Aluminum foiled: built as a company town, Badin ponders its prospects if Alcoa departs. Will it find a future wrapped in its past?

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Feature

David Summerlin grins as he points out items in an Alcoa salesman's wooden sample case: a rod and piston, a jar lid, a handful of nuts and bolts, a packet of aluminum foil, even a tiny bas-relief portrait of Teddy Roosevelt. They are on display in the Badin Historic Museum, a converted one-room schoolhouse, with other mementos -- many collected by Summerlin -- of the business that built this place. Where many Carolina mill towns were spun from cotton, little Badin, near the center of the state on the edge of the Uwharrie National Forest, was cast in aluminum.

"At one time, Alcoa looked after everything here," says the brawny, tanned retiree, who spent nearly 30 years at Alcoa Inc.'s Badin Works. "They owned the streets, the sidewalks, the sewer system, everything." Alcoa built Badin's school and its long-gone opera house. It built the hospital, which now serves as an Alcoa conference center, and hilltop quarters for engineers that is now part of Stanly County Country Club. One of its dams on the Yadkin River created Badin Lake.

But Pittsburgh-based Alcoa doesn't look after everything anymore. Now most of its plant, sprawling over 125 acres, is idle and probably will dose in the next several years, leaving an abandoned industrial site that stretches nearly a mile along the main road into out-of-the-way Badin, a town of about 1,500 residents just north of Albemarle. On Aug. 9, Alcoa shut down the smelter, the heart of the plant. Badin Works will continue to make carbon electrodes, used in smelting, for other plants. That means 150 of the 400 workers keep their jobs -- for now.

"It is a matter of weighing the viability of the plant over a course of years," says Dana Kessler, its human-resources manager. "It is not a shutdown at this point, but I'm not saying it may not become a shutdown years down the road."

Until Alcoa makes a final decision, the smelter -- veterans such as Summerlin call it the "pot room" -- will be kept ready to fire up on short notice, says Paul Campbell, president of Alcoa Primary Metals Southeast Region. That will depend on aluminum prices rebounding, but the fate of other old plants bodes badly. When Alcoa announced its plans for Badin, the company said it was closing plants in Texas and Oregon that it had idled earlier. Like Badin, they can no longer compete.

Alcoa declares its presence as soon as you cross the city limits. Right after the town's welcome sign comes the company's and, just beyond that, one telling truckers making pickups and deliveries which radio frequency to tune to. Then the plant itself comes into view, looming like a castle over a medieval village. It's all towers and sheds, many of them sheathed in corrugated aluminum.

Beside the plant, the tiny business district pales. There's a convenience store across from the gates, a cafe just around the corner and a pizza place a block away. An employee credit union is tucked into the middle of the block...