Leonard Garner remembers when he realized the textile industry in Cumberland County was dying. As a manager, he had already closed one plant, Tolar-Hart in Massey Hill. He was still a few years away from closing the Elk Yarn plant on Legion Road in 1996, the last in Hope Mills.
“Machinery was so expensive, labor was so hard to get,” he said. “We were suffering tremendously.”
There was a time, Garner said, when textile mills could get by with a bottom line that may not have been quite in the red but in the pink.
“But it got to where it had to be bold black to stay in business,” he said.
Garner said he was “born and raised on my mother’s lunch break in the textile industry.” Cut him open and you might find yarn wrapped around his heart. And he’s not alone.
He’s one of a rapidly disappearing generation of workers who spent decades in the textile mills of Massey Hill and Hope Mills and have since watched the industry slow to a crawl. Wednesday’s announcement that M.J. Soffe is cutting the 107 manufacturing jobs at its Fayetteville plant brings it to a virtual standstill.
That news signaled the end of an industry without which Fayetteville and the surrounding area might never have prospered.
In a generation or two, hardly anyone will remember first-hand the days when textile manufacturing was not only the most powerful engine in Cumberland County’s economy but the core around which towns were built. The mills changed names often as they were bought and sold. And the names of companies and mills are woven into the fabric of local history: Rockfish Manufacturing, Elk Yarn, Dixie Yarns, Burlington Industries, Uniblend.
Spurred by demand for locally grown cotton, mills sprang up in and around Fayetteville thanks to the Cape Fear River and its creeks, which provided a source of power. Part of the flume from the first mill built on the north bank of what is now Hope Mills Lake is still visible.
All but one of the early mills in Fayetteville and Rockfish, as Hope Mills was then known, were destroyed by Sherman’s troops in the Civil War.
“They would have been useful to the Confederacy,” historian Bruce Daws said. “He considered those military targets.”
After the war, the local textile industry grew afresh. Four Rockfish mills spawned the town of Hope Mills, the Holt-Williamson mill opened in Campbellton and three mills opened that would give birth to the Massey Hill neighborhood.
“Everybody thinks of Massey Hill as Massey Hill, but it was three very distinct mill villages,” Daws said.
The villages were named for the mills they grew around: Victory Village, Puritan Village and Tolar-Hart Village. Margaret Bucy was born in Tolar-Hart, which later became Lakedale Village when the mill changed owners.
“It was more like a big family,” she said. “You knew everyone in the village.’’
Bucy, 93, has lived in the same house on Powell Street for 75 years. She worked in the Lakedale plant for 30 years, putting thread on spindles, and watched as her village blended with its neighbors.
Although the visible signs of mill history are rapidly disappearing, some remain. The towering brick chimney between Southern Avenue and Gillespie Street and the nearby dilapidated mill office that Daws reckons would make “a wonderful mill museum.”
But it’s not just buildings that have disappeared. Jobs went, too. Bucy lost hers at the Lakedale plant when it closed in 1975.
“I’d been going to work for 30 years and all of a sudden I didn’t have a job,” Bucy said.
The losses have hit regionally and statewide. The Swift Denim plant in Erwin closed in 2000, costing 740 jobs and gutting the town it had spawned. The following year, the Converse plant in Lumberton closed, taking 500 jobs with it.
The number of manufacturing jobs in Cumberland and Hoke counties has declined by more than 40 percent over the past 15 years, from 15,500 in December 1993 to 9,200 last month, consistent with statewide losses in the same span. But the relative durability of food and pharmaceutical manufacturing masks the profound drops in textile jobs, according to Larry Parker, a spokesman for the N.C. Employment Security Commission.
While local textile manufacturing job loss totals were not available, the number of those jobs statewide dropped 78 percent in the past 15 years, from 182,900 to 40,600.
“That says it all,” Parker said.
Robert Musselwhite found himself out of a maintenance job when the Lakedale plant closed. But there were still other options back then; he worked another 20 years at the Burlington plant in St. Pauls.
“I was out of work one day,” he said.
Musselwhite started working in the Lakedale plant when he was 14.
“That was about the only jobs you had around here was textiles,” said Musselwhite, who is 81.
When Edwin Brower Jr. came home to Hope Mills after a stint in the Navy and degrees from N.C. State and Duke universities, it was expected that he would work in the mills — because his father had just bought them.
Hope Mills owes its existence to textile mills — with four of them known by number — dotted across the village that they boosted to a town. A mill superintendent, Sim Cotton, became the town’s first mayor in 1891.
“Everybody that lived in Hope Mills at one time worked in the mills or knew someone who did,” current Mayor Eddie Dees said.
Brower remembers the 1950s and ’60s as boom decades of local textile manufacturing. But he said he saw the writing on the wall as foreign competition began undercutting prices.
“You can’t compete with somebody that can sell it for a nickle or a dime less than you,” he said.
That left the likes of Leonard Garner with the most distasteful of jobs.
“I became a hatchet man,” he said. “I would take a plant and close it down. It was such a strain to tell people after 20 or 30 years that the plants were closing.”
After Garner had told the 186 employees at Elk Yarn Mills on Legion Road that they were out of a job, the company wanted him to close a plant in South Carolina with 600 employees.
“I said no way,” Garner said. He retired.
But as a manager, Garner at least saw the coming apocalypse and understood it, much as he resented it. Some in Massey Hill still find the death of the local textile industry hard to fathom.
“I couldn’t understand why they were all leaving,” Bucy said. “I never thought I’d live to see all the textile mills leave Massey Hill. I thought they were here forever.”
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