I suppose the question is why be interested at all in these grand old ladies? Architecturally, they are nothing spectacular to look at. Rather plain, in fact, except for the deep red color of the brick. If anything, they're an eyesore to most and the land they're occupying could be used for better things.

For me, however, I see history. I see people who toiled their lives away making the "fabric of our lives". I worked in the textile industry for a year - not in the great buildings like you'll see in the pictures, but something more like a warehouse. It was the people inside, though, that made it special. I worked in the clothing branch of Gerber Industries, and it was here that many of the onesies worn by infants were assembled. My husband had just been assigned to manage a book store in the Lumberton, NC area, and I was unable to find work in the medical field. I went to work as a temp, and was eventually hired on by Gerber. My job was working in the computer room, entering data and printing out the tags that were attached to the material parcels. Each seamstress would rip off the tag with her sewing instructions and information to be passed along to payroll, sew the material and then pass it to the next seamstress. It went like this down the line until it came to folding and packing, then out the door to central shipping and eventually to the market.

Working textiles is not a glorious job. It's back-breaking, deafening and monotonous amongst the machinery, whether a room filled with the large looms spinning thread and fabric or the row upon row of industrial sewing machines putting clothing together. It is a steady paycheck, however.

A year after I had begun to work as a temp for Gerber (and they had just hired me as a permanent employee), Ted was assigned to work in Charlotte, NC. I wonder what happened to the workers and friends I left behind at Gerber. Like in most of the industries in the US, work at Gerber was being sent to Puerto Rico, Mexico and anywhere else it was cheap to hire. To hear about factories being shut down in Detroit, Chicago and so on is painful, but to actually have worked alongside people who were in constant danger of losing their jobs overseas is something else entirely. To this day, I hope those in Lumberton are doing okay.

I suppose, in ways, my love for the old textile mills is because of the people I worked with. A memorial, of sorts, to the people who made the clothes Americans and others across the world had worn. There are no other buildings like these being built. Some of the mills have been lucky and given a second chance at life as a condo or museum. Once they're demolished, however, that's it. The bricks will be used on other buildings, but the mills will be gone forever, and the people in them forgotten. The webpage will be a place for viewers to see a bit of history and perhaps think about the workers - the seamstresses, the weavers, the stock crew, the mechanics, janitors, drivers - the heart and soul of the mill. I hope they'll see more than just a run down old building. I know I do.