The Looms Fall Silent

On Bob Little Road in Jonesville, South Carolina, the Cedar Hill Plant will close this spring. One hundred twenty-six workers will walk out for the last time between April and August. The looms that wove natural and synthetic fabrics for decades will fall silent.

Milliken & Company, which has operated in South Carolina for more than 150 years, announced the closure this week. A spokesperson said production will transfer to “more modernized facilities.” The South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce received notice on Tuesday.

Jonesville sits in Union County, where textile mills arrived in the 1890s and changed everything. Workers came down from the North Carolina mountains, where farming was hard and outside work scarce. They moved into company-owned housing. They bought food at company stores. They raised children who grew up knowing the rhythm of the looms the way farm children knew the rhythm of planting and harvest.

By 1920, one-sixth of South Carolina’s white population lived in mill villages. By the mid-1970s, 437 mills operated across the state, employing 143,000 workers. Greenville called itself the “textile center of the world.”

Now the mills close one by one. The workers scatter. The stories go with them.

In the summer of 1936, a writer named James Agee traveled to Alabama on assignment for Fortune magazine. He was supposed to document the daily lives of white tenant farmers during the Depression. He found three families and lived with them for a month.

What he wrote became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—a book that sold only six hundred copies when it was published in 1941, then rose to be recognized as one of the most important American books of the twentieth century.

Agee didn’t write a report. He wrote a witness. He described the worn overalls hanging on a nail. The iron bed frame. The smell of fatback frying at dawn. He listed the contents of a sharecropper’s shack with the reverence of a man cataloging sacred relics.

He called himself a “spy”—painfully aware that he was an outsider looking in, that his words would expose private lives to curious readers who might never understand what they were seeing.

But he wrote anyway. Because he believed every human life held dignity worth recording. Because he understood that silence was worse than imperfect witness.

“For one who sets himself to look at all earnestly, at all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life,” Agee wrote, “what is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart?”

The 126 workers leaving Cedar Hill this spring carry stories no journalist will record.

The woman who started on the floor at nineteen and learned every machine in the building. The man whose father and grandfather worked Milliken plants before him. The supervisor who hired half the second shift and watched them grow into the job. The night-shift worker who drove forty minutes each way because the pay was steady and the work was honest.

Their names will not appear in any history book. Their faces will not hang in any museum. When they clean out their lockers and turn in their badges, the world will not pause.

But their lives are no less sacred than the sharecroppers Agee documented eighty-nine years ago. Their work is no less worthy of witness.

The title of Agee’s book comes from the Book of Sirach: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.”

But Agee’s farmers were not famous. Neither are the workers of Cedar Hill. That is precisely the point. The ones history forgets are the ones writers must remember.

Someone in Jonesville knows these stories. Someone worked beside these men and women for years. Someone heard the jokes in the break room, saw the photographs taped inside locker doors, and watched a coworker’s hands grow skilled on the machinery.

If that someone does not write it down, it will vanish—as surely as the mills themselves are vanishing, one closure at a time.

The Power of Authors calls writers to this work: Stand where silence begins. Write what is real. Bear witness to lives the world overlooks—not to make them famous, but to make them remembered.

The looms fall silent. The words do not have to.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose—and why the world needs your voice now more than ever.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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