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I wouldn't have known about the Textile Heritage Center in Cooleemee had I not moseyed up to Spencer last spring for the Rail Days observance at the North Carolina Transportation Museum.

Walter Turner, the transportation museum's historian, offered to take Miss Peggy and me on a short drive up U.S. 601 from Salisbury to Cooleemee, a quiet little town where the Yadkin River stumbles across the Fall Line with enough force to drive a cotton mill.

It was there that the Duke family invested in a mill to tap into the growing Southern textile industry. The investment poured dollars into Duke coffers to join the revenue from the family's tobacco and electric-power interests. It also provided jobs for the dirt-poor residents of the area who had been left in the throes of poverty since the War Between the States.

Cooleemee became part of a Southwide culture that centered on the textile mill. The brick structures loomed over their surrounding villages like castles over medieval estates and provided the lifeblood of the community. The textile workers looked to the mill for their livelihoods, their recreation and such public utilities as were available.

The mill at Cooleemee turned cotton fiber into cloth from around 1900 until 1969, when its eventual owner, Burlington Mills, closed it down, blaming foreign competition. The mill and its village enjoyed a close relationship during those years.

As the mill was being erected and the Yadkin was being dammed, the Duke founders were also building houses for the mill help. By 1934, the village consisted of around 350 homes. The mill villages across the South were the magnets that drew a massive immigration of people leaving their dirt farms and forsaking annual harvests for weekly paychecks. The family of Dora Cope (I mistakenly referred to her last week as Dora Coke) helped build the houses, then helped run the mill. Dora's father, John Cope, built a crude shack on the site of the village, where he lived, probably with his five sons, while construction was under way. Later he moved his family into one of the houses. It was his daughter Dora who won a battle with the mill company by insisting that it live up to its promise to give her a job as a weaver -- a position normally limited to men.

By the time the mill closed, the textile industry was on the decline in the South. Newer industries with higher-paying jobs were siphoning off the workers, and low-wage foreign competition was winning out in the marketplace in much the same way the Southern mills, with their cheap labor, vanquished their New England competitors.

The exodus of textile jobs had its impact on the Cooleemee culture. In 1990, about 70 percent of the town's population had textile roots. That percentage has been severely diluted since then, and Jim and Lynn Rumley are doing their best to preserve the memory and spirit of the mill town.

The Rumleys have been trying to correct that situation through the Textile Heritage Center, with headquarters in the Zachary House, once the home of the mill's plant manager. The center strengthens the cultural ties between the old mill and the new population through three-day programs for schoolchildren. They capture the flavor of mill-village life by slopping hogs, washing clothes in black iron wash pots and engaging in archaeological digs.

They can also get a glimpse of what it was like to live in a mill house. The Heritage Center includes a restored mill house, with furnishings typical of those in the houses of the '30s and '40s.

Rumley took me into the "big room," furnished with a double bed, a bureau, a chifforobe, a Singer sewing machine with foot-operated treadle, and a shallow fireplace designed for coal fires. There was a "Grandma's room" with a rocking chair, chest of drawers and a bed with a thin spread. A third room included a wooden bedstead with rope springs, a metal bedstead with metal springs and three children's chairs. The kitchen included a table, an ironing board and a wood cook stove.

As I've written about the mill culture, I've received a chorus of "amens" from people around the South who grew up with lint in their hair.

It's true that the mill houses tended to go to the long-term loyal workers, but not all who lived outside the villages were vagrants. Many mill workers lived miles away on their own farms. They worked their land, raised hogs and cows, and still put in 40-hour weeks at the mill. During the Depression, when many mills either closed or curtailed operations to a minimum, my grandfather -- with 14 kids to support -- would travel the region looking for work and would return home on weekends with enough money to buy staples. My mother remembers that the family often subsisted on corn-meal mush during the week. Her younger sibling would say, "I'll be glad when Daddy comes home and we can have rice."

A visit to Cooleemee will put the smell of sweat and cotton lint back in the nostrils of memory. Jim Rumley has written a book, "Cooleemee: The Life and Times of a Mill Town," which captures a lot of history and flavor. If you visit him at the Zachary House, tell him Gene sent you.

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com