Left behind: there's no going back, but some places can't get ahead in the face of forces that took away what they once had.

• Author: Richter, Chris
• Position: FEATURE

Ken Burnette knows what's in the long, narrow box the second he sees it leaning against a wall at East Coast Plywood Co. in Rocky Mount. "My golf club came!" he yells to his only employee, who's sweeping sawdust and dirt off stacks of plywood. "My golf club is here!" Tan, with a full head of brown hair and wearing an oversized white golf shirt and khaki pants, he opens one end of the box and pulls the plastic from around the Callaway driver, inspecting it. He lines up a mock shot but doesn't swing.

Behind him, an industrial saw slumbers untended in the middle of the factory floor. A machine for staining and finishing wood sits silent in a pitch-black side room. Plywood is stacked atop a pallet, Made in China stamped in black on the brown wrapping that binds it. Not long ago, East Coast Plywood had around 25 employees who turned out as many as 54,000 drawer bottoms a day for bedroom furniture. Customers included American Drew, Kincaide and Stanley Furniture. Broyhill accounted for about $1 million of its business each year, Burnette says, and annual sales reached $6 million. "Until about six or seven years ago, this place was absolutely humming."

As American furniture companies shifted work overseas, his business withered--just one example of a local trend. From the first quarter of 1997 to the first quarter of 2007, Nash and Edgecombe counties--Rocky Mount lies in both--shed almost half their manufacturing jobs, a decline nearly 20 percentage points greater than the dip statewide. Burnette tried to adapt by making bottoms for kitchen cabinets, but his customer went out of business, leaving him with hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory and a 50,000-square-foot mausoleum on a dead-end road about half a mile from Rocky Mount Downtown Airport. Now he just wants out. "I better [sell] it now, when my business might be worth something for somebody, instead of waiting for two or three more factories to shut down, and then my business isn't worth squat."

Manufacturing isn't the only thing that has been leaking from Rocky Mount. At times, it has seemed the disorienting currents of global commerce--not to mention the floodwaters of Hurricane Floyd nine years ago--were slowly pulling down the entire city. It was built on tobacco, textiles and finance, and one of its homegrown businesses, Hardee's, became famous throughout the South. But it lost not only its hamburger chain, but the headquarters of one of the state's largest banks, many of its mills and its tobacco warehouses. Per capita income, adjusted for inflation, rose just 1.7% between 2000 and 2005 in Edgecombe and 2.7% in Nash. It increased 4.7% statewide.

Rocky Mount isn't the poorest place in the state nor the only one struggling with a changing economy. Most of those places never had what Rocky Mount did--and maybe never will. But like them, it's feeling its way toward a future where few things are certain. "We can't go back," says Patrick Woodie, vice president of business and natural-resource development at the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center. "It's not simply a matter of replacing, job for job, the manufacturing jobs we've lost with new manufacturing jobs. It's going to take a much more diverse, multifaceted approach to economic development."

About two miles down Church Street from East Coast Plywood, a few cars and people move along downtown's streets and sidewalks. Houses in the surrounding neighborhood look worn, and for a Tuesday afternoon, there are a lot of working-age people sitting on front porches. It's no fluke. In October, Rocky Mount had the highest unemployment rate of the 14 metro areas tracked by the state Employment Security Commission.

Twenty-five years ago, downtown would have been bustling. In late summer, farmers would haul in bundles of golden leaf to be sold in cavernous warehouses around town. "Rocky Mount had a little bit different flavor during the months when the tobacco market was in full swing here," says Mayor David Combs. Tobacco money not only fed farmers' families and paid their bills, it nurtured two local banks, Planters...