A Labor Day question for N.C.: Now what?
Thursday, August 31st, 2006
By Chris Fitzsimon
What will be the work of the future? Film? Nanotechnology?
MARY C. SCHULKEN
On a muggy morning not too long ago, a century of history tumbled to the ground in Kannapolis.
Explosives neatly cut the legs out from under North Carolina’s twin towers — the two brick smokestacks that marked the former site of Cannon Mills. Tar Heel hands labored in that factory for most of the 20th century to supply towels and sheets to the world.
Textiles left North Carolina long before those stacks turned back to dust. But wiping them off the landscape made the loss of mill life and mill work — woven into the fabric of this state — oh, so final.
It’s much like the day I came home from college to find my grandfather’s tobacco barn in Eastern North Carolina feeding a frenzied bonfire.
A glimpse of the future
Flames quickly erased pine boards and rafters, artifacts of a way of life and a way of labor that framed my growing-up. Tobacco had not yet taken its economic tumble. But as I watched I remember thinking: "Now what?""Now what?" is the question North Carolina asks as another Labor Day approaches. Hard, rough work has not disappeared. But what will be the work of the future? (more…)
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