Burlington Industries closes Klopman Mills (2007)
Burlington Industries shut its textile mill at the site now known as the Southern Virginia Multimodal Park. The plant, formerly Klopman Mills, employed about 1,300 workers in Hurt, a town of roughly 1,300 residents. The closure mirrored the broader collapse of US textile manufacturing in the early 2000s.
1,300 jobs vanished from a community that depended on the mill, deepening regional economic decline.
The site sat mostly idle for years before being redeveloped as an industrial park. The loss shaped the region's push for large-scale economic development projects.
Avio's plant promises 1,500 jobs, more than the mill's peak employment, on the exact site where those jobs were lost. It is the same pattern of a single large employer anchoring the local economy.