The battle of Lexington: after losing jobs and people, a factory town fights to remake itself.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: COVER STORY - Company overview

Litewis Brindle holds on tighter as a blast of wind from a passing truck tries to wrest the sign from his scarred fists. It advertises today's special at a nearby grill in downtown Lexington. He's making $5 an hour as a human billboard, but his callused hands hint of days when he didn't have to accept free meals. "I started at old Dixie when I was 16 years old," Brindle says. That was in 1964. Why finish high school when Dixie Furniture Co., which employed more than 1,000 workers in 15 buildings that sprawled over 31 acres along the Southern Railway tracks, was paying good money?

He would wind up a supervisor, making $11 an hour, "which was all right for this area." But outside ownership, imports and intense competition would bring old Dixie down. Beginning in 1987, it and several affiliates were bought, reinvented, sold and leveraged into Lexington Home Brands. Brindle, like hundreds of others, was laid off in 2005. That October, the company closed its last U.S. wood-furniture factory.

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Brindle has struggled since. He attended community college to learn a new trade, then tried bricklaying. "But I couldn't hold up for anything like that," he says. So he holds a sign as cars roll by. "I'm mainly doing this here so I won't be sitting at home on my butt all day." He looks down the street. "The Lexington that I knew growing up is gone."

The last decade has been no kinder to this city of about 19,000 than it was to him and the company he hung his hopes on. Though in the heart of the Piedmont, the most prosperous part of the state, Lexington lost population, down 5%, from 2000 to 2010, the last census showed. Compare that with statewide growth of 18.5%. Or with nearby cities such as Thom-asville, which grew 35.2%, or Salisbury, 27.2%. The population of Davidson County--of which Lexington is the seat--increased 10.6%.

Some say Lexington's growth was stunted because it botched an annexation that would have brought 2,000 new residents and has lackluster schools. But mostly the city shrank because its manufacturing base, predominantly furniture and textiles, shriveled, causing people to move away. "They went to other towns to find jobs," says Bob Timberlake, the artist who found fame with his paintings of the rural landscape that surrounds his hometown. Manufacturing "was our life. It's what fed everybody. It gave promise to students that they were going to have a job and the American dream when they got out of school." Now those jobs have gone halfway around the globe, where workers are paid half what Lewis Brindle makes as a human billboard.

The numbers are grim. From 2006 to 2011, unemployment hovered around 16%. Manufacturing, which provided more than half the jobs in 1980, comprises less than a third now. One of every four residents lives in poverty, compared with 15.5% statewide. Almost half those under 18 are poor; the state figure is one in five. "I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime," Timberlake says. "But I can't imagine living anywhere else in the world."

Lexington's plight is not unique. Since 2008, the 12 counties of the Piedmont Triad Partnership, Davidson among them, have lost some 90,000 jobs, more than any other region of the state. And it is the loss of manufacturing jobs that hurts most. Between 2005 and 2010, North Carolina lost 137,154--nearly a quarter--in what once, by several measures, was considered the nation's most industrialized state. Of those the N.C. Department of Commerce considers competitors, only Georgia and Michigan shed a larger portion of their manufacturing industry. Unlike many small Tar Heel towns, Lexington can boast of attractions such as Timberlake's gallery NASCAR team owner Richard Childress' vineyard and its famous barbecue. But this is a place that made its name known around the world by making things. Now it's struggling...