Although decades apart, witnessing huge industrial losses in two Southern settings is enough economic trauma for a lifetime.
My hometown of McComb lost many hundreds of jobs when the Illinois Central Railroad Co. closed its maintenance shops in the 1970s and 1980s. Those jobs literally built the city. Despite the legendary City of New Orleans passenger train roaring through twice a day, there’s no current portrayal of the McComb railyard’s monumental commercial activities of the past.
Thankfully, a dedicated corps of local volunteers took it upon themselves to construct an artifact-filled railroad museum replete with memories of times gone by. When an arsonist burned it to the ground, they rebuilt it.
The current domicile of Blakely, Ga., wasn’t a “mill town” at its founding in 1825. The Georgia-Pacific paper mill that recently shut down and turned loose 550 workers was established in the early 1960s and was instrumental in helping Blakely grow, chiefly under other owners before G-P bought it in 1990. However, the strong shoulders of agriculture built the state border town’s economy, and remains a stalwart sector today.
Blakely and Early County constitute peanut country — one of the nation’s leaders in growing the legume. This is also cotton country, but with no comparison to the more substantial yields of the vast Mississippi Delta.
As with the McComb railroad workforce, it wasn’t the workers’ efforts that doomed the Georgia industrial plant. At Georgia-Pacific, the above-average payrolls went to highly skilled mechanics of every sort, who produced “containerboard,” used to fortify multiple types of cardboard boxes.
A charge has been leveled in the environs of Early County that while the paper mill’s employees lived up to their end of the deal, the company failed to spend the necessary money to keep it viable in today’s papermaking world.
In its news release announcing the closure, Georgia-Pacific admitted, “We do not believe the mill can competitively serve our customers in the long run.” Obviously, only Koch/Georgia-Pacific could have remedied that state of inadequacy over time.
Suffice it to say that the Blakely community’s tranquil life was violently shaken at news of the shutdown. Some displaced workers have found new jobs; it isn’t known how many haven’t.
There’s a Mississippi factory similar to the one in Blakely that’s also operated by Georgia-Pacific, a newer so-called “sister plant” making the same product with a workforce of about 250. It is located in Lawrence County, not far from McComb.
The urge to interject “hmm” right here is strong.
Georgia-Pacific was Early County’s leading taxpayer, covering an astonishing 40 percent of property taxes, worth about $6.5 million. Who will be left to take up that tax mantle? Taxpaying citizens, of course, many of whom have already protested their new property valuations.
“It’s going to be devastating,” David Bridges, an expert on Southwest Georgia’s economy, said at a town-hall concerning the mill’s closing.
