West Point: From Textile Capital to Kia Country
Georgia
West Point, Georgia, sits where the Chattahoochee River crosses what was once the boundary between Georgia and Alabama, and where one of the Civil War's final battles was fought in April of eighteen sixty-five, a story told at the Fort Tyler earthworks nearby. But the longer story of West Point is about what comes after wars end and industries die, and what a town does when it runs out of reasons to exist.
The town was established in eighteen thirty-two as a railroad crossing point on the Chattahoochee. Trains loaded with cotton, cattle, and passengers had to stop here to transfer between rail lines, and a small city grew up around that enforced pause: hotels, warehouses, a bank, eventually an opera house.
After the Civil War, the same river that had once powered the Creek Nation's fishing weirs began powering textile mills. Through the late eighteen hundreds and into the twentieth century, West Point became a mill town, then a mill city. At its peak, the textile operations here were producing most of the bedsheets and bath towels sold by major American retailers. The company Westpoint Stevens claimed to be one of the oldest and largest textile manufacturers in the country.
Then the industry moved offshore. Between nineteen ninety-seven and two thousand seven, nearly five thousand textile jobs disappeared from the Chattahoochee Valley. The last cotton mill closed in two thousand eight. West Point faced becoming a ghost town.
Instead it became something unexpected. In two thousand six, Kia Motors announced that it would build its first North American manufacturing facility here. The plant opened in two thousand nine, on the site of a former textile mill. It eventually created more than fifteen thousand direct and indirect jobs and generated an estimated four billion dollars in annual economic impact for the region.
West Point had spent a century and a half making things with its hands, first with cotton, then with steel and circuits. The river is still there. The work continues.
