McComb City

This photo from circa 1890 shows factory hands at a cotton mill in McComb City, Mississippi. The city was named in honor of Colonel H. S. McComb, who fought for the Union in the Civil War and founded the metropolis in 1872. The entrance in the photo may well be to one of his enterprises, the McComb Cotton Mill. Cotton in the South didn’t just give jobs to farm workers – millworkers too, many of them female, had their part to play in the industry. Photo Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images