Old General Electric plant, a relic of Conover's past, is demolished

The site, which manufactured ground-mounted transformers, employed as many as 1,200 at its height in the late ’60s from all over the area, some from as far away as Kings Mountain.

“Twelve-hundred people at one plant was just about unheard of back then,” Joie Fulbright said, who is a 28-year employee at the plant and current Conover city councilman.

Fulbright was on the line when the last three units were finished just before it closed — “It was just getting finished. We had a job we had to get done,” he said.

Over the years, production demand slowed, employment dropped to just a few hundred, Fulbright said.

GE determined the Hickory factory was no longer profitable, and in 1997, the company moved the plant to Monterrey, Mexico.

“It had been expected,” Scott Millar said, president of the Catawba County Economic Development Corporation. “It had been on a decline for the last decade during the ’90s.”

Many in the community placed blame on the fact that workers at the plant had unionized, keeping wages high and picketing more than once to bolster the workers’ standing in contract negotiations.

The longest strike lasted 101 days from 1969 to 1970.

But the union, which formed in 1958, wasn’t the only factor in the plant’s closing.

Fulbright concedes that GE was the first to leave, but non-unionized furniture factories and hosiery mills soon followed.

“It was all due to globalization and costs,” Millar said. “I’m not sure that the whole issue was unionization. It was just (GE could) get this done elsewhere for cheaper and so that was the decision-making factor.”

The closing took its toll, particularly in the L’Echo Park area of Conover, where many who worked at the plant lived.

“There’s a whole lot of houses in there and they were all developed in that period of time when GE was thriving,” Millar said. “I would say clearly that there’s 170-acres, or thereabout, along Fairgrove Church Road that suddenly became, in essence, a ghost town.”

When GE left, it took with them lots of high-paying jobs.

An advertisement in a 1977 edition of the Statesville Record & Landmark offered $3.05 an hour starting pay for factory workers, the equivalent to almost $12 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

And they weren’t the only ones. A printing plant in Newton closed on the same day, Millar said—luckily, the economy was in a position to take the hit.

“That happened during an economic upturn and so that was at a time when unemployment was very low,” he said. “So, a lot of those jobs could be absorbed. Had those same impacts been felt particularly in 2002 or 2008, it certainly would have been catastrophic.”

The more than 142-acre parcel sat untouched for close to two decades after the plant shut down. Now, the plant is being razed.

It started coming down in January, being torn down by NorthStar Demolition.

Fulbright said he isn’t exactly sad to see it go.

“I see the opportunity for future growth in that area,” he said.

The site is contaminated with chlorinated solvents, a side effect of the type of manufacturing and location of a landfill onsite — not uncommon in this part of the state, Conover City Manager Donald Duncan said.

Measures are in place to keep toxins contained, he said, with groundwater treatment that cleans the water, then sends it to the city sewer system to be cleaned again before being released into the watershed.

Duncan is working to get the right-of-way from GE and other property owners in the area to build a road, which he says could help area business. It’s something that’s been a part of Conover’s future plans for years.

“It would open up other lots for future industrial properties for future employment,” he said.

It would also alleviate industrial traffic congestion at the thoroughfare near Fairgrove Church Road and Interstate 40. Though, such a project could take years to complete.

“It takes decades to get something built,” he said, noting that gaining the right-of-way, likely to be donated to the city from GE in accordance with a previous agreement, would advance the project many years.