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5 FAMILY LIFE NDIVIDUALS arriving in Buxton in the early twentieth century would find a community where family life dominated all social and economic activities. Most residents traveled to Buxton in family units, and once there, like coal mining populations elsewhere at the time, the great majority of residents lived in household units. As a result, the family served as the basic unit of social organization, and social and economic activities stemmed out of that organization. In most homes, men went to work in the local mines, while women remained at home to manage the household and care for the children. Parents raised their children in a closely supervised manner, and in many homes children began to contribute to the family income at an early age. Because children worked both in and outside of the home, the family existed as both an economic and a social unit. Family members, moreover, assisted one another in times of trouble. Both black and white families exhibited stability and solidarity; throughout the Buxton experience, kinship ties remained strong. For blacks and whites alike, the family stood at the center of people's life and work. Within the family setting, both black and white women played a wide variety of social and economic roles. Interviews and census data show that, in keeping with the social norms of the early twentieth century, most married women in Buxton did not seek employment outside the home, and interviews with former residents indicate that most male and female roles were clearly delineated. Married women carried out all domestic tasks, including housecleaning, food preservation , meal preparation, laundering, and child care. Because most families in Buxton had house lots of at least a quarter acre, families combined the characteristics of town and country living. Most homes 113 114 BUXTON were productive units in which women produced a major portion of the food and goods consumed by their families. Overall, the type and extent of domestic work did not vary significantly between black and white households. The major consideration in determining domestic work was family size. At the same time, all family activity was affected by the fact that Buxton was a company town and that the dominant occupation was coal mining. 1 Interviews with former Buxton residents indicated that most women had a well-defined household routine. Many women rose at 5 A.M. to begin cooking breakfast and to prepare their husbands' lunch. Coal mining families had to rise early because the men boarded the miners' train at 6 A.M. Jacob Brown recalled that he started the fire in the kitchen range and his wife cooked breakfast. Breakfast in the Brown household usually consisted of freshly baked biscuits and sometimes beefsteak or pork chops. Mrs. Brown packed some of the leftover meat in Brown's lunch bucket for his noon meal in the mines. She usually packed three sandwiches- two meat and one jelly-and a piece of cake or pie.2 If the family kept boarders, the housewife also had to prepare breakfast for these men and pack their lunches. In many families one or two sons also worked in the mines. Bessie Lewis related that at one time four of her brothers, as well as her father, worked as coal miners. Moreover, Bessie's family sometimes kept boarders. Her mother then had at least five miners' lunch buckets to pack every morning.3 In many homes the housewife also had to prepare the children's school lunches. Some homemakers had a dozen lunch buckets to fill daily. Although most Buxton women had considerable flexibility in scheduling their daily activities, these activities had to accommodate the men's return at the end of the workday. Sometimes the miners' train arrived as early as 4 P.M. and sometimes not until 6 P.M. The men left home in the morning wearing their miners' clothing and returned home wearing the same clothing. Consolidation's mines did not contain showers, so once off the train the men usually headed home to bathe and change clothes. The routine in most mining households required that the women have hot water ready for their husbands' bath as soon as they arrived home and that the evening meal be served immediately after they finished bathing. Women usually put the tub in the kitchen close to the cookstove. Gertrude Stokes remembered that women in Buxton often went out during the day to shop and socialize, but that they always had to be back home with...

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