This is the 12th photo-essay in my series “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.”

You can find my introduction to the series here.

Like all the photographs in this “Working Lives” series, this group of three photographs is from the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the State Archives.

According to the photographer’s notes, our plow woman in this photograph is a young girl named Ada Retha Walters.

Ada and her family were farmers in the Long Branch community in Britts Township, not far from Lumberton, N.C.

Her father, Ethridge W. Walters, may be the gentleman plowing alongside her. In this scene, we see them getting a field ready for planting cotton. In a later scene, we’ll see them spreading seed.

As was the case with many farmers during World War II, the Walters were probably short on labor or young Ada would not be working behind a mule.

At the time, Ada was 13 years old and in the 6th grade. But she was no doubt an indispensable part of the family’s workforce, and she was hardly the only young woman who had recently grown accustomed to plowing a field.

Across Eastern North Carolina, male farm laborers– family and hired help– had left their homes during the war. They had enlisted in the Armed Forces, or they had gone to Wilmington to work in the shipyard, or they had moved halfway across the country to build bombers or tanks.

Without available labor, many fields were left fallow.  But in many other cases, women and children stepped into the void.

That seems to have been the case at the Walters farm.

In doing a little research on Ada’s family, I discovered that she had at least one brother serving in the U.S. Army at the time of this photograph. That brother, Sgt. Willis Walters, was in the war’s Pacific Theater, as was my father at the time.

To learn more about Ada, I tracked down one of her grandchildren, Ms. Samantha Mayers, who still lives in southeastern North Carolina.

When I shared the photographs of her grandmother with Samantha, she exclaimed, “She’s so beautiful!”

We both thought that her grandmother– even plowing a cotton field– looked like a young movie star.

In this last photograph, we see young Ada with her family taking a break from planting cotton seed to pose for the photographer.

Samantha Mayers and I had a lovely conversation about her grandmother.

Ada’s married name was Ada Britt. Samantha told me that she and her grandfather had six children, three girls and three boys.

When Samantha was little, her grandmother Ada worked at a textile company in Lumberton.  One of the joys of Samantha’s childhood was the Friday afternoons when she and her mom picked up her grandmother at the factory and they went and did their shopping for the week together.

Her grandmother, she recalled, was an “outside person” who was outdoors every chance she could get. She loved gardening and nature.

Samantha remembered Ada as being kindhearted, loving, and generous. “She would give you the shirt off her back,” she told me.

She was, she said, “the most lovable grandmother ever.”

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