Piecing Together Mill Life with Tropy
When I began my assignment with the Clemson University Archives, I had gathered a total of 371 photos. For the project, I only needed to work with ten sources, but the sheer volume of material made me realize how important it was to have a system for keeping everything straight. That’s where Tropy came in—not as a flashy new tool, but as a practical way to make sense of what I had collected.
I imported the ten sources I selected for the assignment into Tropy, and I could already see how it would be helpful for far more than just this exercise. Unlike Zotero, which I’ve never felt was useful, Tropy allows me to attach meaning directly to each photo. I could note why a particular image mattered, what it showed, and how it might connect to other pieces of evidence. That ability to combine organization with interpretation made the process feel less like filing and more like building the foundation of a story. The ease of entering the tags and metadata was clean and straightforward.
Two sets of documents stood out to me as I worked. The first were the child labor permits. For the assignment, I only entered two into Tropy, but in reality, I have hundreds. Most of the list children are between the ages of 12 and 14, which immediately raised questions about the legal framework that allowed this. In South Carolina, child labor was a significant issue in the textile industry. The state eventually passed laws restricting the employment of children under 14 in mills, though enforcement was uneven, and many families relied on children’s wages to survive. Seeing the permits, organized in Tropy, gave me a sense of the scale of this practice and the human stories behind the statistics. I will be able to put the names and ages of all the children and keep them organized under each child’s last name.
The second set of documents was the incident reports. These are handwritten and will take time to transcribe, but even at a glance, they reveal the texture of everyday life in the mill village. They record accidents, disputes, and small events that, when pieced together, create a vivid picture of the community. Having the names and events organized in Tropy means I can start to trace patterns—who was involved, what kinds of incidents were most common, and how the mill responded. I am entering names as tags so I can connect the individual to the incident.
Tropy didn’t just help me finish an assignment—it gave me a way to organize, contextualize, and interpret the hundreds of photos I brought back from the archive. And more importantly, it showed me how those photos can become evidence for telling the story of the mill village in all its complexity.