We are excited to share our monthly recap, including exciting updates, important milestones, and more. Please take a moment to enjoy our highlights.
Adventures in Catawba Culture, Costumes & Curiosity!
On October 15, we hosted our first Dig In! Little Explorers program! In partnership with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, we welcomed children ages 0-5 and their caregivers to learn about the culture, foodways, and art of the Catawba people through story time and hands-on activities like mask making, pottery, and drumming. The October 28 session celebrated Costumes & Curiosity through Halloween activities that connected to history, including historical figure masks, lantern making, and pumpkin printing.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for this special program!
Countdown to Dia de Muertos
Día de Muertos is a beloved celebration for the museum staff, who have gathered throughout the month to help prepare activities for the Kids’ Zone. We look forward to seeing everyone at the festival this weekend on November 1!
Additionally, we’ve been making appearances to discuss the event; you can catch the replay on WBTV and WCNC.
Meet our Catalyst Fellows
The Catalyst Fellowship Reception, on October 15, was an inspiring evening of connection, reflection, and celebration. The event brought together community members, museum partners, and supporters to officially welcome the inaugural cohort of Catalyst Fellows.
The Fellows shared their stories, aspirations, and what being a Catalyst means to them.
Throughout the night, the room was filled with gratitude, encouragement, and genuine conversation. Attendees connected across generations and sectors, united by a shared belief in the power of young people to carry forward the lessons of history and build a more just future.
Donor Spotlight
Meet Stephen Valder
“Levine Museum is important as we all need stories. We live in our story, but any one story is incomplete. I need other stories to inform my own. Help me to see what I haven’t seen. Levine over the years has allowed me to see into so many lives that vary by race, culture, time, place…Those voices become a part of me.”
Collections Corner
Piedmont Spinning Mills was one of fourteen cotton yarn textile mills in Gastonia opened by Charles B. Armstrong in the early twentieth century. Armstrong’s mills had a combined capacity of 145,000 spindles and 2,500 employees.
The textile industry revived cotton farming and brought factories to the New South. In the early 1900s, the introduction of the combed yarn process for making fine quality cotton yards led Gastonia and Gaston county to become leaders in the textile industry and by the 1920s, more textile mills were built and operated there than in other place in the United States. Gaston County became the “Combed Yarn Center of America,” and Gastonia adopted the motto, “City of Spindles.”
This record of payment to Julie Johnson connects us to the history of women who worked in the mills locally and throughout the South in the period of industrialization that followed the Civil War and Reconstruction. Many mill workers were young women who left family farms for their first jobs, some worked alongside their families, husbands, and children for long hours, little pay, and uncertain futures. This payment receipt reflects the common practice of mill owners deducting housing and supplies like wood and coal from their workers’ pay.
