Historical Society Receives Celanese Coning Machine

Discover Giles County Historical Society article from the Virginian Leader, July 7, 2010

The Celco plant in Narrows has been an important industry in Giles County since the plant opened on Christmas Day in 1939. Celanese Acetate has been an economic driver requiring housing, businesses, and amenities to be built for plant workers throughout the county. Production at the Celco plant has shifted over the years as markets have changed. One of the products that the plant no longer makes is acetate yarn for manufacturing fabrics.

In 1905, Swiss brothers, Camille and Henri Dreyfus, were the first to develop a commercial manufacturing process for cellulose acetate, which could be used to make films, fibers, molded objects, and toilet articles. In the 1920s, acetate fiber was first spun in Cumberland, Maryland and a weaving mill was built to turn the acetate yarn into cloth. The Celanese name first appeared at this time as well, a combination of the words “cellulose” and “ease” for the ease of wearing the acetate fabric. The name was a marketing tactic, as the silk market worked hard to discredit the new fabric.

Acetate had several qualities that were superior to silk, including the ability to hold permanent moiré designs and pleating. These qualities revolutionized the dress industry, influencing fashions of the time. Later acetate was woven with silk, cotton, wool, and other fibers to provide wrinkle-free, quick-drying clothing at a reasonable price.

Celanese recently donated a coning machine and several bobbins of Celanese acetate yarn, including the last one to be spun at the Celco plant. According to John Kinney, Jr.: “Installed in the 1940s, coning machines manufactured a filling yarn, used between sheets of yarn from Celco bobbins. Some of the U.S. textile companies that purchased cones from Narrows were Satkin Mills, Burlington/New River Mills, Woodhall Mills, and National Velvet. Most U.S. textile manufacturers went out of business, beginning in the 1990s, due to foreign competition. This also led to ending coning production at Celco.”

Look for the Celco coning machine to be part of a new textile exhibit later this summer in the Historical Society’s Museum!