Burlington's bounce: the historic Alamance County textile town keeps reinventing itself, bolstered by a family business turned global giant.

• Author: Overman, Ogi
• Position: TOWN SQUARE

Burlington is, if nothing else, resilient. Formed as Company Shops in 1857, it was the North Carolina Railroads hub, building, repairing and maintaining its trains and tracks. When the railroad transferred operations to Spencer, a name change was in order, and the city was incorporated as Burlington in 1893.

By then, the area had become a textile-industry pacesetter. E.M. Holt built a cotton mill on Alamance Creek in 1837, kick-starting an industry that would dominate the region for the next 150 years. Holt's mill grew to become global textile giant Burlington Industries, now based in Greensboro, and the city gained the moniker "The Hosiery Capital of the South." During its heyday, the town boasted 30-some hosiery mills and half that many yarn-manufacturing plants, employing a combined 15,000 people.

By the mid-1970s, most of the sites had shut down after acquisitions or migration overseas. The once-bustling burg was so desolate that, during the CB radio craze marking the era, the truckers' handle for Burlington was "Nothingtown."

Most in the city of 50,000 prefer a later moniker, "The Gateway to the Future," reflecting its location along the Interstate-40/1-85 corridor between the Triad and the Triangle. Sheetz, Wal-Mart and others have opened distribution centers outside the city limits to take advantage of the interstates, while large shopping centers in Elon and Mebane have replaced the once-dominant Burlington Manufacturers Outlet Center.

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One company that didn't leave Burlington was Biomedical Reference Laboratories, started by brothers Thomas, James and John Powell in 1969. Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. bought the business in 1982 and a year later formed Roche Biomedical Laboratories. The conglomerate moved its headquarters to Burlington, and after a series of mergers and acquisitions, it is now called LabCorp, one of the world's largest medical testing companies and Alamance County's largest employer with more than 3,000 workers.

"It is safe to say that Roche Biomedical saved Burlington," says local author William K. Lasley. "They either built or acquired numerous buildings downtown and brought in not just jobs but high-paying jobs."

In 2014, LabCorp moved almost 1,000 of those jobs to a large facility in McLeansville, near the Guilford-Alamance county line. "The problem was that they didn't have one central, large building they could use for their clerical staff," says Madison Taylor, executive editor of The...