Documentary preview takes community back inside Beacon

‘Blanket Town: The Rise and Fall of an American Mill Town’ explores legacy of Swannanoa plant

Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
October 14, 2022

Approximately 275 people attended a two-night community preview of “Blanket Town: The Rise and Fall of an American Mill Town.” The documentary explores the connection between Beacon Manufacturing Co. and Swannanoa. Photo by Fred McCormick

For the better part of a century, after Charles D. Owen II moved his massive textile mill nearly 1,000 miles by rail from New Bedford, Massachusetts to be reassembled in the middle of a rural mountain community, Beacon Manufacturing Co. was as tightly woven into the identity of Swannanoa as the colorful intricate patterns for which its blankets were known. That changed on a September morning in 2003, as an eerie red glow emanated from the massive structure, drawing scores of onlookers with generations of ties the site, where they watched the longtime center of their community crumble to the ground.

In the crowd, Rebecca Williams and her husband Jerry Pope, relative newcomers to the area, struggled to comprehend the grief around them, but soon realized they were witnessing the mournful end of an era. The powerful experience inspired an extensive quest to better understand the relationship between the plant and the thousands of residents it once employed, which became the focal point of the documentary, “Blanket Town: The Rise and Fall of an American Mill Town.”

As Pope and Williams hosted a preview of the nearly completed film, Oct. 7 and 8, hundreds of community members returned to a small lawn near the site for an in-depth exploration of the Beacon legacy.

“This is what I really wanted to do,” Williams said, following the Saturday night screening behind the Symmetry Financial Group building on Whitson Avenue. “When the lights went out in Beacon there was this feeling of people not wanting to leave, so it was important to me to bring the community back here for this.”

Rebecca Williams interviewed nearly 100 people who worked at Beacon Manufacturing Co. while director the documentary, “Blanket Town: The Rise and Fall of an American Mill Town.” Photo courtesy of Serpent Child Productions

Williams, who directed the documentary and produced the film with her husband through their nonprofit Serpent Child Productions, began interviewing nearly 100 former Beacon employees in 2008. Many of the subjects who appear on camera worked for the company for decades while living in the nearby mill villages.

“I really had no idea of the depth of this story when I started it,” said Williams, an oral historian who had heard about the mill while writing and producing plays based on local folktales with her husband for the Black Mountain Center for the Arts in the early 2000s. “I couldn’t understand why people were crying and picking up bricks to take home when we were there watching that fire. I knew it was an important part of the community, but I didn’t fully realize how much it shaped the identity of Swannanoa.”

The reconstruction of the one-million-square-foot Beacon building was completed during the Great Depression, bringing thousands of jobs to the community. At its height, the mill operated 24 hours a day, producing and selling more blankets than any other company in the world.

The arrival of the Owen family, who owned the business until 1969, transformed rural Swannanoa into a mill town with businesses that operated around the clock to serve the more than 2,000 employees who worked there. Housing, recreation programs and even entertainment were provided by Beacon, which operated under the paternalistic philosophy that gave rise to company towns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The complex relationship that resulted from workers and townspeople relying on their employer for services is among the themes explored in “Blanket Town.”

“There was mobility and opportunity, but it was certainly a system with many flaws,” Williams said. “It allowed the company to have a lot of control because people didn’t just depended on their employer for a paycheck, they relied on them for housing, and so many other things.”

The dynamic of the relationship, however, often resulted in intense loyalty to Beacon for longtime employees, many of whom worked alongside family and neighbors for decades. The environment created strong bonds within the local community, before the shifting landscape of the global economy led to its sudden closure in 2002.

“As it changed hands, and became more and more corporate, it had a huge economic impact on this community,” Williams said. “Part of the complexity of this story is that, in a way, it’s almost a story about globalization, but in a microcosm.

While an official release date for “Blanket Town” has yet to be announced, Williams wanted to share a preview of the film, which earned recognition as the best overall documentary feature in the 2022 Longleaf Film Festival, with new and longtime residents of the community.

“A lot of people now view Swannanoa as almost a suburb of Asheville, but it’s important to understand what brought the people here and how it became what it is today,” Williams said. “I really believe that for a community to move forward, it has to acknowledge its past.

“When I started working on this so long ago, most of the people in Beacon Village had some sort of relationship to Beacon, whether it was through a home they inherited or their parents or grandparents worked at the mill,” she continued. “That’s not the case anymore. My only regret is that many of the people in the film are no longer alive, but I’m really happy we were able to capture their stories.”