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City honors past, looks to future What happens when a town on the verge takes a plunge toward the future?
By Judith Sheppard
You are about to read about a place on the verge. Thirty years ago, Valley,cut itself away from Chambers County in east Alabama a n d stitched i t s e l f together from four small villages built around Judith four masSheppard sive mills on the Chattahoochee River, a brown ribbon rushing by on its way to the blue Gulf of Mexico. Some people saw it as a long time coming. The two ends of the county were nothing alike. The hilly north part of the county was (and still is) rural, with long roads and wide fields separating communities, sparsely populated by farming families who mostly toiled alone out in the fields, at the mercy of whatever the weather and their own skill and strength could allow. The south end of Chambers, the part that lies next the river, was industrial, not agricultural. Everyone worked for “the Company,” the textile manufacturing giant, WestPoint Pepperell. People lived in identical houses in neighborhoods tightly built so that the workers could walk to their jobs. They worked the same shifts, made about the same money and lived by the mill whistle that so sharply divided the day into hours that, because the mill offices were on “the Georgia side of the river,” everyone on “the Alabama side of the river” still lives on Eastern time. They had nearly everything they needed, from water to telephones to baseball fields to Christmas candy, and they knitted together in a social system impossible to achieve in a sprawling county. The government in the other part of the county, concerned mostly with roads and
bridges and the sheriff’s office, could not provide the services the larger populace in a town needs. So, in a great and difficult maneuver, they pulled apart. But not long after that, the earth shifted beneath Valley’s feet. As they must have learned in the Sunday School classes in the churches the Company built for them, foundations should be built on rock. Who could have believed the company the Laniers built and ran like a distant but kindly father – who may not give you everything you want, perhaps, but would give you everything you need –could crumble? In the “greed is good” world that now exists, businesses run like families are built on sand. They disappear. In this world, that reality is so brutal that even now people here can hardly believe it. So. What now? Read this. Then turn the page. In this publication, you are going to read about a hundred, or more, answers to that question. You will meet some extraordinary people, young and old. There may be people somewhere else in this country as dedicated to pulling a town to its feet, dusting it off and shoving it into a prosperous future as this group you’re about to read about, but don’t bet on it. The city honors and the grants they have already won speak for them. And they just keep asking for help, talking to everyone who will listen to them about the history they want to preserve and the future they see: Kayaking on the stretch of the Chattahoochee that now flows by the mills unimpeded. Turning the bleakly beautiful old mills into brightly lit shops for artists and local businesses and loft apartments. Unveiling extraordinary murals of mill life left by Margaret Bourke-White on the walls of what used to be a Company chemical lab, endangered by other owner-
Honoring the Past Section 2 Page 9
Photo by Chris Walker
The Chattahoochee River is a source of life and recreation for Valley residents. Its flowing waters are what brought mill owners to the area many years ago and eventually provided power for all four mills. ship. Capitalizing on their location off I-85 between Atlanta and Auburn, near a major new Korean auto plant. Telling people about the enduring work that black stone masons left in place
here, the echoes of astonishing experiences of generations of boy scouts, the extraordinary baseball league made up of young millworker athletes, the strange and funny traditions
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that get built when a huge group of people live and work so close together. Read on. You may be about to witness what happens when a town on the verge takes a
plunge toward the future.
Sheppard is an associate professor in the Auburn University Department of Journalism. She teaches the advanced feature writing classes that contributed to this special edition.
Focusing on the Future Section 4 Page 25