Last updated: January 19, 2025
Article
3D Tech Puts Focus on Children’s World in Early Mills
Stories about history can change depending on who’s telling them. We used 3D imaging technology to share what life was like for young people who worked in textile mills in the early days of North American industry.
Image credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection / Lewis Wickes Hine
"All the processes of turning cotton from its rough into every variety of marketable thread state…are here performed by machinery operated by Water-wheels, assisted only by children from four to Ten years old, and one superintendent."
That’s what Boston politician Josiah Quincy III wrote after he toured a Rhode Island textile mill in 1801. When National Park Service interpretive rangers craft a story out of sources from the past, they work to bring voices like these into the present. These voices can give us valuable insight into our own lives.
Researchers are constantly learning more about cultural sites in national parks and sharing what they learn with interpreters. So when a historical mill site comes under the care of the National Park Service, it gives park interpreters an opportunity to explore new and exciting ways of telling its story. But what do you do when the site is closed to the public or you want to open it up to people all over the world who can’t physically get there? You create a virtual duplicate. How do you tell the mill’s stories from the perspective of the people who worked there? You use their vantage point.
The Mills’ Stories Are About Children
In March 2021, Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park took stewardship of two historic mills in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The mills are two places that mark the start of the U.S. Industrial Revolution. Built in 1793, Slater Mill was the first water-powered cotton-spinning mill in the country. Neighboring Wilkinson Mill, built in 1810, was a machine shop and textile mill.
Image credit: NPS / Debra A Boucher
Prior to the buildings’ transfer to the National Park Service, the Old Slater Mill Association restored the mills and used them to teach the history of U.S. industrialization. As the park continues that tradition, its staff are developing new methods for interpreting some harsh truths: The early mills ran on child labor. Mill owners exploited local communities by design. Adult men did other work in and around the mill, but the textile workers were children.
In 1793, Slater Mill was a six-window, two-and-a-half-story building, but it expanded multiple times as the success of its operation grew. It was a textile mill (among other uses) until 1895 and remained in industrial use until 1920. The neighboring 1810 Wilkinson Mill had a machine shop on the first floor that was used to build machinery for mills in the Blackstone River Valley. Textiles were produced on the second and third floors. The Wilkinson Mill’s owners trained apprentices, who were integral in making and inventing machines for the exploding textile industry.
Children born in the 1950s were the first post-industrial-revolution generation that didn’t have legally sanctioned experience working in industry.
In 1921, local business people formed the Old Slater Mill Association to purchase and restore the building to its 1835 appearance. They later purchased Wilkinson Mill and land surrounding both buildings to create a campus for interpreting and teaching the history of American industrialization.
Local schoolchildren have been making field trips to Slater Mill since the 1950s. Due to changes in U.S. labor laws, children born in the 1950s were the first post-industrial-revolution generation that didn’t have legally sanctioned experience working in industry.
Image credit: NPS / Jim Hendrickson
In more recent decades, students visited Wilkinson Mill to learn about the science and engineering behind its magnificent, working waterwheel and how people used it to generate hydropower. The school field trips and tours of Slater Mill remain an important element of programming at the park. But there’s no public access to Wilkinson Mill now, because the National Park Service is restoring it.
The Perfect Chance
The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training in Natchitoches, Louisiana, has been exploring ways to apply 360-degree imaging to create virtual experiences that connect historical sites with new audiences and stories. I (Cooper) had been looking for an opportunity to test building a child-height virtual tour. When I learned about plans to create new interpretive tools to tell the history of child labor at Blackstone River, I knew it would be the perfect chance to try out this technique.
“The park had been struggling to find ways to give visitors at least a sense of what the machine shop looks like.”
“We were immediately interested in the opportunity to have a new method to interpret these buildings,” said Kevin Klyberg. Klyberg is the director of Interpretation & Education at Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park. “Currently, the Wilkinson Mill is closed to the public for a few years while we make it accessible,” he said. “The park had been struggling to find ways to give visitors at least a sense of what the machine shop looks like.”
Image credit: NPS
Creating a Child’s Perspective
The world looks bigger if you’re a child. The early machines in Slater and Wilkinson mills must have looked imposing to the children who worked there. Cameras for creating 360-degree virtual tours can be set to any height that the tripod can accommodate. So to give the viewer a child’s perspective, I (Cooper) wanted to set the height of the camera lens to the eye height of a typical child worker in each of the mills.
Image credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection / Lewis Wickes Hine
In the late 1790s and early 1800s, most children who worked in Slater Mill were around 10 years old, though some were as young as six. To choose a vantage point for the virtual tour, I looked at historic photographs in the Library of Congress. I set the camera to the eye-height of a 48-inch tall child, based on a photo of an 11- or 12-year-old girl that Lewis Wickes Hine took for the National Child Labor Committee.
Early 19th-century mill owners and agents hired boys and young men starting around age 15 to make tools and machines in machine shops like the one at Wilkinson Mill. So for that mill, I set the camera at the eye-height of a 60-inch tall young man, which was the average height of a 16-year-old boy in the 1830s.
To create a 360-degree virtual tour, you have to take a series of photos and stitch them together to form a three-dimensional representation of a space. This process, called photogrammetry, can be done using cell phone cameras or with specialized imaging equipment. To create the digital versions of Slater and Wilkinson Mills, I used two cameras: the Matterport Pro2 and the Matterport Pro3. I controlled both of these using an iPad.
These cameras work with the Matterport platform, which we chose because it auto-stitches the images together, reducing processing time. The cameras automatically rotate on a tripod, collecting a series of images that it stitches together into a 360-degree view from its location. Operators take images at locations three or four steps apart so that they overlap, and the program puts the images together to build out the space.
Image credit: NPS
The easiest way to begin building a virtual space and minimize stitching errors is to start indoors. This is because walls help the program determine the boundaries of the model. I started on the main floor of the mills, which were large rooms filled with machines, to create the core of the tour and then worked my way outside. I wanted a visitor to the virtual spaces to not only visit the buildings but also see the landscape, which includes the Blackstone River and Pawtucket Falls. These water features provided the power for the mills.
Image credit: NPS
I realized that although a 48-inch-tall child would have been able to stand upright under the floor, I had to hunch over to avoid banging my head on it.
There were some unique challenges when imaging the mills. Slater Mill has a trap door in the floor to access the raceway where the waterwheel used to be. We wanted to image this area of the mill to show the drive shaft that used to power the machines. I maneuvered the camera and tripod down the stairs into the space under the trap door. Then I realized that although a 48-inch-tall child would have been able to stand upright under the floor, I had to hunch over to avoid banging my head on it.
Wilkinson Mill had a different challenge: it’s located right against the sidewalk on a major road and bus route. To image the front of the building and enable virtual visitors to see the bell tower, I needed to take images from the street. So rangers from Blackstone River Valley stopped traffic while I took images as fast as I could.
Image credit: NPS
Image credit: NPS
Everything the camera sees becomes part of the virtual version (we usually hide from the camera so we don’t become “ghosts” in the model). Vehicles that drove through the images became ghost fragments, as they moved too quickly for the camera to get a complete image. Altogether, the virtual tours stitched together 173 images of the Slater Mill and 135 images of the Wilkinson Mill. With the digital spaces created, we could turn our attention to adding the stories.
Image credit: NPS
A “Good Fit”
I (Horrocks) am a park ranger at Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park. I wrote the narration for the virtual tours, focusing on the worker experience. In the past, people were often taught that children were a good choice for industrial work due to the size of their hands and how well they fit the machines. That no doubt encouraged adults at the time to view the decision to hire children as logical or even natural. But the real incentive as borne out in company records was simple: children could be paid considerably less than adults.
It was not by chance that young people who labored in these mills were a “good fit” for the work.
Machinists intentionally created many early textile machines to be run by children. So it was not by chance that young people who labored in these mills were a “good fit” for the work. Textile companies recruited children from the local community to do the tedious work of running the machinery as a way to maximize profits.
Giving Voice to the Virtual Experience
We use multiple senses to engage with a physical space, but not all of them are available in the same way when interacting with a virtual one. Simply setting the cameras to a child’s vantage point wasn’t enough to enable the virtual visitor to experience the mills through young eyes. To complete the experience, we wanted to tap into another sense: hearing. We needed the voices of our narrators to match the stories.
"I feel fortunate to not be the kid who worked in the mill."
I (Cooper) worked with local youth who were close to the ages of the workers in Slater and Wilkinson Mills to give voice to the narratives that Horrocks wrote. The 11-year-old narrator for Slater Mill and I sat down with a mic and the script and recorded the audio in sections. When she later reflected on the experience, she said, “Recording the voice for the Slater Mill video was very fun and I learned something new. I feel fortunate to not be the kid who worked in the mill."
The 17-year-old narrator for Wilkinson Mill had his own equipment and recorded his narration remotely. Other staff and I at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training edited the audio clips and combined them with the videos of the virtual spaces to create the tour.
A Fantastic Notion
Children aren’t often the focus of how people share or learn history. Many adult visitors don’t consider history from a child’s point of view. "I think this was a unique experience,” said a parent of one of our narrators. She said it helped her “to connect with the history of the city we live in and to see our daughter realize her place in space and time, and the privilege that she has. This was a great opportunity to talk with her about privilege, gratitude, and what we can do to improve other people's lives.”
Young people can easily feel alienated from history when they don’t know how kids like them participated in past events.
“Shooting the tour at the height of a child mill worker is a fantastic notion,” said Interpretation and Education Director Klyberg. “Beyond providing the opportunity for visitors who can't come to the park to see the interior, it gives our onsite visitors the chance to see the mill again through a different set of eyes.”
Young people can easily feel alienated from history when they don’t know how kids like them participated in past events. Historical stories about adults may seem inaccessible to them, and the historical lives of children unimportant or forgotten. But many young people helped power the Industrial Revolution, spending their formative years running textile machines in the mills.
When we take a tour through their eyes and ears, we realize the importance—on many levels—of the societal roles they played and gain a new perspective on our own lives. It’s exciting to know that through this work, we can share the mill workers’ experiences with people—young and old—across the world, whenever they have access to a digital device and an internet connection.
Take the tour!
Slater Mill Virtual TourTake the tour!
Wilkinson Mill Virtual TourAbout the authors
Catherine G. Cooper, PhD, is a research scientist in the Technical Services division of the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Image credit: NPS.
Tags
- blackstone river valley national historical park
- child labor
- childrens history
- textile mills
- slater mill
- wilkinson mill
- virtual tours
- virtual experience
- 3d
- full 360
- storytelling
- accessibility
- catherine cooper
- allison horrocks
- technology
- methods
- cultural heritage
- features
- ps v39 n1
- park science magazine
- park science journal