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The machines have all stopped moving. The parking lot is empty. Oakdale Cotton Mills, once the longest continuously operated cotton mill in the United States, closed in July, its rural Jamestown location finally quiet.

More than two years before it closed, there was a movement afoot to document it and the mill village culture. The result is "Oakdale Cotton Mills: Close-Knit Neighbors," a documentary directed by Mary Dalton, an associate professor of communications at Wake Forest University.

The film premiers Tuesday at Wake Forest.

The project originally started in 2006 when Jamestown residents Patricia Koehler and Mary Browning became interested in the history of Oakdale Cotton Mills.

"We put our heads together and said we need to do something about collecting the mill's history," Browning said. She and Koehler immediately thought about a documentary film because they were interested in oral history. They then secured some funding from the Jamestown Historical Society. That process also led them eventually to write "Oakdale Cotton Mills," a book full of photographs and documents depicting the history of the mill, out this month from Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America" series.

"Up to that point, we had been thinking amateur, just a hand-held camera, but we decided to contact Mary Dalton, a professional, and when we told her about the project, her eyes lit up," Browning says.

Dalton is the co-director of a new documentary film program (slated to begin at Wake Forest in fall 2010), and she brought her experience and credentials to the project. The resulting product is a 26-minute film that captures the memories and lifestyle of a vanishing Southern institution -- the mill village.

"Jamestown feels like my hometown since I moved there when I was 9, and that was an interesting experience for me while working on the film," Dalton says. "I knew some of the people but not that part of their lives. This project meant a lot to me to be able to do."

The film captures the people of Oakdale Cotton Mills, giving them the opportunity to tell their own stories about hard work, community and growing up in the village. The filmmaker explores the nostalgia about a way of life that, even before the mill closed, most knew was slipping away.

"People talked a lot about the working environment, but the thing that kept coming up was that 'It felt like one big family,' " Dalton says. "They talked about their fondest memories, doing a lot of things like making your own toys, going from house to house in the neighborhood, and these were things that they felt that a lot of kids miss out on now."

The film was primarily shot two summers ago, and the mill gave permission for the filmmaker to document the grounds and buildings. Thus, the story of Oakdale Cotton Mills is told against a backdrop that makes the telling powerful -- the mill itself and the surrounding village, well-known sites for the residents of Jamestown but still a separate community in a lot of ways.

This is Dalton's ninth film, and she has great respect for the people of Oakdale and wanted to give them a medium through which their story could be told.

"Our motto for the Documentary Film Program is 'filmmakers passionate about telling stories,' " Dalton says.

Passion for place and story is what brought this film to the screen, a story told just in time.

 

Contact Stephanie Burt at charlotteghost@gmail.com

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