BLANKET EFFECT: Filmmaker Rebecca Williams captures the essence of a famous Tar Heel business.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: NC TREND: History

In the predawn of a September 2003 morning, a ruddy glow above the trees awakened Jerry Pope at his Swannanoa home. "Wake up! Beacon's on fire!" he yelled at his wife. Rebecca Williams jumps to her feet and they walk down the street near their home to where flames boil skyward.

Fire consumed the five-story, shopping mall-sized factory, once the nation's largest blanket mill with as many as 2,200 employees. Scores of onlookers watched with them as 400 firefighters struggled vainly to control the blaze.

Local Fire Chief Anthony Penland says he'd told his men, "If that thing ever catches fire, it's just going to have to bum." Inside, vast expanses of thick, oak floors had been routinely soaked in oil for eight decades to hold down potentially explosive wool and cotton lint.

Later that morning, Beacon Manufacturing in Swannanoa was reduced to rubble, torched by a teenage arsonist.

The real impact sank in a few days later.

"It had become a pilgrimage site," Williams says. "You saw old guys in pickup trucks sitting a block away, crying."

The fire was anticlimactic, in a way. Charles Dexter Owen II had moved the business to North Carolina from New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1925. The plant completed in 1936 had shut down in 2002, many years after the Owen family sold the company.

Still, it was more than just another of the 300-plus N.C. textile mills to die.

"Beacon was a way of life," says Williams, an oral historian and documentary filmmaker who moved to Swannanoa in 1999. "These were not just jobs. People hoped Beacon would come back, but this was finality. Beacon was not coming back."

It took Williams most of a decade and $70,000, much of it from grants from the N.C. Humanities Council and N.C. Arts Council. But earlier this year she finally completed Blanket Town, her story of Beacon Manufacturing. It screened at the Longleaf Film Festival at Raleigh's North Carolina Museum of History in May. She hopes it airs on public television and at museums and schools in coming months.

The film has input from more than 90 former mill workers, Owen family heirs and modern sources, such as historian Bill Alexander, whose family moved to the Swannanoa Valley in the 1780s. It chronicles an era when looms and shuttles were today's pixels and bandwidth.

Swannanoa ranked with Kannapolis, a Cabarrus County town once literally owned by towel-maker Cannon Mills, as an iconic North Carolina company village. "[Charles Owen II] loaded bricks from the family's...