A beleaguered mill town struggles toward reinvention
During a lifetime among the looms, Venita Allman did it all, working her way from the weave room to the spinning room to the bleachery in these cavernous textile mills.
Now she's selling baby clothes and toys from her daughter's beat-up Mercury, and living in the shadow of a shuttered mill - part of a generation left behind by the faded promise of a worker's utopia.
"It just makes it tough, the way it is," Ms. Allman says, managing a smile. "All I've got left to sell is this broken jewelry on my fingers, and it ain't worth much."
Workers who grew up here in Kannapolis, where the mill owner provided everything from light bulbs to Bibles, have crashed headfirst into the realities of 21st-century commerce. When the Pillowtex Mill gave some 7,000 workers - 4,800 of them in North Carolina - two hours to get out in the summer of 2003, it became the biggest mass layoff in state history. And as workers disassembled antique looms and shipped them to Pakistan, it also became a rallying cry for critics of global outsourcing. Suddenly, this mill town was in the maelstrom of economic and social flux.
In the months since, Kannapolis has found itself adrift, torn between its crumbling identity as a mill town and the slow hints of recovery that are tugging it in new directions.
And across the state, where tens of thousands in the textile industry have lost their jobs in the past 10 years, the trials of Kannapolis may be a harbinger of things to come. With global quotas that regulate the international textile and apparel trade set to be eliminated on Jan. 1, foreign competition - and the mill towns' struggle - will only intensify.
"It's the same problem that a lot of Russians had with the end of communism - not only is there a change in economic circumstance, but there's a change in the culture," says John Silvia, the chief economist at Wachovia Bank in Charlotte. "As far as the general public goes, the United States wins and its trading partners win; but within each society, companies lose and workers lose. And we have to be frank with these people."
This was the mill that made the sheets that America slept on and the towels that hung in her bathrooms, a village founded by a benevolent corporate oligarch, Charles Cannon, who provided housing, schooling, and even free electricity - all in return for relatively easy jobs that were a step up for thousands of dispirited farming families who'd run out of patience with the South's red dirt.
But the town that, with its cheaper labor and proximity to cotton fields, helped bring down the big mills of New England, has now itself been outsourced. The downtown Gem Theater is, perhaps with a hint of irony, showing "Surviving Christmas." The Kmart has closed and tour buses have dwindled at the downtown's Cannon Village mall, while only a handful stop each day to honor Dale Earnhardt's muscled bronze forearms at the memorial to "Our Hometown Hero."
Today, a generation of older workers like Allman still linger. Benefits are running out, foreclosure notices fill the back pages of local newspapers, and even retired workers who were promised that they could live out their lives in the mill-owned homes are worried about their future.
"This is Dodge City right now," says retiree James Mellons as he fiddles with a carburetor on an old lawnmower.
Wally Bennett worked in the mills for most his life, starting when he was 14. Now the septuagenarian sits in his living room beside a vase of fake white roses and seascape paintings, the shutters of his house closed tight. "Mr. Cannon was a good man," he says. "But nobody would have come had he not done all this for us."
Cannon's legacy came to an abrupt end last year. To developer Ken Lingafelt, who has spent months perusing the property and millions of dollars studying its reuse, "it looked like the rapture had just taken place," he says, so many papers and mementos were so quickly left behind. Even a year later, former workers still gaze in disbelief at the shuttered mills.
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