HICKORY, NORTH CAROLINA – It was 11 a.m. on a Thursday, and Union Square in Hickory, North Carolina, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was active. Not quite bustling, but certainly not stagnant. People were out for their morning coffee or brunch, sitting around and enjoying the hot, overcast day, as well as the free public Wi-Fi.
The town was built at a junction of the Western North Carolina Railroad in the 1850s. Shops, restaurants, and neighborhoods clustered around the Hickory Tavern, a log cabin–style inn built by Henry Robinson underneath a hickory tree. This became Union Square, which has been the social and economic center of town for close to 170 years. On one side of the railroad tracks, near the tavern’s still-standing stone fireplace, is the old train station, which has been renovated into a market that serves food, drinks, and artisanal meats and cheeses. On the other side, there’s a pedestrian promenade with more shops, plus a green space and a German howitzer cannon, which was surrendered to the U.S. in 1918 and sits here as a memorial to fallen soldiers from World War I.
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The proximity to the railroad and nearby natural resources like wood and cotton made Hickory an ideal industrial center, able to distribute goods throughout the country. Hosiery, textiles, and tobacco poured out of factories. But the main product can be ascertained from Hickory’s longtime nickname: The Furniture Capital of the World. At one point, there were dozens of mills in the city.
But times change, reflected in one attraction in Union Square. Across the tracks, centered in the green space, is a matte-black platform under a triangular roof, perfect for concerts and other gatherings. It’s called the CommScope Stage. CommScope sprung for the Wi-Fi too, through a $275,000 donation to the city in 2021.
The company is a backbone of modern internet infrastructure, a maker of fiber-optic cable, flexible strands of glass as thin as a human hair that can transport data as fast as the speed of light. CommScope has been around Hickory for decades, and so has one of its main competitors, Corning. But both companies are thriving, thanks to an assist from Washington.
Much of Joe Biden’s tenure as president has focused on reversing the deindustrialization and labor offshoring in cities across the country. Hickory is a prime example. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) contained provisions to bring high-speed internet to everyone in the country. But it also included language to strengthen existing requirements that federal investments like the broadband buildout use component parts that are made in America.
Today, fiber-optic cable manufacturing is responsible for more than 2,500 jobs in Hickory, in a town with a total employed population of 18,673 as of 2020. The economic output of this business is over $1.6 billion. The area produces up to 40 percent of the country’s fiber-optic cable. And so both CommScope and Corning have announced factory expansions, investing tens of millions of dollars of their own money, in anticipation of a return when companies like AT&T use federal broadband dollars to buy their products.
“They’ve ramped up in anticipation of demand,” said Warren Wood, the city manager of Hickory. “It has had a huge positive impact for us.”
Hickory was well positioned to take advantage of federal support, mostly because in the absence of investment for the past two decades, the city figured it out for itself, through targeted improvements to attract residents. The town’s roots are in manufacturing, and as industrial policy has come back into fashion, Hickory is now poised to revamp its relevance in a global economy that has left other American cities in tatters. But success has not come here fully formed: Parts of the city are blossoming, while others are clearly struggling.
Catawba County, where Hickory is the largest city, voted for Donald Trump by 67-30 over Biden in 2020. If Democrats have any hope of making gains here, there needs to be a clear understanding of how the federal government can provide tangible results to ordinary people. The first step in that process is under way in Hickory, but it’s a long way from completion.
I MET LESLIE KELLER, DIRECTOR of the Hickory Landmarks Society, at a landmark called Maple Grove. I actually drove past the house twice before making the correct turn into the driveway. Keller brushed off my apologies for being late, stating, “In Hickory we say, ‘You can’t get from here to there.’” It was resonant, especially to a visitor—my navigational issues started when I almost missed a turn onto “N. 3rd St Ave.”
Maple Grove was the home of Adolphus “Dolph” Shuford, co-founder and major benefactor of Hickory, which was founded in 1863. Descendants of the Shuford family are also the owners of Century Furniture, one of the last remaining furniture makers in town. Maple Grove is preserved as it was in the 1890s, with knickknacks, art, and precious porcelain decorating the home.
Furniture making in western North Carolina is almost as old as Hickory itself. The region has an abundance of natural forestry, which was by the 1870s being processed into furniture in factories in nearby Lenoir and Morganton. In the 1890s, an agricultural depression pushed farmers to work in the mills.
Hickory was the last city in the region to open furniture factory doors, with the Hickory Furniture Company in 1901. But the city has maintained production ever since. Cheaper labor in a region not known for union activity undercut competitors in the Northeast and Midwest.
A postcard view of Union Square, 1939
Even the Great Depression couldn’t derail growth. Local mills began to specialize in cheap products made with low-quality wood, somewhat derisively known as “borax furniture.” Despite the low-end reputation, this specialization helped the industry stay afloat during the economic downturn. “You had to sell a lot of it,” Richard Eller, professor of history at Catawba Valley Community College, told the Prospect. “But if you could, then you were guaranteed to stay in production.”
As the economy rebounded and returning GIs from World War II needed places to live and furnishings to fill their homes, the industry took off. Thanks to Hickory’s prime location, abundance of jobs, and affordability, its population increased by 80 percent from 1930 to 1940, and 30 percent from 1950 to 1960. Interstate highway expansions—Hickory is right off I-40 and U.S. 321, key thoroughfares for the Southeast—propelled Hickory even further.
But North Carolina’s furniture barons were soon lured by lower-cost furniture production abroad, particularly after China was welcomed into the WTO in 1999. According to the Richmond Federal Reserve, between 1999 and 2009, North Carolina lost half of its furniture jobs. And that was before the Great Recession and its economic scarring. By 2016, nearly three-quarters of all furniture sold in the U.S. came from overseas.
It was a brutal lesson and something of a turning point for the region. “The discovery that labor from somewhere else could be trained to make case goods at cheaper hourly rates than where it was already established was the same concept that brought manufacturing to the South in the first place,” Eller wrote in his book Well-Crafted: The History of Furniture Manufacturing in Western North Carolina.
Overall, the region lost more than 45,000 manufacturing jobs in less than 15 years; by the end of it, the Hickory area saw unemployment as high as 15 percent. Many mills were left abandoned.
The city’s solution was to repurpose them. Keller and I stopped at Hollar Mill, a former mill that now contains a Mexican restaurant, an event space, and other shops. The extensive renovation cost up to $6 million between 2009 to 2012, when the site was also placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
I asked Keller if she sees businesses springing up around the city. “It’s hard to tell,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to be new [businesses], but they seem to be bringing in more people.”
I MET WARREN WOOD, THE CITY MANAGER, at Town Hall. It’s just two streets over from Union Square, but it feels like I have traveled miles, and decades. Between here and there are abandoned lots, run-down buildings, and ill-maintained roads. Town Hall itself is a rather modest building, but across the small street is a new apartment complex.
As Wood explained it, the city belatedly recognized the need to diversify as furniture manufacturing diminished. “It took us a while, but we finally realized that those jobs weren’t coming back,” Wood told the Prospect.
The solution was twofold. First, the city would invest in itself. In 2014, Hickory successfully passed a $40 million bond referendum for economic development, and since raised an additional $58 million from other sources. This capital funded what is called the “Inspiring Spaces” plan.
The centerpiece is the Hickory Trail system, a ten-mile set of pedestrian and bicycle paths that connects the town. City Walk covers the central business district along Main Avenue; the OLLE Art Walk heads north through Old Lenoir Road; Aviation Walk leads out to the local aviation museum. A highly anticipated trail called Riverwalk, a pedestrian bridge that hugs the shoreline of Lake Hickory, is expected to open later this year. The bond referendum made it possible, along with funds from the state Department of Transportation.
The Inspiring Spaces plan has “been a game changer for us,” Wood said. “It is about attracting younger folks. We need a workforce, and we think we can offer a different flavor than what the big city has.”
The second part of Hickory’s rebuild came out of a side business in town producing cables, initially for telephone connections and the early coaxial wiring that enabled cable television. Superior Cable (now CommScope) began operating in 1953, and is still headquartered in Hickory; in the late 1970s, it got involved in fiber-optic equipment, playing a leading role in the first broadcasts of C-SPAN. Siecor, a joint venture of Fortune 500 companies Siemens and Corning, began operating in 1977, with multiple facilities in and around Hickory; eventually, Corning took over Siemens’s cable operations, and Siecor just became Corning Cable Systems.
An old tractor sits outside the redeveloped Hollar Mill.
Fiber-optic cable jobs were less labor-intensive than the often-dangerous toil of making furniture with belt-driven and steam-powered machinery. They also offered better pay and better hours—a labor upgrade. The business was initially relatively small, able to coexist with the more dominant furniture companies. As cable television became dominant and offshoring wounded furniture making, CommScope and Corning became more prominent as employers in town.
“I’m not saying that everybody here was poor. But it brought in a lot of people from outside of Catawba County to work in fiber optics,” a retired employee from CommScope, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Prospect. “It increased housing, it boosted the county and economics around here greatly. I think everybody’s perception over the area was that it was good-paying for the county.”
HICKORY HAS A LITTLE OVER 40,000 RESIDENTS, but that number swells to over 100,000 in the daytime. Workers stream in to work in the manufacturing campuses, from Charlotte and other western North Carolina towns.
Both CommScope and Corning attribute their recent expansions to federal investments, from which they indirectly benefit. The infrastructure law’s high-speed internet provisions led to last year’s announcement of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, which allocated up to $42.5 billion toward new infrastructure in all 50 states to connect the roughly 30 million Americans with no internet access. Each state received their share in June; the money should start flowing next year.
Build America Buy America (BABA), a part of the IIJA, stipulates that “all iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in covered infrastructure projects are produced in the United States.” Telecom companies have grumbled about the Buy American mandate, claiming that routers and other electronics are largely made abroad. However, everyone agrees that there’s plenty of fiber-optic cable made in America to handle the increased demand; a 2022 supply chain assessment by the Department of Commerce highlighted the industry as a rare bright spot, and after recent investments, U.S. fiber-optic manufacturing grew to $3.6 billion in 2022. Hickory’s businesses drove much of that growth.
Earlier this year, CommScope announced a $47 million investment into expanding fiber-optic cable production. The expansion will increase output of a specific kind of fiber-optic cable called HeliARC, which the company says is designed for rural community deployments. According to CommScope, the expansion will bring broadband to about 500,000 homes per year, and over 250 jobs to the region, 90 percent of which will not require a college degree.
“We believe everyone should have reliable access to broadband,” Kris Belisle, communications director for CommScope, told the Prospect in an email. “We are prepared to supply the demand of fiber and other cables necessary as demand increases through deployment.”
In July, CommScope boosted its investment, with $60.3 million over the next four years to expand manufacturing in its North Carolina facilities.
Meanwhile, Corning opened a new campus in Hickory in March. A company spokesperson told the Prospect that the company has invested more than $500 million toward fiber and cable manufacturing since 2020, and its workforce in North Carolina is now 5,000 strong. The company has also paired with NTCA, the Rural Broadband Association, to “make available an exclusive supply of cable and connectivity solutions for its members’ network buildouts.”
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CommScope’s headquarters in Hickory
Other companies are following CommScope and Corning’s model. Last year, Prysmian converted a copper cable plant in Jackson, Tennessee, to fiber-optic cable manufacturing, to capitalize on the White House investments. Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, where Nokia announced the opening of a new factory to support the broadband buildout with electronic components. The Finnish firm expects to hire 200 employees for the factory. The White House highlighted the Hickory expansions in its fact sheet about the announcement.
“When we made this investment, we knew that there would then be an increased demand for fiber-optic cable and for other products that connect people to the Internet,” Harris said in her remarks. “And whereas in the past, many of those jobs would have been created overseas, President Biden and I required that the materials and products used in these projects, from steel to electronics to fiber-optic cable, must be made in America by workers in America.”
These private investments by businesses supporting the federal broadband buildout are exactly how the administration believed its industrial policy would work. Buy America preferences for federal investments creates a cluster of domestic manufacturing, bringing industrial knowledge back to the U.S. The country lost that knowledge when jobs and manufacturing shipped overseas; its return could boost more than just the broadband industry.
THE TECH INDUSTRY IS ALSO GROWING in Catawba County. In 2021, Apple announced a nearly $500 million expansion of a data center. In 2022, Microsoft and county leaders announced a $1 billion investment over ten years, also for data storage. But the job creation is largely coming from cable manufacturing.
Kristina, 34 and manager of the Olde Hickory Station, sees in the city what Wood hopes to cultivate. She followed her parents to Hickory in 2016, as her father got a job with Corning. But when her parents left, Kristina stayed.
“I love it here,” she told me, impressed with the liveliness and its proximity to the mountains and the river.
David Thompson-Whitfield, owner of Neon Sugar Candy Company on Union Square, says the same. His shop feels like childhood nostalgia, draped in pink and other bright colors, filled with bins that contain sour candy, chocolate, and the company’s specialized freeze-dried candy.
Whitfield, who is originally from Chicago, told the Prospect that he came to Hickory in 2010, when Hickory was “hurting for jobs.” He originally had a job with a call center for Fiserv, but decided to stay after that ended. In February, the store opened its doors. Its location on the square is prime, but Whitfield noted that the city has been working to historically preserve the building he and other shop owners run their stores out of, while also updating the space and making it welcoming.
“Hickory really cares about its downtown,” Whitfield said.
Keller, the historical society director, also praised the upgrades. “We’re not used to people actually living there,” she said. “But it is more livable and more walkable than it used to be.”
Hickory’s furniture industry has seen a modest revival in the past few years, primarily in upholstery. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the 1990s, more than 80 percent of jobs in Hickory were manufacturing jobs. Today, that number is about 40 percent. Fiber-optic has fought that trend, but hasn’t completely reversed it.
While manufacturing jobs have brought significant prosperity to Hickory, it has also been the source of the region’s weakness. Plenty of cities have not recovered from outsourcing and recession—just travel northwest to Lenoir, where they are still rebuilding. There is a risk that Hickory will fall into a trap it has been in before, with an overreliance on industry. It needs to diversify and modernize. Still, the dynamics set in motion by federal support have given Hickory a chance.
The Prospect’s reporting on the implementation of the Biden administration’s industrial policy is supported through funding from Omidyar Network.
