June 2005

NARC Plant at Bemberg

This is the back of one of the few remaining buildings that once was the NARC (North American Rayon Corporation) plant in Elizabethon. This building is large, but even it was dwarfed by the main plant structure that stood between here and the highway. If you stand at the Wal-Mart, this building is situated way back by the Watauga River behind the concrete slabs that are all that remain of the once huge and thriving rayon plant. This particular building was the power house. The milk bottle shaped structures on top are scrubbers for the coal-fired boilers. This powerhouse produced steam and electricity for the textile plant. NARC burned several years ago in a spectacular fire that lasted for days. There were all kinds of environmental concerns, including a fish kill in the Watauga River caused from the run-off of contaminated fire-fighting water. I'd like to know more about what this building actually contained in the way of power equipment, what it did and how it worked. The angled hole in the top floor toward the left was the entrance point of a long conveyor that came in from the left, presumably from a coaling facility.

Photos from the demolition of this historic structure in the summer of 2013 show that the entire top half of this building was filled with coal bunkers that were still full of coal. Hope to get photos posted in my later year indexes.