McCOMB — There are too many factories and other businesses, both large and small, closing these days, but one I read about last week was especially poignant to me.
I was born in a house within a block of the Hercules plant in Hattiesburg. Yes, doctors made house calls and delivered babies in homes in 1935.
My father worked there from before I was born until he retired sometime in the early 1970s, save for a few years during World War II when he was in the Navy Seabees. Probably all the older Hercules retirees recall Huck Dunagin.
I worked for the company for two summers during my college days. When I turned 19, I was at an Alabama woods camp, harvesting virgin pine stumps. The next summer I was at the Hattiesburg plant in what was known as the “bull gang.”
The bull gang consisted of a cadre of laborers who handled such unskilled chores as digging ditches, manning wheelbarrows and jackhammers and unloading boxcars. In the summer of 1955, everyone in the bull gang but me was waiting for a better job to open in the plant. I was waiting for the fall semester to begin at Ole Miss.
So, Hercules not only financed my college education — through my own work and Dad’s contributions — but the labor there, especially the first summer hauling stumps, inspired me to get a degree.
Now I read that Hercules, once a mainstay of the Hattiesburg economy, is closing.
Actually what is closing isn’t the same Hercules that my father knew.
The Hattiesburg plant, which opened in 1923, employed as many as 1,400 people during its heyday, according to one account. Another put it at 1,500.
Back in the day, it was known as Hercules Powder Co. and produced raw materials for a plethora of products, including, I believe, gunpowder and dynamite, printing ink and various by-products of pine resins.
It later became Hercules Inc., and as the virgin pine stumps began to disappear, it became more of a chemical plant.
Last year, in July, Hercules Inc. was purchased by Ashland Inc. in a $2.6 billion merger agreement.
The Hattiesburg plant, now reduced to 21 employees, currently manufactures paper sizing products for use in tissue manufacturing. Soon, according to the announcement last week, it’ll be closed completely.
I suspect some environmental cleanups are going to be required before it is ever used for anything else. It used to put off some pretty bad smells, eliciting complaints from people in Hattiesburg who didn’t work there.
My dad said it smelled like money.
