ALUMINUM FOILED

Business, North Carolina, Nov 01, 2002 by Speizer, Irwin

David Summerlin grins as he points out items in an Alcoa salesman's wooden sample case: a rod and piston, a jar lid, a handful of nuts and bolts, a packet of aluminum foil, even a tiny bas-relief portrait of Teddy Roosevelt. They are on display in the Badin Historic Museum, a converted one-room schoolhouse, with other mementos - many collected by Summerlin - of the business that built this place. Where many Carolina mill towns were spun from cotton, little Badin, near the center of the state on the edge of the Uwharrie National Forest, was cast in aluminum.

"At one time, Alcoa looked after everything here," says the brawny, tanned retiree, who spent nearly 30 years at Alcoa Inc.'s Badin Works. "They owned the streets, the sidewalks, the sewer system, everything." Alcoa built Badin's school and its long-gone opera house. It built the hospital, which now serves as an Alcoa conference center, and hilltop quarters for engineers that is now part of Stanly County Country Club. One of its dams on the Yadkin River created Badin Lake.

But Pittsburgh-based Alcoa doesn't look after everything anymore. Now most of its plant, sprawling over 125 acres, is idle and probably will close in the next several years, leaving an abandoned industrial site that stretches nearly a mile along the main road into out-of-the-way Badin, a town of about 1,500 residents just north of Albemarle. On Aug. 9, Alcoa shut down the smelter, the heart of the plant. Badin Works will continue to make carbon electrodes, used in smelting, for other plants. That means 150 of the 400 workers keep their jobs - for now.

"It is a matter of weighing the viability of the plant over a course of years," says Dana Kessler, its human-resources manager. "It is not a shutdown at this point, but I'm not saying it may not become a shutdown years down the road."

Until Alcoa makes a final decision, the smelter - veterans such as Summerlin call it the "pot room" - will be kept ready to fire up on short notice, says Paul Campbell, president of Alcoa Primary Metals Southeast Region. That will depend on aluminum prices rebounding, but the fate of other old plants bodes badly. When Alcoa announced its plans for Badin, the company said it was closing plants in Texas and Oregon that it had idled earlier. Like Badin, they can no longer compete.

Alcoa declares its presence as soon as you cross the city limits. Right after the town's welcome sign comes the company's and, just beyond that, one telling truckers making pickups and deliveries which radio frequency to tune to. Then the plant itself comes into view, looming like a castle over a medieval village. It's all towers and sheds, many of them sheathed in corrugated aluminum.

Beside the plant, the tiny business district pales. There's a convenience store, across from the gates, a cafe just around the comer and a pizza place a block away. An employee credit union is tucked into the middle of the block. About the only businesses that don't seem dependent upon the plant are an art gallery, an antique store and a radiator shop. Alcoa is the principal landlord. It still owns most of the commercial property.

Two-thirds of Badin's property taxes about $182,000 a year comes from the company. That's nearly a third of the town's revenue, enough to pay for the six-cop police force. Alcoa owns the 5,500-acre lake, four hydroelectric dams on the river and 37,000 acres of land, including the plant site. It will keep generating and selling electricity, even if the plant never reopens. But it has no plans, a spokesman insists, to develop the real estate, as Duke Energy has done with land it owns.

Badin began French and shows its Gallic roots in its design. Streets are wide, with sidewalks. Along them cluster twostory, four-unit apartment buildings, not rows of shotgun shacks. "Most of the mill villages in North Carolina are fairly standard - white frame houses with three or four rooms, not much variety in the architecture," says Brent Glass, a Pennsylvania historian who studied the town while working on his doctorate at UNC Chapel Hill. "The neocolonial style of Badin is unique. I don't think there is much like it in the country."

Mayor Tom Garrison, whose father ran a general store in the building that is now City Hall, says the town is trying to find a way to pin its future to its past, figuring tourists might be interested in its French roots. Maybe one of the old four-plex apartment buildings can be converted into a bed-andbreakfast. History is one thing Badin has plenty of. In fact, its past is far richer than its present.

As an industrial site, few places can trace their roots back so far. Manufacturing, of a sort, began here at least 10,000 years ago when Indians, attracted by the granitelike rhyolite washed down from the Uwharrie Mountains, established a camp where the Yadkin narrows and began chipping spear points. Called the Hardaway Site, it has yielded almost 2 million artifacts. It is the oldest archeological site in the state.

In 1796, English historian and cartographer William Winterbotham noticed its potential. "The River Yadkin is reduced ... about twenty-five miles to the southward of [Salisbury] to the width of eighty or one hundred feet. For two miles it is narrow and rapid ... . Perhaps there is not in the United States a more eligible situation for a large manufacturing town." A century later, Barry Cornwall Hambley noticed the same thing. An English mining engineer who came to Salisbury in 1887 and branched into other ventures, including a railroad, cotton mill and bank, he saw the Narrows as the perfect spot for a hydroelectric dam.