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The Textile South lies along the banks of the Haw and the Deep.

Visit these hidden spots in Jamestown and in a hamlet east of us called Glencoe, and you'll see up close the life of a mill hand in the scuffed floors, the huge machines and tiny snuff toothbrushes made out of sweet gum.

This textile way of life started before the Civil War. Generations of families were fed by -- and ultimately survived on - the fabric created and the yarn spun from the cotton picked in some field, near and far.

Today, that textile way of life has all but vanished. Mill hands and textile plants remain. But for many, it's just memories preserved in music, verse and film.

You'll see some of that tonight.

Community college educators from across the South will gather for a three-day conference at the Marriott in downtown Greensboro. The conference will begin with "Mill Voices," a free presentation about the Textile South.

Or really the Vanishing South.

You see it in the numbers and in the news. Yet, over the past 150 years, this vanishing way of life molded the South we know and the people we meet.

Like Phil Clodfelter.

He's a Ragsdale High grad, a 52-year-old father of three who manages the Oakdale Cotton Mills, considered the longest continuously running cotton mill in the United States.

Oakdale Cotton Mills, perched along the banks of the Deep River in Jamestown, started in 1865. Clodfelter has worked there nearly 32 years.

The plant still dyes twine and yarn and makes the fabric used for shoulder straps, shoulder harnesses and conveyor belts. But today, the plant has just 18 employees in a cavernous space that covers nearly 120,000 square feet.

Clodfelter will tell you Oakdale is still hanging on. But he'll also mention the strangers who slip into the office unannounced, ask about a tour and say along the way, "My grandmother used to work here."

You sense the same thing in Glencoe, the mill village just outside Burlington. The cotton mill started in 1882 and closed in 1954.

Yet, even today, in a reconstructed mill village, where residents from as far away as California have come to live, the voices of the mill hands still resonate.

Ann Hobgood, a Glencoe resident and a longtime educator, has found them for her oral history project.

The Textile Heritage Museum at Glencoe along the Haw River has found them, too. Except they're more like echoes in this renovated company store where trinkets of textile history cover every inch.

This spring, the Historic Jamestown Society will screen a $30,000, 30-minute documentary that took three years to create. In that documentary,"Oakdale

Cotton Mills: Close-Knit Neighbors," you'll hear stories.

Clodfelter will tell a few.

"You talk to the people who have retired now, and they'll all say, 'It's about time someone's getting these down' because these stories could be lost," Clodfelter said. "They're just priceless."

So are the stories in verse created by North Carolina poet Barbara Presnell.

She's a lecturer at UNC-Charlotte, a graduate of the MFA program at UNCG and a daughter of a textile plant manager in Asheboro. She saw textile life firsthand.

In 2007, in her first book of poetry called "Piece Work," she wrote about mill hands named Pauline and Charlie and slipped into dialect, slang and working-class angst at almost every line.

The result: A piece of work that feels as gritty and authentic as vintage Bruce Springsteen.

"Piece Work" has won awards. But to Presnell, the best compliment she got came after a reading in Charlotte.

It came from the audience, during a question-and-answer session, from a woman who raised her hand.

"I'm from Pillowtex, and I'm one of those people in this book," she told Presnell. "I want you to know what she said is exactly the way it is."

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com