MAIDEN, N.C. _ Scot Wilson estimates he has spent most of his 56 years in an eight-block radius.
The youngest of eight kids, Wilson was 16 when he started working at the yarn mill across the street from his family's home in Maiden, a quiet North Carolina town about 37 miles northwest of Charlotte that was once bustling thanks to its cotton mills.
Wilson would walk to and from high school, which let out at 2 p.m., then walk the few steps to the factory, where from 3 to 11, he helped assemble woven goods like sheets, towels, T-shirts and police uniforms.
"When you're from a big family, as you got old enough, you try to help your parents," Wilson explains of his after-school job. He switched to 12-hour shifts after graduating high school.
Wilson spent nearly four decades at Delta Apparel before his bosses told him and his nearly 160 coworkers last spring that the Maiden facility would close and move its operations to Honduras. Wilson considers himself lucky to have found another job at a nearby furniture plant, where he started work before the Delta plant closed in July.
"It was heartbreaking," Wilson says. "One of the reasons I got out when I did was because I was afraid at my age, I wouldn't find nothing else. There ain't no textiles around this way."
Bringing back American jobs is a promise on which Donald Trump focused his presidential campaign. Speaking at a rally in Concord, N.C., less than a week before the election, Trump said his administration would "stop the jobs from leaving America."
That's a vow that particularly hit home in North Carolina, once a hotbed of textile manufacturing that has seen employment in the sector fall by more than 82 percent since the mid-1990s, according to Federal Reserve data.
But interviews with over a dozen Maiden residents, who like Wilson have witnessed the textile industry's decline firsthand, show they remain skeptical of a comeback _ regardless of their political leanings. And economists say for North Carolina, returning the industry to its former prominence is not feasible.
The main reasons are deep-rooted, and difficult to fix with incentives or policies. For one, labor remains cheaper in countries like Honduras. Textile manufacturing has also become highly automated, so factories need fewer people to do the manual work now handled easily by machines.
"The same jobs are not coming back. We just do it differently today," says UNC Charlotte economist John Connaughton. "The idea that somehow or another there are going to be loom producers or workers that are going to come back and get jobs here ... that's absolutely ridiculous."
