Small town blues: Rural communities struggle to chart a future
Published November 18, 2014
by Paul Woolverton, Fayetteville Observer, November 16, 2014.
North Carolina's big cities are seeing new, well-paying jobs created as the nation continues to recover from the Great Recession. But residents of small towns that once were home to the state's industrial base feel left behind.
Just days after the Nov. 4 election, people in four once-thriving towns near Fayetteville sounded a note of frustration with the seeming inability of their elected leaders to halt their decline.
In Erwin, a former mayor is closing the clothing store his family has owned for decades. In Elizabethtown, a young woman's life plan is to find a good job that takes her away from the place where she's grown up.
And in Clinton and Red Springs, people wonder whether there is anything the newly elected state or federal government can do - or is willing to do - to address the specific needs of small towns.
These four communities, like many others with fewer than 10,000 residents across the state, once depended on factories that employed hundreds or thousands. But in the late 20th century into the last decade, textile makers and other manufacturers closed their plants as they chased low wages to other countries.
Even before the recession struck in 2007, much of rural North Carolina was economically stagnant or declining.
The situation is much on the mind of rural state lawmakers, such as Rep. David Lewis of Dunn, next door to Erwin in Harnett County. Lewis, a Republican, is one of the higher-ranked lawmakers in the General Assembly.
It's a challenge to bring jobs back to small towns, Lewis said.
"Unfortunately, the jobs follow jobs," Lewis said. "In other words, these people that move into an area want their employees to have a certain standard of life, a certain standard of living. It's very difficult once the ball starts rolling toward the bigger town that has the restaurants and the movie theaters. Folks begin to live where they work."
North Carolina's small towns thrived through much of the 20th century, said economist Brent Lane, director of the University of North Carolina's Center for Competitive Economies.
"They are an example of something that was distinctly different about North Carolina's industrial history, and that was that we were a state predominantly of small towns and rural areas, but we still were the most industrialized state in the country," Lane said.
In the years after the Civil War, he said, North Carolina's small towns built factories and mills, often with local backers. The manufacturing coupled with the state's decentralized, tobacco-based agricultural economy to create prosperity, he said.
"It was the 'balanced growth' policy," Lane said. "It was a very deliberate effort in economic development, and one I would agree we've retreated from as a public priority.
"But the reality is that the economic forces that enabled towns like Red Springs and Clinton and Erwin to develop have receded and what we're seeing is the consequence of that."
Lane and Lewis think the state can take steps to bring the jobs back to smaller communities. Lane said he has been finding new companies created to exploit new niches, and they are hiring.
Lewis, meanwhile, wants rural towns to coordinate regionally to sell themselves, saying that a plant in Erwin would employ people from there and surrounding communities. And he wants the state to create conditions to foster growth.
Corporate taxes have been lowered, he said, while the state continues to offer tax incentives to draw companies.
Further, "we're going to put a renewed focus on making sure that our rural communities have the infrastructure they need, the water, the sewer, the streets. And frankly, the connectivity" - sufficient highways to move goods and people, Lewis said.
The people in these small towns will be watching and waiting, hoping for a day when a lack of jobs does not send their best and brightest away.
Red Springs Mayor John M. McNeill can remember when the community had 4,200 manufacturing jobs, "more jobs than we had population."
The plants offered "mini-shifts" to high school students, with work hours in the evenings and on weekends. "And then, when they finished high school, they graduated on Friday night, Monday morning they walked in the door and they had a full-time job," McNeill said.
"You worked hard, but they paid well," he said.
Things changed in the 1980s, when automation began to replace some workers in textile mills. In the 1990s, trade agreements pushed low-skilled manufacturing jobs in textiles to other countries. "We lost as many jobs as we had people," he said.
And the Robeson County town's population fell, down 14 percent since 1990.
Starting in the 1990s, the town and the county government redoubled efforts to draw new employers. They built a modern industrial building, McNeill said. It drew different tenants over the years. Tredegar Film Products is there now, making linings for diapers and similar products. But Tredegar has lost its contract and, with it, 80 jobs.
McNeill and other officials are again looking for a company to fill the space and hire their people.
"So we've made all the contacts. Everything's in place to start moving on that," he said. "We'll get some facility back in there unless the economy really goes south again."
Otis Charles Ferguson, 59, is hopeful that the town will get more jobs. "There's nothing around here" for young people like his son, 23-year-old Charles, he said, who goes to school and works in Fayetteville. Most of the jobs he sees are oriented toward caring for the elderly.
Ferguson himself left Red Springs in the 1980s and moved to Connecticut to find work after a tornado struck the town.
"I don't believe in sitting home waiting for a check to come in the mailbox, so I went on to stretch out and do for myself."
He would like the politicians in Raleigh and Washington to visit Red Springs. He said they need to see what the changing economy - and changing government policies - have done to the town.
Twenty-one-year-old De'Trell Woods said he has struggled to find a job since moving back to Red Springs after he graduated from high school in Virginia three years ago. He said he recently found work at a grocery store, and he is taking community college classes.
Woods said he is close to his family in Red Springs, but he can't stay.
"As long as I get away, if I can find a better opportunity, my family will understand," he said.
Like Woods, college student Elizabeth Taylor has no plans to stay in Elizabethtown, the Bladen County seat where she was born and raised.
"I'm contemplating right now going into the Navy after college just to get away, kind of. To get paid to get away," said Taylor, 22. She works full time at a restaurant to support herself and pay for school.
If she doesn't join the Navy, Taylor plans to become a teacher and move away. North Carolina does not pay teachers enough, she said.
The departure of young people like Taylor is one reason the town's population has been in a slow decline over the past 20 years. There's little reason for the next generation to stay, said Taylor's friend, 47-year-old Sue Miller of Whiteville.
"There's no jobs here. There's no jobs," Miller said.
In truth, though, there are some opportunities. Taylor said her brother, who is away in school, plans to come back to be a diesel mechanic for the region's logging companies. Most storefronts downtown are occupied. Other shopping centers around town had customer traffic on a Tuesday afternoon.
But it is not like it used to be, Miller said.
She thinks NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, should be repealed. The 1994 treaty took away many tariffs levied on goods traded between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Factories that once supported places like Elizabethtown moved to Mexico where labor costs were cheaper.
A block away, customers stopped by Inman's Deli & Meat Market in the new Cape Fear Farmers Market. They could watch as owner John S. Inman cut their meat to order. Others went for the baked goods at Burney's Sweets & More, the building's other permanent tenant.
Inman, 50, employs himself, his mother and eight others. Elizabethtown used grant money from government-supported nonprofit organizations to buy the building, a former grocery store that Inman's family owned, to build the farmers market and spur job creation.
Free trade has helped chain stores such as Dollar General, Food Lion and Walmart by lowering prices, Inman said, but he wonders at what cost. They take money out of the community instead of turning it over among the locals, he said.
"It needs to go full circle, but it needs to stay within the circle. It doesn't need to go outside of the circle," Inman said.
Lawmakers need to help small businesses, Inman said. Big banks were bailed out during the recession, he said, yet they were not pushed to extend the credit that small businesses need to maintain cash flow.
And he said legislators need to understand the consequences of other policies. For example, he said, an increase in the minimum wage would carry the burden of additional taxes and other expenses.
Clinton all-terrain vehicle dealer Jamie Little said his father told him to never give up his other business, Clinton Janitorial Supply.
"My daddy used to say, 'Don't ever get rid of it. Everybody's got to wipe their nose and the other thing, too,'" Little said. "It's what kept me going through the hard times, that's for sure."
During the Great Recession, the ATV side of Little's business dropped from $1.3 million a year in sales to $360,000. "I dropped a million dollars in six years."
Unless someone needs an ATV, such as a farmer, it's a luxury in a community where the median worker's income was $23,699 in 2011.
Little thinks rural communities such as Clinton have been left behind while those in central North Carolina along Interstate 85 from Charlotte through Greensboro to the Research Triangle have grown. "Through that corridor, everyone is doing great," he said.
The jobs and higher salaries of those communities have drawn people away, he said.
Little thinks the economy is still struggling but he is hopeful for the Sampson County town's future. There is some industry, N.C. 24 is being widened to four lanes and a new factory is to open soon nearby and bring 80 jobs that promise an average salary of $38,000.
Downtown, a barber did not want his name published because he feared angering people who he has to live with in a small community. But he had plenty of complaints.
Clinton has a stratified and stagnant society that prevents many from getting hired, he said.
"It's just stuff stays the same," he said. "I hate to say, it's just like different cliques. If you ain't in with the cliques, you're just here. Trying to survive on your own. Each for theirself."
His children have been leaving town for school and work. One is in the Army, one studies accounting, another business.
The barber thinks the government has been unfair in how it issues grants and loans to students and small businesses. He said that when he was in community college, a fellow student, the daughter of immigrants who were well off, got $50,000 from the government to start her own business, "and I couldn't get 5."
Alonzo Alford said he used to work factory jobs until he was disabled in a car accident. He thinks that his town would be better off if the country took a stronger stance on immigration.
Hispanic immigrants get a lot of the jobs, he said, and he thinks many of them are in the country illegally with false identity papers.
"They're getting city jobs. They're getting factory jobs. They're getting jobs we can't get now," Thompson said.
A mural on the side of an insurance office in downtown Erwin recalls the town's days as the "Denim Capital of the World."
The painting depicts men unloading bales of cotton from rail cars to be made into denim for blue jeans at the textile mill. Several people on the street in the downtown relax, and one patronizes a cafe. A corner building houses a drugstore.
The textile mill built Erwin more than a century ago and employed tens of thousands of people over the decades. It closed in 2000, when it was known as Swift Denim and was owned by Galey & Lord Inc. The train tracks have been pulled up; the rail bed now a five-mile walking trail. Many of the storefronts downtown are vacant, including the corner building in the mural.
A town in China is now known as the world's denim capital.
Former Erwin Mayor George Joseph Jr. will soon add his men's clothing store to the list of shuttered businesses. At 76, Joseph is ready to retire, and he doesn't have enough customers to keep the shop on East H Street open. "We just couldn't make it," he said.
The Joseph family had run the business for decades, most of that time around the corner in another building that still has a large "Joseph's" sign out front.
There's a thrift store there now, one of three downtown.
"A long time ago, you had 2,500 people that worked over there at that mill," Joseph said.
The plant had 740 employees when its closure was announced.
Several years later, the local hospital also shut down, taking another 160 jobs, though it has since re-opened as a 16-bed psychiatric facility.
"Well, we have rapidly become a bedroom community," Joseph said, with residents driving to Raleigh and Fayetteville to work.
"The only thing we can rely on right now is Triton High School," the public school serving the eastern part of Harnett County, Joseph said. "They're the largest industry that we have in town."
He voted this month for change, he said, and described himself as "tickled" that Republican Thom Tillis won the U.S. Senate race. But he is not sure, beyond a tax cut, just what politicians can do to stop the decline in Erwin. And a tax cut, he says, is "not the answer to the problem."
