BUTTON-DOWNS AND BARBECUE: AT A TINY BYWAY IN THE CENTER OF NORTH CAROLINA'S PORK AND POULTRY INDUSTRIES, GARLAND WORKERS FASHION PREPPY SHIRTS FOR THE ONE-PERCENTERS.

• Author: Mims, Bryan
• Position: TOWNSQUARE: Garland

Inside a nondescript brick building across East Front Street from the Piggly Wiggly, and right across Warren Street from the Family Dollar, beneath the blue water tower that says "Garland N.C. Est. 1907," a dress shirt is being custom made, perhaps for a moneyed man in Manhattan. All the specs are right there on the order: shoulder width, sleeve length, neck size, a little slack on the left cuff to make room for his watch.

Here at the Garland Shirt Factory, where Brooks Brothers apparel is made--yep, that Brooks Brothers, the 200-year-old brand favored by the jet set and Mad Men's Don Draper--special orders for bigwigs are nothing all that big and special. Workers here tailored the shirt that President Barack Obama wore during his first inauguration. They've made shirts for Kobe Bryant, George Strait and Will Smith. (If you saw the movie Ali, you saw Smith wearing a shirt made in Garland.)

For Queen Clark, who sews made-to-measure shirts that retail for $150 to more than $400, it's all in a day's work. She grew up in Garland and lives a few streets over from the factory. "This is home," she says.

A railroad depot, not spiffy shirts, put Garland on the map in the late 1800s. The community surrounding it was named for the assistant postmaster general, Henry Garland. But perhaps the town's most acclaimed native son was Amos Neill Johnson, a local doctor who taught at Duke University's medical school and was president of the North Carolina Medical Society from 1960-61. Johnson and his employee, Henry Lee "Buddy" Treadwell, were the inspiration for Duke's physician-assistant program, the first in the U.S. when it was started in the 1960s. Johnson, who died in 1975, and Treadwell, who died in 1990, appear in a downtown mural completed in 2015.

Shirt-making came to Garland in the 1950s, when Fleetline Industries moved into a brick building paid for by the Garland Development Corp. The group was formed to recruit business to this town in rural Sampson County. In 1982, New York-based Brooks Brothers bought the shirt factory, supplying sharp-dressed men and providing the economic fabric of Garland. Along with the special-order division and other luxury garments, Brooks Brothers' classic button-down polo oxfords are made at the plant.

"Without Brooks Brothers, I think Garland would die," says Queen Newman (that's right, there are two factory employees named Queen), who's worked in the plant since 1982 and is now a supervisor. "This is what keeps...