Counting on Grace by Elizabeth Winthrop

Publisher blurb: 1910. Pownal, Vermont. At 12, Grace and her best friend Arthur must leave school and go to work as a “doffers” on their mothers’ looms in the mill. Grace’s mother is the best worker, fast and powerful, and Grace desperately wants to help her. But she’s left handed and doffing is a right-handed job. Grace’s every mistake costs her mother, and the family. She only feels capable on Sundays, when she and Arthur receive special lessons from their teacher. Together they write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about underage children working in Pownal. A few weeks later a man with a camera shows up. It is the famous reformer Lewis Hine, undercover, collecting evidence for the Child Labor Board. Grace’s brief acquaintance with Hine and the photos he takes of her are a gift that changes her sense of herself, her future, and her family’s future.

Here are a few text quotes to give you a flavour of this writing by Elizabeth Winthrop:

"Arthur Trottier is my best student. He could be a teacher or a manager or even a lawyer someday. As long as you leave him be. Because we both know the only way he will ever come back to this school is when your machine spits him out."

"The mill owners own everything in town - the store, the school and our houses."

"The river doesn't seem to mind. Borrow my water it says. Long as you give it back. Trouble is when the mill spits the water back out, it comes out all dirty and it smells queer."

"Every girl in the mill has to have her hair bound up so it don't get caught in the machines."

"But now I'm here to work, not play. The air in the mill is stuffy and linty and sweaty at the same time 'cause all day long water sprays down on the frames from little hoses in the ceiling... you don't breathe too deep for fear of what you might be sucking down your throat."

"You've got to pay attention in the mill or else those big old bad machines, they'll snatch up any loose piece hanging off a person and gobble it up."

"Maybe the screaming is coming from me and maybe it's coming from Arthur, but all I know is he's gone and put his fingers in that place between the sprockets and they're chewing his hand all to bits. ... I'm the only one who knows Arthur was fixing to do whatever he to so's he could get out of the mill."

Read more plot details here. Sadly Counting on Grace is now out of print (first published in 2006) but I was able to read a ebook version. Listen to the story of the photo on the cover of this book. And read more here.  Audio sample. 

Addie never knew that her face ended up in a Reebok advertisement or on a postage stamp issued 100 years after her birth, or that Hine's glass plate negative resides in the Library of Congress. Addie Card LaVigne never knew that she had become a symbol.

Solid research and lively writing make this a fine historical novel Kirkus

Imaginative, plucky, and both smart and smart-mouthed, Grace is a heroine who leaves the reader confident that she will fulfill Miss Lesley’s hopes for her – and ours. Hisorical Novel Society

I have read and really enjoyed other books with a mill and factory worker setting such as Lyddie by Katherine Paterson and later her book Bread and Roses too. Then I watched the television adaption of North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Bread and Roses too