Nearly a century ago, a sparsely populated farming and railroad community in the Appalachian Mountains was changed forever, when Charles D. Owen II relocated his family’s textile mill from New Bedford, Massachusetts to Swannanoa. At one-million-square-feet, Beacon Manufacturing soon became the center of a thriving unincorporated village between the train tracks and Swannanoa River, where generations of factory employees and their families lived, played and worked, side-by-side.
Few people have dedicated as much time and effort to understanding how its identity as a mill town shaped the future and present of Swannanoa as filmmaker Rebecca Williams, who is will screen her award-winning documentary, “Blanket Town: The Rise and Fall of an American Mill Town,” at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 21. The event, hosted by the Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance in the former Methodist Church at 216 Whitson Avenue, is free to the public, while donations for the project will be accepted.
The documentary was produced over 12 years by Williams and her husband Jerald Pope, who moved to Swannanoa in the early 2000s. Like many of their neighbors, the couple gathered around the former site of the mill, which had been shuttered for more than a year, after a fire that raged for days destroyed the structure in September of 2003. Amidst the devastation of one of the largest structure fires in N.C. history, they were compelled to understand the overwhelming sense of grief they encountered among the longtime residents gathered at the scene…