When Fuller Earle Callaway founded and made prosperous Dixie Mills on Greenville Street in 1895, the city of LaGrange rejoiced. The South was thriving again with the birth of textiles, and it had gone local.

Later, Callaway Mills added the Kex plant on Leeman Street and the Unity plant on Austin Street. West Point Manufacturing Co. purchased Dixie in 1933, and Milliken and Co. purchased Callaway Mills Inc. in 1968, acquiring Kex and Unity.

But as the textile industry declined, the plants became reminders of a bygone era in which the buildings of hardy wood and brick brought prosperity and growth by themselves.

Now, the previously empty mills have renewed vigor and a new owner, who, instead of recycling the buildings and selling them, turned them into a recycling operation of their own.

“We had looked at the mills from the standpoint of its value for the old wood and the brick and everything that’s in there,” plant owner John Knox said, who owned Dixie for about two years and Kex and Unity for a year.

Along with partner Richard Willey, the two, under Dixie Mill Enterprises, decided against selling the buildings after being hired to move recyclable carpet for Interface Inc.

“We were facilitators for it,” Knox said. “They’d bring in trailers, we’d unload the trailers. … We thought that would be the extent of it for us, and then when I got Unity and Kex, opportunity came along where they had so much going on at their facility over there that they needed more room. They also needed help preparing the material for recycling.”

Soon, the company was moving recyclable carpet pieces all over the country to recycling companies for Interface. They’d sort, cut, organize and stack the carpet, getting it ready for shipment out of the textile plants’ warehouses.

“We still do some of that over (at Unity) now, but because of the economic times, it’s cut back - way back. They don’t bring in near as much as they did,” he said.

To help broaden the horizons and scope of the company, a linen leasing operation was started in the back of Kex, where Dixie Mill employees pick up dirty linens from restaurants, clean them and return them two or three times a week, Knox said, primarily with businesses in Atlanta.

Not giving up on recycling, however, Dixie Mill recently became a government contractor for recycling parts of federal buildings torn down during renovation, with Fort Benning being a primary target under the federal Base Realignment and Closing Commission.

Like its carpet operation, the group will break down and sort the recyclables into different pieces and grades, then send them to recycling companies across the country.

“It’s federally mandated that a minimum of 50 percent of all materials that come out of a (federal) building has to be recycled,” Knox said “What we’re telling them is we can do 95 percent plus.

“You’ll always have some things that can’t be recycled, but even then we try to send it to waste energy where it can be burned for energy. Bricks, concrete, everything has a use.”

With economic cutbacks, the amount of sorting the group does now has been lessened at the three plants. Unity is being used as storage for recyclable materials, Dixie is used for storing carpet and Kex is being used for the linen business, storage and office space.

But where there’s new carpet being created and building renovations being completed, the three mills still will be on deck.

“We wanted to just make sure we had enough value in the mills to make it make sense to get them,” Knox said. “We worked with Interface warehousing their material for recycling. And it grew - that whole business grew.”

Trey Wood can be reached at twood@lagrangenews. com or (706) 884-7311, Ext. 228.