THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY arose in Bloomsburg in the middle of the 19th century.  For a few generations, the town had silk mills and fabric mills, and by the 1950s the Magee Carpet Company’s fully-integrated factory south and west of Railroad and West 5th Streets employed between two and three thousand people in one of the largest such facilities in the world: Raw wool arrived by the railroad-car-load, and those employees cleaned, carded, spun, dyed, and wove it, in the end producing the highest-quality carpeting for both domestic and commercial use.  The company had its own designers on staff as well, and they worked with customers to create a fantastic range of patterns and colors – among them staid solids, a bowling-alley theme in black and white and orange, and multitudes of floral patterns, each in at least a dozen colors.

The 1970s brought changes.  The Magee family had already diversified their business interests under the Magee Industrial Enterprises banner, including by operating the Hotel Magee on Main Street in Bloom and more than a dozen Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips restaurants in the region as the franchisee.  In the mill, the production of carpeting for houses and theaters and stores gave way to the manufacture of flooring for automobiles and trucks.

The Magee family maintained control of the company until the late 1990s, when they took on a partner in the Swiss firm then known as Rieter Automotive Systems.  For many years, the mill’s output went solely to General Motors; this worked just fine while GM retained its status as the world’s biggest carmaker, but as foreign competition eroded GM’s market share, this hurt Magee-Rieter.  In 2005, the Magee family sold its remaining shares of the company, and in 2011 Rieter spun off its automotive business to create Autoneum, still Swiss-owned and now with about 13,000 employees worldwide and fifty-five manufacturing facilities in North and South America, Asia, and Europe.  Autoneum North America has plants in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, Ontario, and Mexico, and its customers include almost all of the world’s automakers, from Acura and Audi to Volvo and VW and all of the U.S. Big Three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler, the last-named now officially Fiat Chrysler and a part of the oddly-named Dutch firm Stellantis).

Always vulnerable to flooding, the mill took on substantial water in the hurricanes of 1936 (which happened before we named such storms) and 1972 (Agnes), although neither of them topped the flood of 1904; the 2011 flood following Tropical Storm Lee broke all records, measured at 32.75 feet on the gauge at the Bloomsburg Airport (compared to an estimated 32.70 for 1904, 31.20 for Agnes, and 27.80 in 1936).  Six feet of water inundated the first floor of the old buildings in the Lee flood; the first floor of most of the newest buildings sit higher, but not six feet higher, and Autoneum had to invest $60 million in the cleanup effort – but the fact that they did so speaks to the reliance that Autoneum has on the mostly unionized Bloomsburg workforce and the high quality of their production.  The level of employment at the mill has fluctuated in recent years, as demand has ebbed and flowed and as productivity and efficiency have increased; the number working at the mill now, about 650 in three shifts, has fallen from 750 a few years ago.

The photo above, made by Dallin Aerial Surveys in May of 1936 (a month and a half after that year’s flood) and now owned by the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, shows the mill before its major post-war expansion.  At that time, company houses lined Magee Avenue running south from 5th Street west of the mill, and the mill property itself occupied about fifteen acres, eight of them under roof.  The oldest buildings on the site date to 1889, and all of the pre-World War II buildings share the classic mill “look”: red-brick facades including acres of windows from the days before fluorescent lighting.  The mill complex today extends across more than fifty acres; the primarily single-story manufacturing buildings erected since World War II cover fifteen of those acres under roof.  Typical of their era, they have yellow-brick and steel siding unadorned by even windows.  The old red-brick buildings all remain standing, housing offices and storage and, as you see in this exhibition, hundreds of thousands of square feet of beautiful and heartbreakingly empty space.