# Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill
> Lewis Wickes Hine - 1910
> Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/lewis-hine/lewis-hine-addie-card/
> Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-20
## Tombstone
- **Artist:** Lewis Wickes Hine
- **Date:** 1910
- **Medium:** Gelatin silver print. The Library of Congress catalogues the specific item behind this record's lead plate both as a black-and-white film copy negative (cph.3a15220) and, under the same photo number, as a color digital file scanned from a black-and-white original print (nclc.01824).
- **Dimensions:** Approx. 11.5 x 8.5 cm (4.5 x 3 3/8 in), per the Library of Congress catalogue for this print/negative. A later print of the related Photo #1050 exposure, acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 2014, measures 24.1 x 19.2 cm (9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in) - see Technical.
- **Object type:** Photograph
- **Period:** American, early twentieth century - documentary and reform photography
- **Current location:** Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC
- **Attribution:** accepted
## Summary
In August or February 1910, the exact month is disputed across the institutions that hold related material, Lewis Hine photographed a twelve-year-old spinner at the North Pownal Manufacturing Company in Vermont, on assignment for the National Child Labor Committee. His caption on this negative, Photo No. 1056, calls her an anaemic little spinner; a companion negative from the same sitting, Photo #1050, records that the mill's other workers claimed she was ten while she herself admitted to twelve, a small documented lie the photograph exists to expose. For most of the twentieth century the girl was misidentified in print as Addie Laird, including on a 1998 US postage stamp; nobody, government researchers included, could trace anyone by that name.The real identification came from outside any archive. Novelist Elizabeth Winthrop, who saw the photograph in 2002 and wrote the novel Counting on Grace in response to it, went looking for the real child afterward and found her correct name, Addie Card, on a 1910 census sheet in 2005. Writer Joe Manning then traced the rest of her documented life: an early marriage, a divorce that cost her custody of her daughter, a second marriage and an adopted daughter, decades in Cohoes, New York, and a death in 1993 at ninety-four, as a grandmother who never once mentioned to her family that she had ever been photographed.This record anchors on the Library of Congress's own print of Photo No. 1056, part of the NCLC's archive since a 1954 gift, and is careful throughout to distinguish it from the more widely reproduced Photo #1050 negative held by the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the National Archives: the same child, the same day, but not the same negative, and not always prints of demonstrably the same vintage.
## Provenance
Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it.
- **1910** National Child Labor Committee, New York `[documented]` (origin)
Photographed by Lewis Hine on assignment for the NCLC during a field investigation of North Pownal, Vermont mills, working alongside investigator Edward F. Brown. Sources disagree on the exact month; see Open Questions.
- **1910-1954** National Child Labor Committee, New York `[documented]` (institutional custody)
Retained as part of the NCLC's own working photographic archive and used in its exhibition panels, lantern-slide lectures and publications for the campaign against child labor.
- **1954** Library of Congress, Washington DC `[documented]` (gift)
The NCLC's photographic archive, more than 5,100 prints and 355 glass negatives, was given to the Library of Congress in 1954 together with the NCLC's organizational records, by Gertrude Folks Zimand, the NCLC's general secretary.
- **1954-present** Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division `[documented]` (institutional custody)
Held in the National Child Labor Committee Collection under the linked identifiers cph.3a15220 and nclc.01824. No known restrictions on publication.
## Open questions
- What month in 1910 was this photograph actually taken? Elizabeth Winthrop's account places investigator E.F. Brown's mill visit in February 1910, a National Archives caption for the related Photo #1050 negative gives February 9, 1910, and several library and museum summaries describe the sitting as August 1910. No primary NCLC field report resolving this discrepancy has been located.
- What is the exact relationship between Photo No. 1056, this record's lead plate, and Photo #1050, the far more widely reproduced companion exposure? Whether they were taken minutes apart, on separate days, or represent some other point in Hine's numbering sequence is not established by any source consulted.
- Is the Library of Congress's cph.3a15220 item Hine's original print, or a later copy negative made from it? The catalogue record does not say, and a separately catalogued item under the same photo number, nclc.01824, is described as scanned from a black-and-white original print, raising the possibility that the Library holds both an original and a copy without saying which is which.
- When were the Metropolitan Museum's and National Gallery's prints of the Photo #1050 exposure actually made? Neither museum's published record states a print date, and the National Gallery's print, at more than four times the surface area of the Library of Congress's stated dimensions for the negative, is almost certainly a later enlargement rather than a print made near 1910.
- What was the exact date of Addie Card's divorce from Edward Hatch? Joe Manning's research established only that it fell between their daughter Ruth's 1919 birth and the 1930 census, on grounds of desertion, with Edward awarded custody.
- Is the Ernest buried in 1967 at St. Mary's Cemetery in Hoosick Falls, New York, definitely Addie's second husband, Ernest Lavigne? Manning's published account treats the identification as probable rather than conclusively documented.
## Sources
- [1] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, '[Addie Card], anaemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill. See photo No. 1056. Location: Vermont' (item 2018675329; digitized as cph.3a15220 and, under the same photo number, as nclc.01824).
- [2] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, 'Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pormal [i.e., Pownal] Cotton Mill. Vt. Girls in mill say she is ten years. She admitted to me she was twelve; that she started during school vacation and new [sic] would "stay." E.F. Brown. See Photo #1050. Location: North Pownal, Vermont' (item 2018675335).
- [3] Wikimedia Commons, file description and Library of Congress-sourced licensing metadata for 'Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pormal (i.e., Pownal) Cotton Mill. Vt. ... LOC cph.3a20286.jpg,' citing Library of Congress record ncl2004001725/PP.
- [4] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill. Girls in mill say she is ten years. She admitted to me she was twelve; that she started during school vacation and now would "stay". Location: Vermont,' object 285844.
- [5] National Gallery of Art, 'Addie Card, 12 years old. Spinner in cotton mill, North Pownal, Vermont,' Lewis Wickes Hine, accession 2014.164.1, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund. Provenance and dimensions as stated on the museum's object page.
- [6] Elizabeth Winthrop, 'Searching for Addie: The Story behind a Famous Photograph,' Social Education 70, no. 4 (2006): 174-177, National Council for the Social Studies.
- [7] Joe Manning, 'Addie Card: The Search for an Anemic Little Spinner,' Historical Journal of Massachusetts 36, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 167-183, Institute for Massachusetts Studies and Westfield State University.
- [8] Elizabeth Winthrop, 'Through the Mill,' Smithsonian Magazine, September 2006.
- [9] Time, 'Tracking Down Lewis Hine's Forgotten Child Laborers,' on Joe Manning's broader project identifying subjects of Hine's National Child Labor Committee photographs.
- [10] U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Children's Bureau (RG 102), 'Addie Laird, 12 years old. Spinner in a Cotton Mill. Girls in mill say she is 10 years old. She admitted to me that...' (NARA 523249), dated February 9, 1910.
- [11] Winterthur Museum, 'Treasures on Trial: The Art and Science of Detecting Fakes - Hine Photograph,' on the scientific authentication of a disputed Lewis Hine print and the discovery that it was printed decades after its claimed date.
- [12] 'Intrigue in the World of Photography: The Fake Lewis Hine Prints,' on the Walter Rosenblum print-forgery case and its 2001 settlement.
- [13] New Orleans Museum of Art, 'Object Lesson: Lewis W. Hine and the Fight Against Child Labor,' on Hine's investigative and documentary methods.
- [14] Library of Congress, 'National Child Labor Committee Collection: Background and Scope,' on the 1954 gift of the NCLC's photographic archive.
- [15] National Archives, 'Records of the Children's Bureau' (Record Group 102), on the Bureau's 1912 founding and its holdings of duplicate Hine/NCLC prints.
- [16] Wikipedia, 'Lewis Hine,' consolidating biographical dates and career chronology. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography such as Daile Kaplan's published Hine scholarship or the George Eastman Museum's catalogue of his negatives.
- [17] Wikipedia, 'National Child Labor Committee,' consolidating the 1904 founding, 1907 congressional charter and 2017 closure. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the NCLC's own archived records.
- [18] Wikimedia Commons, file description and licensing metadata for 'Every one of these was working in North Pownal Vermont cotton mill and work was slack. LOC cph.3c34640.jpg.'
- [19] Wikimedia Commons, file description and licensing metadata for 'Lewis Hine selfportrait.jpg,' credited to the George Eastman Museum.
- [20] Wikimedia Commons, file description and licensing metadata for 'Lewis Hine - Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill MET DP262027.jpg.' Consulted only to confirm the existence of a second, short-caption Met print and the reason it is excluded from this record's gallery pending confirmation of which negative it reproduces.
- [21] Library of Congress Research Guide, 'Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother Photographs in the Farm Security Administration Collection,' for the 1978 identification of Florence Owens Thompson, cited as a comparandum in Related Works.
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