The Rayon Plant That Made and Marked a Town

For half a century, the economic heart of Front Royal was not the river or the mountains but a sprawling chemical and textile plant on the edge of town. Construction began in nineteen thirty seven on an American Viscose facility to manufacture rayon, the artificial silk spun from wood pulp, and at its peak it was one of the largest rayon producers in the country. When it began operating around nineteen forty, it quickly became the largest employer in the entire region, and it stayed that way for more than twenty years.

During the Second World War the federal government ran the plant, producing materials for the war effort, including the tire cord that reinforced military tires. In the nineteen seventies the operation became known as Avtex Fibers, born of one of the earliest leveraged buyouts in American business history. But the same chemistry that made the rayon left a heavy legacy.

The plant discharged pollution that contaminated the ground and the Shenandoah River, and after waves of layoffs shrank the workforce from around thirteen hundred people in nineteen eighty eight to fewer than five hundred, the plant closed in November of nineteen eighty nine. The abandoned site became a federal Superfund cleanup, one of the largest in Virginia. Today, after long remediation, that scarred ground is being reborn as trails and open space, an ordinary looking piece of land that carries the full arc of a company town's rise and fall.