Aug. 16--If the broad oak beams and scarred pine floors of The Cotton Mill Lofts could talk, you'd hear about pajamas, flap-bottomed underwear and T-shirts produced there for decades.

You'd also hear lots about the daily lives and sweat shed by hundreds of blue-collar workers, mostly women, who made that clothing.

Michelle Rose, property manager for the refurbished apartment building on Sixth Street Southwest, wants to make the walls talk, too.

She's looking for ex-workers from the former Roanoke Mills textile factory who are willing to tell their stories for a historical exhibit along the building's hallways.

The 108-unit Cotton Mill Lofts is the third, most recent and largest downtown rehab project by lawyer and developer Ed Walker.

He took the old 107,000-square-foot factory building, which had been vacant for 13 years, and turned it into gleaming, loft-style apartments that opened as rental residences June 16. As of Friday all but 14 of the new apartments were leased.

At one time the circa-1919 factory was one of the Roanoke Valley's largest employers. It also was part of an industrial textile culture in Western Virginia that has largely disappeared as cheaper imports from overseas drove most of the region's knitting mills out of business.

The work force at Roanoke Mills peaked at 750 in 1959 when 80 percent of the workers were women, according to reports in this newspaper. Across the street from the old Jefferson High School (now the Jefferson Center), at that time it produced as many as 140,000 articles of clothing per week.

The plant used to shut down each July, when all of its workers used to take their summer vacations at the same time, and again around the Christmas holiday.

By 1990, 300 people still worked there daily. That number gradually declined to about 60 when the plant was closed for good in 1996.

Built by the Marshall Field Co. of Chicago, over the years the factory operated under mostly out-of-town owners and various names: Roanoke Mills, Roanoke Fashions, Roanoke Dyeing and Finishing and Valley Apparel, and Virginia Mills Cotton Products.

At one time, Tultex, founded by the Tully family, owned it. Some of the other former owners were Twin City Textiles, Glennon Bittan Investments and Dye-Tex.

Though the factory had been an actual knitting mill for decades, by the time it closed it was mostly dyeing and finishing fabric for clothing manufacturers who made T-shirts, jerseys and sweat shirts elsewhere.

About a month ago Rose had a brainstorm that the new apartment building should pay homage to the old factory's generations of textile workers. That came one day when she noticed a family walking around the building's exterior.

She invited them in for a look. The father, who Rose believes was in his early 50s, was with his wife and their son and some others.

The father told Rose that his mother had worked at the factory for more than 40 years. Her sister worked there as well. He used to hang out there as a youngster on its small children's playground.

And later in his life it was there that his mother introduced him to his future wife, who was one of her younger co-workers.

"The grandson was 24 or 25," Rose said. "He said, 'I might not even be here if it wasn't for this building.' "

What Rose didn't get was their names. And for that, "I could just kick myself," she said.

After they left, it struck her that there must be scores of people around the Roanoke Valley who have connections to the building.

"This building fed a lot of families. Maybe we can get stories of families, and just have a wall of history," Rose said.

Do you have a connection with the old Roanoke Mills building?

Give Rose a call. You could wind up as a piece of Roanoke history.

Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.

To see more of The Roanoke Times, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.roanoke.com/.

Copyright (c) 2009, The Roanoke Times, Va.

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