Enka: A Dutch Rayon Empire in the Blue Ridge

In nineteen twenty-eight, a Dutch company called the Nederlandse Kunstzijdefabriek chose a two-thousand-acre site in the Hominy Valley west of Asheville, North Carolina, to build what would become the nation's largest rayon producer. The company name was derived from the Dutch pronunciation of its initials, N and K, spoken aloud: Enka. The American subsidiary was called American Enka.

The plant opened in nineteen twenty-nine, just months before the Great Depression hit. Instead of shutting down, American Enka became a lifeline, employing about nineteen hundred workers during the Depression at a time when most of the region had nothing. The company built a planned village of worker housing, schools, and recreational facilities. It was one of the Depression-era South's more unusual industrial success stories, a foreign-owned rayon town tucked into the Appalachian foothills that kept a corner of western North Carolina employed. The man who helped bring the factory here was an Asheville businessman named Fred Loring Seely, who had met Dutch businessmen in Java back in nineteen oh one. The company picked the Hominy Valley for its water supply and its labor, sent Seely more than a million dollars to buy the two thousand acres, and spent ten million dollars on the plant. Employment climbed to forty-three hundred after the Second World War and at one point reached about seven thousand. Workers had a gym, a bowling alley, a library, and two cafeterias, and the company built a lake to supply the plant with water. Rayon was no longer made here by two thousand seven. Developers tore down nearly everything except the clock tower, and three former plant buildings now house a campus of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College. The plant later passed to BASF in nineteen eighty-five.