Fort Payne, Alabama Process Automation Experts

Fort Payne, Alabama sits at the base of Lookout Mountain in DeKalb County, a city of roughly 14,900 residents that has spent more than a century turning raw thread into a global manufacturing identity.

Known worldwide as the Sock Capital of the World, Fort Payne once produced one out of every eight pairs of socks made on the planet, with more than 150 hosiery mills operating here at the industry's late 1990s peak and an annual payroll north of $150 million.

Trade shifts and overseas outsourcing thinned that mill count sharply after 2000, but hosiery manufacturing has not disappeared.

It has consolidated into a smaller group of resilient producers, and the logistics, food processing, and distribution companies that followed the interstate access into DeKalb County have picked up much of the slack.

Today Fort Payne's economy runs on a mix of legacy textile know-how and newer distribution muscle.

Ferguson Enterprises operates a 645,000 square foot distribution center in the city, one of the largest logistics footprints in northeast Alabama.

Koch Foods and Pilgrim's Pride anchor poultry processing jobs in the county, PlayCore designs and manufactures playground and recreation equipment from a Fort Payne base, and Renfro Corporation, one of the largest hosiery makers in North America, still runs operations here.

Nucor and UPS round out the county's larger employers, giving DeKalb County an industrial base that spans metal fabrication, textiles, wood products, food processing, automotive supply, plastics, and distribution.

Median household income in Fort Payne runs around $47,479, below the statewide figure, and the city's unemployment rate has hovered near 5.0 percent, a reminder that the labor market here still carries the scars of the hosiery contraction even as county-level unemployment has run tighter.