Then Again: Finding Addie

Of the thousands of photographs Lewis Hine took of child laborers, a handful have become iconic, perhaps none more so than an image he took in Vermont in August 1910 of a slender, barefooted girl standing in front of the spinning frame she was operating.

By Mark Bushnell
August 18, 2024, 7:58 am



Lewis Hine’s photograph of Addie Card, taken in August 1910, has become an iconic image of child labor. Hine learned that Addie started working at the North Pownal, Vermont, cotton mill when she was 8 and left school at the age of 12 to work there full-time. Photo via the Library of Congress

Lewis Hine relied on subterfuge to accomplish his mission. He couldn’t just walk up to a factory’s gates, or to a coal mine, vegetable farm or fish cannery, and explain that he was there to document the often brutal working conditions endured by child laborers. Instead, Hine would take on a persona—Bible salesman, fire inspector, postcard peddler or industrial photographer—and try to talk his way in.

When that didn’t work, Hine sometimes faced threats of violence, death threats even, from security guards and factory foremen. Undaunted, he would wait just off the property and photograph the children as they left work.

Surprisingly often, however, Hine’s ruses worked and he was able to create poignant portraits that captured the hard realities of young workers’ lives during the early 1900s. Hine, a sociologist and social reformer, was in his mid-30s when the National Child Labor Committee, a leading advocacy group for reform on this issue, hired him as a photographer. His work would take him around the East Coast and into the Midwest, where children, sometime younger than 10, were working more than 10 hours a day, often under dangerous conditions. The photos he took along the way offered Americans a shocking glimpse of a world often hidden from view.

Of the thousands of photographs Lewis Hine took of child laborers, a handful have become iconic, perhaps none more so than an image he took in Vermont in August 1910 of a slender, barefooted girl standing in front of the spinning frame she was operating. Dressed in a smock splotched with stains, her left arm resting on the machine, she looks directly at the camera with weary eyes. Other workers told Hine the girl was only 10 years old—she looks it—but she explained that she was actually 12. Hine titled her portrait “Anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill.”



Addie Card, fourth from left in the front row, poses with other child laborers at the cotton mill in North Pownal, Vermont, in 1910. Standing slightly behind Addie and wearing a white shirt, is her 14-year-old sister Anna. Photo via the Library of Congress

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