Entitled: "Young spinner in Roanoke Cotton Mills. Said fourteen years old, but it is doubtful. Location: Roanoke, Virginia." Cotton mills were designed to move cotton through a precise series of production processes that separated, straightened, and twisted cotton fibers, combined them into yarn, then wove the yarn into cloth. Workers directed four or more slivers through a series of rollers in the head of a drawing frame, where they were combined in a single strand. As bobbins on the spinning frames filled with thread, doffers replaced them with empty ones. The spinner's job was to move quickly up and down a row of machines, repairing breaks and snags. Child labor refers to the employment of children in any work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful. Photographed by Lewis Hine, May 1911.