THOMASTON, Ga. — Not so long ago, this rural town an hour outside Atlanta was a hotbed for textile manufacturing.
In the late 1990s, there were six major mills here. Their machines spun children’s clothing for Carter’s, made tire cords for B.F. Goodrich and produced bed sheets for J.C. Penney, Sears and Walmart.
In all, they employed about 4,000 workers.
By 2001, all of those jobs were gone.
What has happened here in the 15 years since tracks the slow comeback of manufacturing in the United States.
Two new textile companies have come in, investing millions in new technology and adding about 280 jobs in this town where one-third of residents live below the poverty line.
It is becoming more affordable to produce textiles in the United States, companies say, as machines become more efficient. Major firms are more willing to pay higher prices for domestically sourced products, and rising wages in China mean there is less of an advantage to making products overseas than there once was.
Last week, there was new cause for celebration when Marriott International announced that all towels in its 3,000 U.S. hotels would be manufactured by Standard Textile in plants here and in Union, S.C. The move is expected to bring $23 million of business and 150 jobs back to the United States.
The hotelier joins a number of other companies, including Walmart, Apple and General Electric, that have pushed for more U.S.-made products in recent years.
But manufacturing employment here is still a fraction of what it once was. While a company such as Standard Textile might have once employed close to 1,000 people, today it has a couple hundred workers who oversee machines that spin, scour and weave cotton.
“We’ve had to redefine who we were because we were a mill town for so long,” said Kyle Fletcher, executive director of the Thomaston-Upton Industrial Development Authority. “We lost a lot of the middle class.”
Nationally, the United States lost 30 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 1998 and 2016, according to Federal Reserve data.
As of February, the country had 12.33 million workers in the sector, down from 17.64 million in April 2008. At a recent low in February 2010, that figure was 11.45 million.
There are hints that manufacturing is returning to the United States in small ways: The nation’s quarterly output has climbed steadily since the end of the recession, growing 35 percent and adding 650,000 jobs since mid-2009, according to the Fed.
But the glory days are gone, Fletcher said. About one-third of Thomaston’s 9,000 residents live below the poverty line, compared with 23 percent in 1999. Average income has dropped more than 20 percent since 1999, to $14,243 from $18,193, according to U.S. Census data.
“Losing all those jobs was devastating, and it’s certainly changed things very quickly in our community,” Fletcher said. “Probably in my lifetime, we won’t recapture those jobs.”
