I wouldn’t have known about the Textile Heritage Center in Cooleemee, N.C., had I not moseyed up to Spencer, N.C., last spring for the Rail Days observance at the North Carolina Transportation Museum.

Walter Turner, the transportation museum’s historian, offered to take Miss Peggy and me on a short drive up U.S. Highway 601 from Salisbury to Cooleemee, a quiet little town where the Yadkin River stumbles across the Fall Line with enough force to drive a cotton mill.

It was therethe Duke family invested in a mill to tap into the growing Southern textile industry. Cooleemee became part of a Southwide culture that centered on the textile mill. Across the region, the brick structures loomed over their surrounding villages like castles over medieval estates. The textile workers looked to the mill for their livelihoods, their recreation, and public services normally provided by a municipality.

The mill at Cooleemee operated from around 1900 until 1969. The mill and its village enjoyed a close relationship during those years.

As the mill was being erected and the Yadkin was being dammed, the Duke founders were also building houses for the mill help. By 1934, the village consisted of around 350 homes.

The mill villages across the South were the magnets that drew a massive immigration of people forsaking annual harvests on their farms for weekly paychecks at the mill. It was a hard life, but the workers chose eating and breathing lint to starving and working their fields.

By the time the Cooleemee mill closed in 1969, medical science was discovering the cause of the hacking coughs among textile workers: byssinosis, also known as “brown lung.”

“I knew people who worked in the Alex City Mill, and the brown lung that brought them down,” wrote Ernie Williams, who grew up in Brighton, Ala. Ernie cited a bitter ballad by Si Kuhn that recalled the ravages of the condition caused by breathing cotton lint: “They buy us off with fancy words and sell us out to cotton.”

Cooleemee’s spindles and shuttles stopped as the textile industry was on the decline in the South. Newer industries with higher-paying jobs were siphoning off the workers, and low-wage foreign competition was winning out in the marketplace in much the same way the South, with its cheaper labor, drove New England mills out of business.

The exodus of textile jobs had its impact on the Cooleemee culture. In 1990, about 70 percent of the town’s population had textile roots. That percentage has been severely diluted since then, but Jim and Lynn Rumley are doing their best to preserve the memory and spirit of the mill town.

“The kids growing up in Cooleemee didn’t know where they lived,” Jim told me.

The Rumleys have been trying to correct that situation through the Textile Heritage Center, with headquarters in the Zachary House, once the home of the mill’s plant manager. The center strengthens the cultural ties between the old mill and the new population through three-day programs for school children. They capture the flavor of mill-village life by slopping hogs, washing clothes in black iron wash pots and engaging in archaeological digs.

They can also get a glimpse of what it was like to live in a mill house. The Heritage Center includes a restored mill house, with furnishings typical of those in the houses of the ’30s and ’40s.

Jim took me into the “big room,” furnished with a double bed, a bureau, a chifforobe, a Singer sewing machine with foot-operated treadle and a shallow fireplace designed for coal fires. There was a “Grandma’s room” with a rocking chair, chest of drawers and a bed with a thin spread. A third room included a wooden bedstead with rope springs, a metal bedstead with metal springs and three children’s chairs.

The kitchen included a table, an ironing board and a wood cook stove.

For this linthead raised in a cotton-mill culture, it was like going home.

As I’ve written about the mill culture, I’ve received a chorus of “amens” from people around the South who grew up with lint in their hair. Among them was Looie Allyson of Kingsport, who wrote:

“There were two distinct groups at the mill. Most of the workers and their families had lived in the mill village for many years … . These people were stable, honest, hard-working, God-fearing, good-hearted people. Then there was another small group, a minority who might be called vagrants. They had learned to be skilled operators, fixers etc., and could always get a job at just about any mill in the South. This restless, sometimes undesirable group never seemed to stay in one place very long.”

It’s true the mill houses tended to go to the long-term loyal workers, but not all who lived outside the villages were vagrants. Many mill workers lived in the countryside on small farms. They worked their land, raised hogs and cows, and still put in 40-hour weeks at the mill. During the Depression, when many mills either closed or curtailed operations to a minimum, my grandfather — with 14 kids to support — would travel the region looking for work, and would return home on weekends with enough money to buy staples. My mother remembers that the family often subsisted on corn-meal mush during the week. Her younger sibling would say, “I’ll be glad when Daddy comes home and we can have rice.”

A visit to Cooleemee will put the smell of sweat and cotton lint back in the nostrils of memory. Jim Rumley has written a book, “Cooleemee, The Life and Times of a Mill Town,” which captures a lot of history and flavor. If you visit him at the Zachary House, tell him Gene sent you.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson S.C. 29625 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com