Aspirations for a Better Life
The breadth of the Front Street artifact assemblages and their links to retailers in Danville and beyond indicate that the occupants aspired to improve the quality and conditions of life for themselves and their families. This included a varied diet and perhaps a conscious effort to improve their health through the consumption of nutritional foods. Traditional Southern fare—sausage, bacon, biscuits and gravy, cornbread—was probably not absent from the kitchen tables of these families. It was supplemented, however, with plenty of vitamin-rich vegetables and fruit that helped to stave off the devastating nutritionally based diseases which ravaged earlier generations (Beardsley 1987). Botanical evidence from Sites 44PY178 and 44PY181 suggests that fresh fruits and vegetables (i.e., strawberry, raspberry, black walnut, bean) were part of their diets. These may have been grown in small kitchen gardens or were purchased from local grocery stores such as Jones Market or Riley's Market in Schoolfield. Local markets and dairies probably supplied most of the milk, butter, and eggs consumed by the families, but some may have been purchased from members of the community who raised cows and chickens (Thompson 1984:27). The abundance of container glass indicates that they ate home-canned produced as well as commercially prepared food. Recovered faunal remains indicate their diets included fresh meats such as beef, chicken, pork, and perhaps rabbit and duck.
Archaeological evidence does not indicate that the Front Street residents were “on the margin of subsistence,” as historian Daphne Roe surmises for many early twentieth-century mill operatives, nor are there indications of great deprivation of basic material goods or modest “luxury” items. Mrs. Newman recalls the general character of her family's home furnishings during the 1940s and 1950s: “Our house was neatly but inexpensively furnished.” Despite the new gadgets and innovations that had emerged by this period the simplicity and relative comfort of the Kirby home had a ring with the past. An operative recently arrived at the mills wrote in a letter in 1914:
I arranged credit with the company furniture store the first day. Four of my folks already had jobs waiting when we got here and they went to work the very next day. Nancy and Ella weren't quite old enough but they are large and wear long dresses so they looked old enough to me and so I told the man they were old enough. We need the money. I told them that our house had burned and the Bible with the family records burned, too. Anyway, after a few days we had beds, a table, a wood stove, a cabinet, a dresser, and some iron pots, vessels and a few dishes (soup plates mostly). Before we got it all together we just had boxes and barrels in the kitchen (quoted from Thompson 1984:10).
