Kent Trilogy
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| The Kent Trilogy At various times during the years 1947, 1948, and 1949, three graduate students from the Institute for Research in Social Sciences of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lived and worked in York, South Carolina. Their mission was to study the town culture, mill culture, and African-American culture of a typical small Southern mill town. The project was part of much larger study of Southern communities underwritten by a grant from the Rosenwald Fund and directed by Dr. John Gillin, who founded the PhD anthropology program at the University of North Carolina. Ralph C. Patrick, Jr. (1920-1983) was given the task of documenting the society of York’s town folk; John Kenneth Morland (1916-2005) was assigned to study the mill workers; and Hylan Lewis (1911-2000) focused on the African American community. In order to publish these studies, the scholars changed the name “York” to "Kent," and the names of the people and places mentioned in the studies were likewise disguised to mask their real identities. All three scholars incorporated these studies into their PhD dissertations, and in the early 1950s the University of North Carolina Press was contracted to publish them in book form. Hylan Lewis’s study appeared in 1955 as Blackways of Kent, followed three years later by Kenneth Morland’s Millways of Kent. The third study, conducted by Ralph Patrick, was supposed to be published as Townways of Kent, but Patrick eventually decided against publication because he thought the result would be too controversial. As a native of nearby Gastonia, North Carolina, Patrick had many friends and family connections in York whom he did not wish to embarrass or upset with his frank observations about their attitudes and social customs.
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The Kent Photographs These twenty-five black-and-white photographs were taken by John Kenneth Morland in 1948-1949, while engaged in his study of the mill culture of York, South Carolina. These photographs were taken primarily in the Cannon and Lockmore mill villages of York, and show mill houses, family members, school children, and church services. Click to Enlarge Image
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Credit: Photographic items P-4212/1-25, Field Studies of the Modern Culture of the South Records, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. | |
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