Mississippi Hardware manager Carla Rather, above, goes through the original blue prints of the building at South Madison and Washington Streets Tuesday. (Jon Giffin The Vicksburg Post)

[9/12/04]If you go to the second floor of the Mississippi Hardware building and close your eyes and concentrate hard, you may be able to hear the whir of the dozens of sewing machines running there more than 60 years ago.

The giant, privately owned hardware store has occupied the building at South Madison and Washington streets for 23 years, since acquiring the building from the owners of O’Neill McNamara hardware store. O’Neill McNamara had moved in in 1958, but the building had a life before that. It was a garment factory.

A cornerstone on the southeast face says the three-story building was built in 1936 by the Vicksburg Chamber of Commerce.

The main purpose, said Carla Rather, manager of Mississippi Hardware, was to bring jobs to the Vicksburg area.

“There wasn’t much for women then,” said Blanche Terry, who worked in the building in the 1940s, long before her years at the Old Court House Museum Eva W. Davis Memorial.

“Jerry Silver (who died in 2003 and had been the owner of the former Michael’s Jewelers) told me it was the only building in Vicksburg built by consensus,” Rather said.

She said she was also told the factory was one of the first buildings in Mississippi to be tax exempt under an early industrial-development program.

Rather said long-time Vicksburg businessmen told her the city’s business leaders realized the city needed more jobs, particularly for women. They went to New York, found M. Fine and Sons Mfg. Co. Inc. and persuaded company owners to open a factory in Vicksburg.

Rather, Terry and others said the deal was for the city to build the building and for M. Fine to open the factory to make clothing. Ownership of the building would remain in local hands until M. Fine achieved a payroll of $1 million.

“When they made it, they pulled out,” Terry said.

At “The Garment Factory,” Rather and Terry said, cloth was cut on the third floor, sewing was done on the second floor and shipping, on the first.

Rather said her mother, the late Betty Rather, worked in the garment factory, and she repeated a story told by her mother: Within a few days of landing her job, the elder Rather was told she had better make her daily quota or she would be fired.

“She made it after that,” Rather said, adding her mother was paid $17.50 a week.

Today, the atmosphere is a bit more laid back.

Carla Rather’s grandson often visits and even gets help with his homework from various employees.

Pet dogs are known to visit with customers, and a pot of coffee on the main floor is always at the ready for employees and customers alike.

The giant building sits on the edge of the area targeted by the city for downtown urban renewal, and though it is not listed in any of the $5.6 million plans for the area, other adjacent properties have been bought by the city and torn down.

Mississippi Hardware is across the street from the Vicksburg Convention Center, and much of that area has been bought by the city for parking. Additionally, on-again, off-again discussions of a convention center hotel going up around there continue.

Though air-conditioned now, 60 years ago, Terry said, the factory was hot in the summer. The windows on all sides often were open to catch a breeze below the nearly 20-foot ceilings.

Along with those ceilings, other remains of the building’s former life can be seen today. The boiler room still exists in the northwest corner of the ground floor, and a huge freight elevator remains in the building now owned by J.O. Smith Jr.

Charles Abraham, a retired Vicksburg merchant, said he was in elementary school during M. Fine’s early days, but he remembers the factory making mostly men’s work clothes.

Terry, who worked there during World War II, said the factory also turned out shirts and pants for military uniforms.

Ed Clark, a retired electrical contractor who wired the building for the sewing machines, said it also produced a line of women’s dresses.

Clark also said he became friendly with the factory manager, whose name time has blurred in his memory.

“He told me if (my wife) wanted a dress to come pick it out and he would let me have it at cost,” Clark recalled.

Clark said the building was involved in Mississippi’s old Balance Agriculture With Industry program, which was designed to bring industrial jobs to Mississippi to reduce the state’s reliance on agriculture.

Today, M. Fine is apparently out of business. No record of it can be found with the secretary of state in New York or among records of the U.S. Patent Office for M. Fine’s brand name, Five Brothers.

Today, Rather said, Mississippi Hardware tries to keep the reputation a former owner said the building had. She said Jinx Peterson bragged the store was probably the only place where a customer could find brand new scythes, which are large curving blades for mowing grass, and the long, wooden handles for them, snaths.