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Fighting for jobs in America’s former ‘Sock Capital of the World’

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Kenny Young monitors a sock knitting machine at Emi-G Knitting in Fort Payne. Photos by Tony Cruz

Fighting for jobs in America’s former ‘Sock Capital of the World’

FORT PAYNE, Ala. – There used to be two kinds of socks. White socks to play ball, black socks to go to church. Then local manufacturers in this mountainous region, tucked between Birmingham and Chattanooga, invented the cushion sole sock during World War II for the army. The hosiery business hasn’t been the same since. Decades later, a fateful trade deal was signed and businesses chased cheaper wages in Central America in the 2000s. U.S. mills closed. Entire shop floors were scooped up and sent overseas on shipping containers. Mills left standing were whackamoled further by the Great Recession. Remaining sock makers are now persisting through a combination of strategies. Small batch, “Made in USA” manufacturing and marketing. Kickstarter campaigns to finance prototypes and ventures. Making goods for other companies known as “gray goods” manufacturing, the kind of work that keeps the lights on while you figure out the rest of the business. The end goal is to make finished, high quality goods on American soil, develop new products, and retain and create U.S. manufacturing jobs, a drumbeat of President Trump.

For decades, apparel and socks were pretty much about covering body parts and expressing your style and fashion. Technology has since evolved to enable developers to create new fibers and textiles so clothes can perform multiple functions. Fibers infused with medicine like ibuprofen. Clothes that can sense and regulate body temperature. Uniforms that can detect threats like chemical and radioactive elements to alert warfighters and first responders. But can such innovation move beyond prototypes to revitalize a once thriving, textile manufacturing industry in the South?

Unlike the cut-and-sew apparel business that requires many workers, socks are knitted by machines which means a combination of automation and workers on shop floors. But the broad appeal of manufacturing hasn’t changed. Solid middle-class wages that don’t require 4-year college degrees. A manufacturing worker can earn an average of $35 an hour, compared with $12 an hour for a retail sales employee, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A cashier pockets about $10 and an hour. Since the recession, job gains have been concentrated in lower-wage industries and occupations. Lower-wage sectors employ 2.3 million more American workers than at the start of the recession, according to 2014 analysis from the National Employment Law Project. In contrast, there are 698,000 fewer jobs in mid-wage industries than at the recession’s start, according to the data.

And its fewer, quality paying jobs that are helping to erode upward mobility, and faith that you’ve at least got a shot at the American dream if you just work hard enough and hustle. Children’s prospects of earning more than their parents have dropped to 50 percent from 90 percent over the past 50 years, according to the Equality of Opportunity Project.

Back in Fort Payne, the local economy capsized after President George W. Bush signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, in 2005. About 6,000 local mill jobs evaporated, more than 47 percent of Fort Payne’s population of about 12,600 at the time, says Jimmy Durham, executive director of the DeKalb County Economic Development Authority. Countywide unemployment clocked in around 16.9 percent and could have been higher if it weren’t for 30-, 40-year career mill workers who just outright retired after their jobs got axed.

Rhonda Whitmire remembers what it was like when word of the trade deal came down. She grew up around sock-making. Her mother worked at W. B. Davis Hosiery Mill, the town’s first sock mill that’s now referred to as the Big Mill. Rhonda went to work in the hosiery business right after high school. More than 30 years later, she’s still in it with a keen eye for quality control and sock imperfections most of us would barely notice. For 27 years she worked at local sock-maker V.I. Prewett & Son that was acquired by Montreal-based Gildan Activewear in 2007. “We’re a small town in America. People say it’s just sock mills. It’s just socks,” Rhonda says. “But those ‘just socks’ were our food, our children’s education, healthcare, the day-to-day living. It just hits you in your gut even today to think about those feelings. It changed the atmosphere of this community.”

This year retail giant Walmart announced it would partner with American companies including sock maker Renfro that has a manufacturing and distribution outpost in Fort Payne. The deal to produce athletic socks in Fort Payne for Walmart shelves will create 442 jobs. “We have a diverse population and all of them need jobs,” says Jack Weaver, a therapist and counselor in town and originally is from nearby Collinsville, fifth-generation. Fort Payne was forced to diversify its economy since the peak mill years of the 90s and key employers include a Children’s Place distribution center and Ferguson Enterprises, a retail plumbing company. Those who believe the local hosiery business can thrive again in some capacity have been called holdouts. The larger question is whether such Renfro deals and small-batch “Made in USA” businesses can scale to collectively create a substantial number of textile manufacturing jobs.



About 97.2 percent of the U.S. apparel market was imported in 2016, according to the American Apparel & Footwear Association. But U.S. production rose for the seventh consecutive year in 2016. The U.S. footwear market is following a similar trajectory with domestic production up for the seventh consecutive year in 2016. 'We're not trying to bring jobs back from Vietnam or Mexico,' says one textile manufacturer. 'We're trying to create new jobs so we don't send work overseas.'

The hosiery years

Sock-making is actually the second boom industry for Fort Payne. The region’s first big bet was on coal and iron ore in the late 1880s. Enticed by rumors of rich mineral deposits, Yankee investors swooped in and swelled the local population to the thousands from the hundreds. Wealthy New Englanders bankrolled the construction of steel mills and foundries that produced metal castings. An opera house was built, along with a swanky hotel outfitted with a billiard room, dining hall and ballroom. Visitors from around the world arrived by rail to see for themselves, the new Pittsburgh of the South! But mineral resource volumes and quality were below expectations. Then the panic of 1893 unraveled. Another commodities run-up gone bust.

Knee deep in an economic depression, a few industrious businessmen looked around and noticed they were surrounded by cotton fields. In 1907, Fort Payne opened the Big Mill and their payroll was the region’s principal cash flow for years. The mill supplied socks to the military in World War II, with more than 8 million pairs delivered to the army alone. The block-long, brick building now houses an antique store and restaurant.



The Big Mill where W.B. Davis ran the town's first hosiery mill in the early 1900s. Annual payroll for Fort Payne's hosiery industry in the 1990s was about $150 million.

During the peak of America’s hosiery industry through the 1990s, roughly 7,800 people worked at one of 150 mills in Fort Payne. The town became the “sock capital of the world.” And many of the mills dotted Airport Road. “I remember being a kid, being on Airport Road, and it was just like crazy and bustling energy,” says one local entrepreneur Gina Locklear.

Mills in Fort Payne usually were knitting mills or finishing mills. The full cycle from fiber to finished sock was rarely under a single roof. And during the industry’s height, nearly everyone in town was hustling socks. Scrappy workers bought machines and stashed them in basements and kitchens. After a full day’s work, you’d go home and polish off some socks for extra cash. “Your first shift was at the mill, and then you’d go home and finish socks,” says Dan St. Louis, a textile manufacturing expert and mentor.

Dan is a sock whisperer for sorts. If you’re curious about hosiery and unique textiles sourced in America on a small carbon footprint, you’ve probably called Dan, director of the Manufacturing Solutions Center. He’s based in North Carolina, where the state’s abundance of waterpower, cotton, lumber and cheap labor helped build the textile industry. Even if he doesn’t really have time to spare, Dan will patiently listen as you vent about why the dozen mills and vendors you’ve reached out to for help won’t return your calls. He’ll help you source domestic cotton and wool. Where to find machines and folks who know how to use and fix them.

Textile manufacturing entrepreneurs and brothers Rick and Neil Levine began working with St. Louis and the Manufacturing Solutions Center in 2012. Based in the San Francisco Bay area, the brothers flew out to North Carolina and peppered Dan and locals with questions. Armed with a few vendors and game plan, the duo launched sock company Xoab (pronounced Zoh-ab). The startup uses Merino wool, sheared in the West including Montana and Idaho, and is spun in South Carolina. Their cotton is grown in California’s San Joaquin Valley, and made into yarn in Georgia. The socks are designed in San Francisco, and their yarn is dyed and knit into socks on a manufacturing floor in Catawba County, North Carolina. It’s a rare end-to-end “Made in USA” supply chain of vendors and hosiery specialists.

“In the old smoke-stack industries, people really do like innovation. You can think that, ‘Oh there’s no innovation in textile or furniture manufacturing. The people there are just like us,” Rick Levine says. “They like new things, they like learning stuff. Yeah they want to get paid, they want to have a job. But they don’t want to be bored. They’re willing to entertain things if you’re serious, respectful, competent.”

“And if you want to do something of quality that’s different and unusual,” Neil Levine says. “There’s not a lot of that going around.” Sock producers like Xoab are a rare breed. While the U.S. remains a big exporter of cotton yarn, nearly all of the socks sold in America are made abroad in places like China, where base manufacturing wages hover around $5.22 an hour. Compare that to $1.14 an hour in India, $2.58 in Mexico, and $23.19 in the U.S. southern states, according to 2016 manufacturing wage estimates from the Boston Consulting Group.

'Dye ditch kids'

In DeKalb County that includes Fort Payne, remaining sock mills have been picked off one by one. There were 147 hosiery and sock mills remaining in the U.S. including 17 in DeKalb County as of 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among those 17 is Emi-G Knitting, run by entrepreneur Gina Locklear. A second-generation family sock-maker, she’s fighting to keep her parents’ mill alive. And Gina isn’t just nostalgic about the past. She’s mad more people aren’t aware of the deep manufacturing know-how embedded in many small American towns.

Around the mid 2000s, she was working in real estate in Birmingham as the U.S. economy was about to implode into a recession. Her mind wandered to her parents’ mill back home in Fort Payne. A lot of people in town made socks. She made socks. Her grandmother worked at the Big Mill. Her father was a “dye ditch kid.” Terry Locklear used to play in ditches behind the Big Mill that flowed with colored water runoff from the mills’ dying process. Gina’s mind circled back again and again to socks and her hometown mills, squat steel structures that were closing in a slow motion of falling dominos.



A closed hosiery operation on Airport Road, once packed with working mills.

Gina is polite and welcoming. But inside her mind, she was screaming, “Hey! This is going on in small town America, this little manufacturing town!” she says. “I just really remember thinking that no one cares about U.S. manufacturers. I don’t think that’s true but I think that there wasn’t awareness out there.”

What she couldn’t fully see then, barreling down around the corner, was a brewing retail storm of too many malls and not enough shoppers. More consumers started hunting the Internet for deals and unique, small-batch goods with rich backstories that connected makers to buyers. A “Made in the USA” product with a small carbon footprint? Click, add to cart. This confluence of shifting shopping habits and a new retail environment were about to collide and create a Gina-sized opening to revamp her parents sock business. “What Gina did, that was a big deal, huge deal. That was before the curve,” says Dan St. Louis.

This article is part of Work in Progress, a new series and podcast exploring what it means to earn a living. Have an idea for other topics we should explore? Send me a note, or share your own post using #workinprogress #newamericandream.

And follow along as we track Gina’s journey, and travel the country to see how workers are navigating a new American work landscape.