Manville Closing Flagship Factory After 74 Years

More than 55 years ago, this community adopted the name of the company whose asbestos products gave it life, and as it turns out, disease and death.

Today, Manville Corp.’s 74-year-old flagship factory is slated to close its doors for economic reasons, leaving behind memories of steady employment but also unanswered questions about obligations of employers that manufacture hazardous products.

For 50 years after what was then the Johns-Manville Corp. opened the plant in 1912, the town thrived. Modest, neatly-kept houses fanned out around the factory, and the area, a section of Hillsborough, changed its name in 1929 in tribute to the company.

Falling ‘Snow’

At its height in the 1960s, the plant employed 4,500 people, including 40% of the town’s work force. Its 180 acres in central New Jersey eventually encompassed 13 buildings.

Residents in this classic factory town of 12,000 remember watching children open their mouths skyward to catch falling “snow”--white asbestos dust released from the plant.

Workers came to be called “snowmen” because of the fibers that covered their bodies.

Those fibers have been linked to cancer and asbestosis, an often deadly lung disease caused by chronic inhalation of asbestos fibers. In 1982, Manville Corp., a financially healthy company, filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code, saying that the thousands of damage suits against it, if successful, could force it to become bankrupt.

More than 900 of those lawsuits were filed by former employees of the plant or their families.

The company expects to emerge from its reorganization late this year, having created a $2.5-billion trust fund to pay asbestos victims or their heirs.

Anna Kisaday, 73, who lived one block from the plant from 1935 to 1978, remembers how the pumpkins, tomatoes and lettuce in her garden were blanketed with the dust.

“Who were we to stop them?” she asked.

Still, stressing the jobs the plant created, she criticizes workers who sued the company. “We’re all going to die from something,” she said.

Nonetheless, many are bitter.

“They’ve killed a lot of people, made a lot of people ill,” said 57-year-old Thaddeus Kowalski, a former president of Local 800 of the United Paperworkers International Union here.

Kowalski left the plant in 1966 after 19 years, partly because he contracted asbestosis.

He particularly faults the company for not warning employees of the perils of asbestos, once widely used in piping and insulation.

However, Ray Gomez, a spokesman for Denver-based Manville, said safety policies were in place to protect workers. If policies were not followed, he said, that was because of plant, not corporate, practices. “There was no organized cover-up by the industry or Manville,” he said.

Most of Manville’s workers came here to escape from Pennsylvania’s coal regions, where employees faced cave-ins and breathed clogged air. “They got a new lease on life here,” said Edward Purcyzki, the former health officer and water superintendent for 31 years in this 2.2-square-mile town of 15 churches and 21 bars.

“It’s a very sad day for us,” Gomez said of the closing.