Oral history interview with Blanche Scott, July 11, 1979

Blanche Scott began working at the Liggett and Myers tobacco factory in Durham, NC, at the age of twelve. She spent more than two decades there until she left to pursue a career as a beautician. In this interview, she recalls her two careers and her motivation to rise from poverty and her religious devotion. Researchers interested in the industrializing South will find her recollections of life as a child laborer in a tobacco factory particularly useful. She describes how relatively lax child labor laws enabled her to land a job; the dynamics of the factory floor and the influence of unions thereupon; and some of the details of tobacco work, including her handling of the noxious burly tobacco. This interview offers an interesting look at the tobacco industry, which dominated North Carolina for decades.