By Mike Drummond
LENOIR, N.C. – Nan McCall chuckles when asked if Lenoir’s better days lie ahead. It’s the gallows laugh of someone confronting an uncertain future.


“It will be a ghost town,” said McCall, laid off from a furniture plant last summer.

Broyhill Furniture Industries recently said it will close its Lenoir plant and lay off about 700 by August. Plant closings and cutbacks over the past five years have toppled the major pillar supporting Lenoir’s economy.

Where there were once more than a dozen big factories producing bedroom, dining-room and living-room sets, the Lenoir area now has one.

“The Furniture Capital of the South” is suffering from an identity crisis.

As it struggles to reinvent itself, sentiment remains uneasily divided.

Will it be another Flint, the Michigan city left for dead in the ’80s and ’90s when General Motors downsized?

Or will a downtown face-lift and a plan to lure retirees trigger a renaissance?

McCall, 55, dropped out of high school to work in Lenoir furniture factories – a familiar path in Carolina’s textile towns. Like scores of others, she’s now attending GED classes.

She says she’s resigned to making $6.75 an hour as a cashier. As a furniture finisher, she used to make $14 an hour.

Some of Lenoir’s big factories still upholster furniture or serve as partial assembly plants or distribution warehouses. But the labor-intensive days of turning trees into tables are over.

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