Economic History: Timber, Textiles, and Transformation

Andalusia’s economy tells the story of how small Southern cities rode successive waves of resource extraction and manufacturing, adapted when those waves receded, and figured out how to keep going when the old formulas stopped working. From the longleaf pine wilderness that made millionaires in the 1890s to the textile mills that hummed through mid-century to the more modest but more stable mix of employers today, the city’s economic history is one of boom, decline, and pragmatic reinvention.

The Longleaf Pine Empire (1880s-1930s)

Before Andalusia was Andalusia, this was longleaf pine country—a seemingly endless forest that stretched across the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas. The trees grew straight and tall, their resinous heartwood perfect for ship masts, railroad ties, and construction lumber. By the 1880s, after Northern timber barons had exhausted the white pine forests of Michigan and Wisconsin, they turned south.

The longleaf boom built Andalusia. When the railroad arrived in 1899 (Central of Georgia, later L&N), the town had about 600 people. Within two decades it had grown to 2,500, powered entirely by timber money. Sawmills sprang up wherever a spur line could reach the forest. Log trains hauled massive virgin pines out of the woods. Mill towns formed around the big operations, with company housing, company stores, and paychecks that cycled right back to the company.

The naval stores industry ran parallel to lumber. Turpentine camps dotted the forest, where workers cut diagonal slashes into living pines and collected the resin that bled out. The crude gum went to distilleries that separated it into turpentine (for paint thinner and industrial solvents) and rosin (for soap, paper sizing, and a hundred other uses). It was brutal work, often done by Black laborers under exploitative lease labor arrangements that resembled convict labor in all but name. The camps moved every few years as they worked out a stand of trees, leaving behind scarred pines and exhausted soil.

By the 1920s, the longleaf forest was mostly gone. Timber companies had cut nearly everything worth cutting, replanting nothing, moving on to the next stand. What fire suppression and intensive logging didn’t eliminate, land conversion to agriculture finished off. Across the South, longleaf pine ecosystems—which once covered 90 million acres—shrank to less than 3% of their original range. Covington County went from forest to cutover land to farm fields in a single generation.

The boom left behind sawdust piles, abandoned mill sites, and an economy that had to figure out what came next. But it also left railroads, capital, and a generation of people who’d learned that Andalusia could be more than a crossroads.

Agricultural Interlude: Cotton, Boll Weevil, Peanuts

As timber faded, agriculture stepped in—but not smoothly. Cotton had been the cash crop of the South since before the Civil War, and newly cleared land seemed perfect for it. Covington County farmers planted cotton across the cutover pine barrens through the 1910s.

Then the boll weevil arrived. The insect had been moving east from Texas since the 1890s, devastating cotton fields as it went. It reached Covington County around 1915, and within a few years cotton farming was essentially finished. Yields collapsed. Farmers couldn’t make payments. Rural communities emptied out.

The response—memorialized in the famous Boll Weevil Monument in nearby Enterprise—was diversification. Farmers shifted to peanuts, corn, sweet potatoes, truck crops, and livestock. The agricultural economy became more stable, if less lucrative. Peanut farming in particular took hold, supported by crop rotation practices and eventually by federal price supports.

Poultry farming arrived later, in the mid-20th century, and became a major part of the county’s agricultural economy. Contract growers raised chickens for large integrators, a model that still persists but concentrates profits upstream while farmers carry most of the risk and debt.

Agriculture never made Andalusia wealthy, but it kept the rural economy functional and provided a baseline of economic activity when other sectors stumbled.

The Textile Era: Shirts, Mills, and a Thousand Jobs (1930s-1990s)

Textiles were the industry that really defined mid-century Andalusia. The story begins with John G. Scherf, a Montgomery businessman who opened a shirt factory in Andalusia in 1939. The Andalusia Shirt Company employed about 150 people making men’s dress shirts. The business model was simple: cheap Southern labor, modern sewing machines, and access to national markets via rail.

The plant changed hands and names several times—Andalusia Manufacturing Company, then Ala-Tex Shirt Corporation—and by the 1960s it was a major operation employing 500-600 people. At its peak, the Ala-Tex plant produced more than a million shirts per year. Walk into any department store in the Southeast and you’d find Andalusia-made shirts on the racks.

Other textile operations followed. Multiple garment factories and a carpet tufting mill employed hundreds more. The mills paid better than farm labor or retail work, offered steady hours, and didn’t require a college degree. Women especially found opportunities in the sewing plants—though “opportunities” is relative when you’re talking about piecework quotas and minimal benefits. Still, for a generation of Andalusia families, the shirt factory paycheck was what kept the mortgage paid and the kids in school.

The textile boom was never going to last. By the 1980s, global competition was undercutting domestic garment manufacturing. NAFTA in 1994 accelerated the shift, making it cheaper to produce clothing in Mexico, and later in Central America and Asia. One by one, the mills closed or downsized. Ala-Tex shut down in 1997. Other plants followed.

The human cost was real. Workers in their 40s and 50s, who’d spent their entire careers on a sewing line, found themselves without jobs and without skills that transferred to other industries. Younger people saw the writing on the wall and left for college or for cities with more diversified economies. The tax base shrank. Downtown storefronts emptied.

Andalusia wasn’t unique in this. Every small Southern city with a mill had the same story. But that didn’t make it any easier.

Shaw Industries: What Stayed

One textile operation that did survive—though in reduced form—was the Shaw Industries carpet plant. Shaw, a Georgia-based carpet manufacturer that became part of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in 2001, has maintained a facility in Andalusia for decades. The plant produces residential and commercial carpet, employing somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-300 people depending on market conditions.

Shaw represents something important: a connection to the city’s manufacturing past that didn’t completely disappear. The jobs aren’t as numerous as they once were, and automation has reduced the workforce, but the plant is still there, still making things, still providing paychecks.

It’s also a reminder of how manufacturing has changed. The Shaw plant is more automated, more specialized, and more integrated into a global supply chain than the old shirt factories ever were. It requires fewer workers, but those workers need more technical skills. The equation of “show up, work hard, get paid” has evolved into “show up with the right training, operate complex equipment, get paid.”

What the Boom-and-Bust Cycle Teaches

If there’s a lesson in Andalusia’s economic history, it’s that single-industry dependence is dangerous. Timber crashed when the trees ran out. Cotton collapsed when the boll weevil hit. Textiles evaporated when globalization made offshore production cheaper. Each time, the city had to scramble to find the next thing.

The modern economy—anchored by healthcare, education, government, and a mix of smaller employers—is less dramatic but more resilient. Andalusia Health doesn’t employ as many people as the shirt factories did at their peak, but it’s not going to offshore the emergency room to Vietnam. The school system isn’t subject to international competition. The city and county governments provide stable employment that doesn’t vanish when market conditions shift.

This is the trade-off: fewer opportunities for rapid growth, but also fewer catastrophic collapses. It’s not the story anyone tells in economic development brochures, but it’s the story that Andalusia has lived.

The challenge now is whether a city of 8,800 people, with a median household income of $26,856 and a poverty rate above 20%, can build enough economic opportunity to keep young people from leaving, attract new residents, and maintain the quality of life that makes the place worth staying in. That’s the question that downtown revitalization projects, broadband initiatives, and industrial park recruitment efforts are all trying to answer.

The timber barons and mill owners are gone. What’s left is a community trying to figure out how to make a living in an economy that doesn’t hand out easy answers anymore.