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Comer are the present members of the family and they're both getting old. Their father, or their grandfather, was the Governor of Alabama. They were ruined by the war, of course. He was a man of education and intelligence. By the way, many of the very best of these old Southern people had been educated at Princeton, Harvard or some such place. I think their grandfather had been Princeton, which merely meant that he had a basically good education. When the war was over he gathered himself and his friends together and said, “We have to live. These people who worked for us as slaves were at least supported by us. They had their support out of the same projects that we had our support out of. They are in terrible condition. So are these poor white people who have been dislodged by all this. We've got to do something.”

He thought of the idea of starting a little mill. They built the little mill almost with their own hands. Grandfather went around lecturing for $20 a lecture in order to collect a little working capital so he could pay wages. They made a great cotton factory out of it after three or four generations. It was originally a project invented as some way of keeping people alive. They started along with it, almost at the same time, free schools. The members of the family who had had an education all turned to as school