Avondale Mills executive wraps up company's final details

“It was not a challenge we were not going to be able to overcome”

Avondale Mills' Stephen Felker Jr. is overseeing the dismantling of the company his family built.

Nearly all the workers have been gone for two years now, but Felker told The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle that the company still has some real estate holdings to sell off.

'It's something that's slowly coming to a close,' said Felker, who worked as manager of corporate development for Avondale Mills.

The company employed more than 4,000 workers and operated 18 plants in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina at the start of 2005. But then came a train derailment a few days into that year which caused a chlorine gas leak just outside the company's Graniteville plant. Nine people died, 250 were injured and the corrosive gas damaged the plant beyond operation. Read more