. Hine titled her portrait “Anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill.”

The photo has been used in dozens of books, in museum displays and, in 1998, on a United States postage stamp. It has even been used in an advertisement for Reebok.

But in all that time, people knew next to nothing about the girl herself, except her name, Addie Laird. And even that was wrong.

Author Elizabeth Winthrop encountered the girl’s image in 2002 at the Bennington Museum, where it was part of an exhibition of Hine’s child labor photos. “Once I saw Addie’s face,” she wrote, “I never forgot it.”

The photograph inspired Winthrop to write the critically acclaimed 2006 young adult novel, “Counting on Grace,” about a bright 12-year-old girl who is growing up working at a mill and struggling to get an education.

While Winthrop was inventing a life for her main character, Grace Forcier, the author wanted to discover more about the real life of the girl in the photo. That was easier said than done. When the Postal Service issued the stamp bearing the girl’s image, the U.S. Department of Labor could find no record of an Addie Laird working in North Pownal.

Undeterred, Winthrop started her own quest. When searching for an Addie Laird in North Pownal proved a dead end, Winthrop decided to look for anyone named Addie in North Pownal in 1910. The Ancestry.com genealogy website still turned up nothing. Then she tried variations on the name. “Adeline” got her nowhere, but she found a possible lead: an “Adalaid Harris” appeared in the 1910 U.S. Census. On May 4th of that year, a census taker in Pownal recorded that Harris had two granddaughters living with her: 14-year-old Anna and 12-year-old Addie. The girls’ last name wasn’t Laird, it was Card. For decades, Addie’s last name had been misidentified. Winthrop had found the girl in the photo.

The image of the census page showed that both Addie and her sister had been born in Vermont, spoke English and worked as spinners in the Pownal cotton factory. By looking back to the 1900 census, Winthrop could see that Addie was already living with her grandmother when she was two. The apparent reason, Winthrop learned, was that Addie’s mother had died of peritonitis. Her father apparently felt he couldn’t raise his children alone. By the 1910 census, he wasn’t living in the same household as his daughters and the girls had been taken in by his mother-in-law.

Winthrop couldn’t find Addie in the 1920 census, when she would have been 22 years old, and worried that the waifish spinner had died in the intervening years. Her fears were allayed by a visit to Pownal’s town offices during which a clerk doggedly searched for any document that might shed light on Addie’s life. The clerk found it in a record from 1915 — Addie’s marriage certificate. Both she and her husband, Edward Hatch, had been 17 when they married.

Tracking this new incarnation of the spinner, now known as Addie Hatch, Winthrop was able to find her in the 1920 census, which reported that she was living with her in-laws and still working at the cotton mill. Edward, however, was serving in the Navy, stationed in Boston.

As she dug, Winthrop learned that Addie’s adult life was challenging. The distance between Addie and Edward only grew. In the 1930 census, Edward was living in Detroit. He’d taken a job on a General Motors assembly line. And Addie was again nowhere to be found.

Winthrop wanted to continue the search, but other projects demanded her time. In 2005, she invited a friend, New England historian Joe Manning, out to dinner and told him about her hunt for Addie Card. Manning later wrote, “She dropped the search for Addie in my lap and offered to hire me to find out the rest of the story. …As a historian, author and genealogist, I had experienced the excitement of the hunt and the elation of turning over the right rock at the right time. I wanted to forget about dessert and just bolt out the door and start looking.”

Manning set out on Addie’s trail, using a variety of tactics that might be unnecessary today, just two decades later, because of the rapid expansion of online resources. He visited cemeteries, libraries and town clerk’s offices, cold-called newspapers and funeral homes, and read government documents on microfilm and microfiche. Through this clever, circuitous sleuthing, Manning picked up Addie’s story where Winthrop had left off. Documents provided a cursory outline of Addie’s life, but Manning hit pay dirt when he located some of her living descendants, including one he found through a garage sale listing. Addie’s family added invaluable details to the story he had managed to piece together.

Here is some of what Manning found out: Addie suffered a pair of painful losses in her teenage years. First, her sister, Anna, with whom she was close, moved away in 1914. Then the next year her grandmother died suddenly. Years later Addie told a story about that day. She’d been working at the mill and had seen her grandmother waving to her from outside the factory. Addie finished the task she was working on and looked up again, but her grandmother was gone. When she mentioned it to her supervisor, he said hadn’t seen her grandmother. Addie returned home that day to find her grandmother being given her last rites. Addie felt that that last wave was her grandmother saying goodbye.

Just days before her grandmother’s death, Addie had married Edward. The couple had a child, but the delivery had been traumatic and left Addie unable to bear any more children. After a decade of marriage, Addie and Edward split in 1925. The divorce was rancorous. Edward sued Addie for desertion and won custody of their daughter, whom he left in the care of his sister, the girl’s aunt.

After the divorce, Addie stayed for a time with a friend in North Adams, Massachusetts, not far from North Pownal. There she met a man named Ernest Lavigne, who she married about a year later. They lived for a time in New Jersey, where they adopted a baby girl, and a few years later moved to Cohoes, New York, north of Albany, where Addie got another job in a mill.

Addie and Ernest had a rocky marriage; they sometimes lived apart, which family attributed to his having a drinking problem. When their daughter grew up, Addie spent years helping raise her grandsons, both in New York City and Albany. When the boys were teenagers, Addie apparently reunited with Ernest and moved with him to Hoosick Falls, New York, just west of Bennington. After Ernest died in 1967, Addie spent years living in Albany and then in a housing project in Cohoes. Addie and the daughter she gave birth to were estranged for decades. Only when Addie was an old woman did the daughter she had lost custody of agree to speak with her.

The work of activists like Lewis Hine helped the child labor reform movement gain traction with the American public. The movement’s first successes, while still shockingly minimal by today’s standards, were at the state level. In Vermont, for instance, the Legislature in 1913 curbed children’s work schedules, allowing a maximum of nine hours a day and 50 hours a week for children under 16, and 11 hours a day and 58 hours a week for 16- and 17-year-olds. The federal government became greatly involved in 1938, with passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The act, along with subsequent federal reforms, set stricter limits on the minimum age of child workers and the hours they could work, especially on school days, while also barring them from hazardous jobs.

For Joe Manning, the search for Addie Card was just the beginning of his work on child labor history. After studying some of the 5,000-plus photographs by Hine posted on the Library of Congress website, he had an epiphany. “I began to feel as if the children were staring back at me,” he wrote. “It occurred to me that I had the power to do for some of them what I had done for Addie.”

In his Lewis Hine Project, Manning managed to identify hundreds of children in Hine’s photos and discover something of their lives. When possible, Manning contacted the descendants of these children in order to get more information about them. These conversations were often emotional, because Manning frequently was able to fill in large gaps in the families’ histories. The project served as a sort of career capstone for Manning, who died in 2021.

Addie never mentioned the day a photographer took her picture at the mill. She died in 1993 at the age of 95, five years before the stamp bearing her likeness was issued. She never knew she was an icon.

During her lifetime, Addie Card was known by several names, including the erroneous one, Addie Laird. Her gravestone bears her final legal name: Adeline Lavigne. Below that is the name her grandchildren and great grandchildren called her, Gramma Pat. She never changed her name legally, but as a young woman she had started asking people to call her Pat. She never liked the name Adeline.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: Finding Addie .