"Millworker," an ambitious theatrical performance built around the voices of textile mill workers that was derived in part from Jacquelyn Hall, et al.'s Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, drew a crowd of almost five hundred to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh on Sept. 18, 2004. This performance marked the show's final staging.

Written and directed by Ellen Bland, director of Central Carolina Community College Theatre, with help from former student Drew Lassiter, "Millworker" features student actors, live musical accompaniment, and an old-time radio show format to present the life stories of textile workers who toiled in mills across the Southern piedmont. "Millworker" earlier played to large crowds and rave critical reviews in other North Carolina venues -- mostly old textile mill buildings. "Millworker" was first staged in November 2003 at the old Chatham Mill building in Pittsboro, NC, a production that produced a packed house of four hundred and garnered an annual "top ten theatrical events in the Triangle" honor from the Raleigh News & Observer. The N&O recently profiled Bland, the cast, and the production in a lengthy feature, and Independent

Like a Family, a product of the SOHP's "Piedmont Industrialization" interview series of the 1970s-early 1980s and hailed as "an instant classic upon its publication in 1987," recounts the transition from farm to factory in the early twentieth century and provides an intimate portrait of life in textile mill villages. The book, co-authored by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher Daly, was re-issued, with a new foreword by Michael Frisch and new afterward by the authors, in August 2000 by UNC Press. To learn more about Like a Family ­ and to hear audio excerpts from the original interviews with women and men who worked in textile wills ­ visit a special Like a Family website.