Reba Grace Oakley, Textile Worker of Surry County, North Carolina
Reba Grace Oakley was born in Surry County in 1912. She was one of many female textile workers in the area, going to work as a teenager. She stayed in Mt. Airy when her family moved to the Sandhills region in about 1936. After she developed tuberculosis, she joined her father and step-mother, Ed and Fannie Oakley, in Cameron and was treated for several years at the McCain sanatorium near Aberdeen.
Statistics from the 1920 census show that North Carolina had become the second-most industrialized state in the South, with an output of a billion dollars per year in textiles, tobacco products, and furniture. By 1930, North Carolina was first in the nation in producing cotton textiles and first of the southern states in knitted textiles.
In 1929, when Reba was seventeen years old, she was employed at Argonne Hosiery Mill in Mount Airy. The 1930 census gives her occupation as button machine operator. During the years of the Great Depression, many people started work at age fifteen, some as young as thirteen. They could expect to work until they were about sixty.
At Spencer knitting mill of Mt. Airy, in 1930, a female employee made 75 cents a day. Men were paid a higher wage.
Most textile workers in North Carolina earned about $10 a week. They worked shifts of up to twelve hours, as many as 6 days a week. Half of all textile workers were female.
One unfortunate consequence of work in the textile mills was lung disease from contact with cotton dust and fibers. The irritation could lead directly to a disease commonly called "brown lung," and indirectly to tuberculosis. Reba's grandfather, Tyson Snow, died of tuberculosis in 1906, and in 1915, her mother, Maggie Snow Oakley, also died of the disease. By 1935, tuberculosis was one of the five leading causes of death in Surry County. In 1936, there were 38 recorded cases in Mt. Airy.
Tuberculosis has been documented as far back as ancient Egyptian times, found in the remains of mummies. In old times it was often called phthisis or consumption and was a common illness, usually fatal. Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Jackson, Eleanor Roosevelt and many other famous figures suffered from the disease.
Tuberculosis is spread from person to person by simply breathing in bacteria when an infected person coughs. However, people who are in close contact with a sick person over a long period of time are most likely to become infected. Babies easily acquire the disease from an infected mother. Individuals can carry the disease in their bodies without becoming sick or contagious. When their immunity is compromised by other illnesses or continuous exposure to irritants like dust, they are more likely to become ill.
McCain Sanatorium, pictured at left, opened in Aberdeen, North Carolina, in 1908, the state's first sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. Reba went there for treatment around 1944. By 1950 sanatoria in the United States offered over one hundred thousand beds to TB sufferers.
Scientific developments helped in the battle against tuberculosis.
In 1944 and following years, antibiotics were created which were effective in curing the disease.
Treatment with the new drugs resulted in the closure of the sanatoria in the nineteen-fifties.