BY
Design
Heir to the Loom In a withering textile market, Jack King continues his family’s legacy with American-made clothing manufacturing company L.C. King / by Steven Tingle // photography by Eli Warren
I
f you ask Jack King if he ever thought he’d wind up in the clothing business, he’ll answer you with two curt words: “Absolutely not!” It’s true, but it’s also hard to believe; the business seems to run in the King blood. In 1913, Jack’s great-grandfather, Landon Clayton (L.C.) King, and a pattern-maker named Lockwood, started a cut-and-sew factory in downtown Bristol, Tennessee. The following year the company trademarked the “Pointer” brand for its line of workwear. The business expanded, and over the next ninety years, L.C., then his sons, and then his grandsons, managed the operation. But Jack wasn’t interested. “I didn’t want to be in that factory,” he says. “I wanted to open up a food import-export business in Singapore.” Today Jack is not in Southeast Asia. He’s in eastern Tennessee, serving as the president and sole owner of the L.C. King Manufacturing Company, the oldest cut-and-sew textile mill in America still run by the
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