Introduction

An aerial view of the American Enka Corporation, taken in the 1970s, after the factory had already expanded to include a nylon plant.¹

In November 2020, the residents of Enka-Candler complained to the mayor of Asheville, Esther Manheimer, about the plans to demolish the Enka Clock Tower. The Enka Clock Tower is the last-standing structure of the rayon and nylon factory run by the American Enka Corporation. As a result of their concerns, the clock tower will be preserved as a monument to the area’s industrial heritage.² While the historical memory of mill villages is of exploitative capitalism, Enka is uniquely remembered in what it gave to workers, rather than what it took from them.

“Nederlandsche Kunstzijdefabriek,” a Dutch rayon company looking to expand into the United States, came to Asheville in 1928 as the American Enka Corporation. Asheville was a hopping place to be in the 1920s—a period considered Asheville’s architectural boom.³ Many buildings downtown were finished in this time period and still recognizable today, such as the Grove Arcade, the Bon Marché department store which is now a hotel, the Flatiron building, and many more.⁴ However, when the stock market crashed in 1929, the Asheville economic boom went bust.

The Great Depression was devastating for the country, and certainly for Asheville, but some prominent businessmen were hopeful the city would return. One of these optimists, Fred Loring Seely, once said, “there is every reason for Asheville to go to work and look confidently to the future.”⁵ Seely convinced the Dutch rayon company to open their American location in Asheville. They chose the location for several reasons.

One thing Asheville has always had was pure water. The water quality was said to have healing properties which brought many people into the area for recreation and rejuvenation, but water was important to the American Enka Corporation for other reasons. “It takes a tremendous amount of water to manufacture rayon. I have heard that it takes as much as one hundred gallons to make a pound of rayon.”⁶ The water supply from Pisgah National Forest was clean and plentiful.

Additionally, Asheville had people looking for work.⁷ The Great Depression left many jobless, but Enka opened up the opportunity for steady employment. The plant was a large operation, yet it took less than a year to build and cost approximately $10,000,000. This investment in Western North Carolina resulted in a plant capable of employing 5,000 people with an annual pay roll of $6,000,000 a year.⁸

The American Enka Factory opened on July 1, 1929. At its opening, Enka had a thousand workers on payroll and it slowly hired more as they began producing more rayon. The original plant had twenty two hundred acres and it expanded in the 1940s and 1950s to include a nylon plant and additional locations.⁹ American Enka’s second location was in Morristown, Tennessee. Enka was one of the largest rayon plants in the world.

The American Enka Plant was more than a large rayon factory though, the mill village gave workers a place to stay, recreation, and services. The care Enka demonstrated for their workers helped integrate the factory into the community and maintained good relations for years to come. As a result, nearly a hundred years later, the community remains attached to the Clock Tower, which still stands as a physical reminder of the plant. This website is divided into sections that talk about these opportunities, such as Community Layout; Community Life; World War II; Labor Relations; the Oral History Interview; Conclusion; Bibliography; the Historiographical Essay; and Additional Resources.

1. Aerial View of American Enka Plant, Courtesy of Asheville Citizen-Times, accessed October 28, 2021.
2. John Boyle, “Enka Clock Tower Will Be Preserved, Planning Meeting Next Up,” Asheville Citizen Times, November 30, 2020.
3. Nan Chase, Asheville: A History (Contributions to Southern Appalachia Studies) (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2007), 91.
4. Chase, Asheville: A History, 93.
5. Chase, Asheville: A History, 112.
6. J. Wilson Ayers, interview by Dr. Louis Silveri, July 10, 1975, Southern Highlands Research Center Oral History Collection, D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville.
7. J. Wilson Ayers, interview by Dr. Louis Silveri, July 10, 1975.
8. The Robesonian (Lumberton, N.C.), September 27, 1928. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/86608151/ (accessed September 30, 2021).
9. J. Wilson Ayers, interviewed by Louis Silveri, July 10, 1975, transcript, Southern Highlands Research Center Oral History Collection, D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville, Asheville, NC.