The Photograph That Changed Everything

It was just another Thursday afternoon in the climate-controlled basement of the Manchester Historic Association in New Hampshire—a place where history slumbers in acid-free boxes, its secrets waiting for the right pair of eyes.

Margaret Ule, a seasoned photograph conservator, was doing what she’d done for nearly twenty years: cataloging the past, image by image, for a region shaped by the relentless rhythm of the mills.

But on that gray November day in 2019, Margaret’s practiced hands slid a four-by-six-inch photograph from between two pieces of cardboard, and everything she thought she knew about industrial-era portraiture began to unravel.

At first glance, the image seemed utterly ordinary.

Two teenage girls, shoulder to shoulder, in what looked like a breakroom or lunchtime gathering space.

Their faces were serious, but not unhappy.

Their plain cotton dresses were worn soft by use.

In the background, the blurred outlines of other workers faded into the shadows.

It was a portrait of sisterhood, of family pride, of immigrant dreams made real in a new country.

But then Margaret noticed the bandages.

Both girls held their hands in their laps, fingers loosely interlaced, as if posing for a confirmation portrait.

Across every fingertip, wrapped in identical thin strips of white cloth, were bandages—ten on each girl, covering every pad and tip from thumb to pinky.

The wrapping was precise, methodical, almost ritualistic.

This was not a home remedy, but a practiced routine.

The fabric was slightly stained at the edges, where it met the skin.

Whatever had happened to these girls’ hands, it had happened to all of them, at the same time, in the same way.

Margaret set the photograph down, her heart pounding.

This was not a portrait of sisterhood.

This was something else.

## The Clues in the Archive

Margaret was not easily rattled.

She’d handled thousands of images, from daguerreotypes of mill executives to Lewis Hine’s famous investigations into child labor.

She could reconstruct a photograph’s provenance from a single studio watermark.

But something about these two girls—their steady gaze, their matched injuries, the way they held their hands in plain view as if the bandages were unremarkable—made her feel the floor tilt beneath her feet.

She began her standard assessment: paper condition, fair, some foxing at the edges; emulsion, stable; image sharpness, excellent for the era.

The two girls, perhaps fourteen and sixteen, had the same dark hair, the same heavy-lidded eyes.

Sisters, almost certainly.

The older one wore a high-collared blouse, buttoned to the throat.

The younger’s sleeves were rolled to the elbow.

On the reverse, in faded pencil, was a date: May 1910.

The handwriting was French Canadian cursive, the letters sloping backward.

Margaret examined the corners for a studio stamp—nothing.

But in the lower right, partially obscured by old tape, was a second line.

She lifted the tape with surgical care.

Beneath it were two names: Marie Tz Gon, age 14.

Adele Gon, age 16.

And below that, a single word: Bonus.

Margaret stared at the word.

She’d seen enough industrial photography to suspect what it might mean.

But she needed to be sure.

## The Historian’s Eye

The next morning, Margaret called Dr.

Eleanor Vance, a labor historian at the University of New Hampshire, renowned for her work on New England’s textile mills.

Eleanor had written extensively about the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, once the world’s largest cotton textile operation, which sprawled across the banks of the Merrimack River in Manchester.

By the 1910s, more than a third of its workers were French Canadian immigrants, paid by the piece, not by the hour.

Margaret emailed Eleanor a high-res scan of the photograph.

Eleanor called back within the hour.

“Do you know what a piecer is?” she asked.

In a cotton mill, the spinning room belonged to the piece-rate worker.

Cotton fibers, drawn from raw bales, were twisted into thread by spinning frames that ran the length of entire floors.

When threads broke, which they did constantly, someone had to tie them back together before the whole operation snarled.

That someone was usually a woman or a girl.

She moved along the row of spindles, fingers flying, knotting and splicing broken strands as fast as she could.

The faster she worked, the more she earned.

The more she earned, the less likely her family would fall behind on rent.

But the cotton fibers were coarse, the threads abrasive.

After hours of constant contact, the fingertips split open, the skin cracked and bled.

Workers wrapped them in rags or strips of cloth to dull the pain and keep working.

The bandages were not evidence of a single accident.

They were evidence of a system.

Eleanor pointed to the word on the back of the photograph: Bonus.

In some mills, she explained, there were speed incentives.

If a worker exceeded her quota, she received a small bonus payment.

But the quotas were calibrated to be just out of reach at a safe pace.

To hit them, workers had to push their bodies past the point of breakdown.

Fingers bled, joints swelled, lungs filled with cotton dust.

The injuries were not incidental.

They were designed into the system.

## Tracing the Sisters

Margaret began the search for the Gon family in the 1910 census.

She found them on Cartier Street in the heart of Little Canada, Manchester’s French-speaking quarter.

Joseph Gon, age 42, cotton mill worker.

Selena Gon, age 39, no occupation listed.

Children: Adele, 16, cotton mill worker; Marie Tz, 14, cotton mill worker; Louie, 12, school; Henriette, 9, school; Albert, 6, at home; Rosemarie, 3, at home; infant male, unnamed, deceased.

The tenement buildings of Little Canada were notorious for overcrowding.

Sometimes ten to a room.

Typhoid and diphtheria swept through with grim regularity.

Infant mortality in mill districts ran higher than anywhere else in the region.

Margaret flagged the deceased infant.

Death, she’d learned, often pointed toward larger patterns.

She turned next to parish records.

The Gons attended St.

Marie Church, the largest French Canadian parish in Manchester.

Marie Tz Gon’s baptism was listed in 1896, Adele’s in 1894.

The deceased infant, Jean-Baptiste, was baptized in February 1909 and buried three weeks later.

Cause of death: failure to thrive—a catch-all diagnosis that could mean anything from malnutrition to congenital defect to simple neglect.

But another entry caught her attention.

In June 1911, a year after the photograph was taken, Marie Tz Gon was listed in the parish burial records.

She was fifteen.

Cause of death: blood poisoning.

Margaret stared at the page.

Blood poisoning—septicemia—an infection that spread through the bloodstream, usually from an untreated wound.

In 1911, there were no antibiotics.

A cut that festered could kill within days.

She thought of the bandaged fingers in the photograph.

She thought of the word bonus.

The system was beginning to come into focus.

## The Medical Truth

Margaret reached out to Dr.

Paul Lev, a medical historian at Dartmouth who had studied occupational illness in New England’s industrial era.

She sent him the photograph, the census data, the burial record.

He called her back within an hour.

He told her about the hands in textile mills.

Finger injuries were endemic.

The constant friction from tying broken threads wore through the skin faster than it could heal.

Workers developed deep cracks, open sores, chronic infections.

The lint and dust in the air infiltrated every wound.

Mills were kept hot and humid to prevent thread breakage, which meant bacteria thrived.

A blister could become an abscess, an abscess could become gangrene.

Company physicians, when they existed at all, were paid by the mill, not the workers.

Their job was to keep production moving.

A girl with bleeding fingers might receive a quick wrap and be sent back to her station.

If she complained, she risked losing her position.

If she lost her position, her family lost her wages.

In a household where every dollar mattered, lost wages could mean eviction.

Paul had seen similar cases in his research.

Girls who died of infections that started in their hands.

Women who lost fingers to machines and continued working the next day.

Children whose stunted growth and respiratory diseases were documented by reform photographers but ignored by the companies that employed them.

## The Hidden Records

Margaret’s next step was to search for employment records.

The Amoskeag records from that era were incomplete—many destroyed in floods, fires, or deliberate purges during the company’s long decline toward bankruptcy in 1935.

But there might be another way.

In 1908, the National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine to document working conditions in American factories.

His photographs from Manchester, taken in May 1909, were among the most damning in his collection.

They showed children as young as eleven working the spinning frames, their faces blank with exhaustion.

Margaret contacted the Library of Congress, which held over 5,000 of Hine’s original prints and negatives.

Three weeks later, a research assistant sent her a digital scan of Hine’s field notes from May 1909.

Near the bottom of the page, Hine had recorded a conversation with a floor supervisor, Mr.

B.

The supervisor explained his speed bonus system: girls who exceeded their quota by 20% received an extra nickel per day.

But to hit that number, they had to work without stopping, without resting their hands, without pausing when the skin split.

Hine noted, “many girls with bandaged fingers.

Supervisor says it is just part of the work.”

Margaret read the sentence three times.

Then she looked again at the photograph of Marie Tz and Adele Gon.

Just part of the work.