Old-Fashioned Textile Industry Weaving a New Future : Manufacturing: Decrepit mills have been retooled into profitable, high-tech enterprises that scramble to hire from a dwindling labor pool.

There was a time when the heat of machinery and smell of grease must have overwhelmed the 1,600 workers at the Ponemah Textile Mill, formerly the nation’s largest mill under a single roof.

*

Where dozens of women and children once attended to the whirring carding machines, Tom Beaudet, 65, now stands alone, working with machines that roll raw wool into knitting yarn.

From appearances, the Quinnehicut Woolen Co., located in a corner of the vast and mostly empty Ponemah mill, would seem a vestige of a dying industry.

It’s not. Across New England, the sight of large shuttered textile mills has left a wrong impression: Although greatly shrunken, the industry has gone high-tech and survived.

The New England textile industry still provides jobs for 60,000 people and companies are actually clamoring for college graduates to fill high-paying, high-tech jobs.

The only problem is that many people don’t know it, including college students and others who could find work in the industry if they trained for a future in textiles.

Worried about the trend, a group of New England mill operators has formed an association, the Northeast Textile Foundation, to promote the industry to college students and gather donations for scholarships.

“We have to think about the next generation of workers,” said foundation co-founder William Giblin, president of Tweave Inc. in Norton, Mass., where the average age of employees is 44.

The irony of the situation can be seen at New England colleges. Textile schools at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Rhode Island field more requests for workers from New England textile companies than there are graduates to fill the jobs. But the University of Connecticut is phasing out its textile programs because of declining enrollment.

“We have trouble attracting students because they pick up on a rumor that it’s a dying industry and there’s not much opportunity,” said Steven B. Warner, who heads the Textile Sciences Department at the University of Massachusetts.

Only about 300 students this year are studying textile manufacturing and design at Massachusetts and the University of Rhode Island, the only New England colleges that still offer degrees in the subject.

Pay is not the problem. Graduates make about $30,000 to start, more than many first-year computer engineers, Warner said.

Hartley Eastwood, president of Cranston Printworks, based in Cranston, R.I., said the few textile majors have their pick of jobs. “We recruit, starting at the high school level. We fight over the college graduates. Each one gets three to five offers,” he said.

Dale Plummer, historian and proprietor of the old-fashioned Quinnehicut Woolen Co., said New England mills are surviving by adapting to the changing market.

“They’re dealing with specialized goods, where emphasis on quality can get a good price. In New England, these can be very competitive.”

In Connecticut, the specialized goods include medical supplies, spandex, sailcloth, industrial fabrics and high-quality wool.

SMS Textile Mills Inc. manufactures spandex for women’s swim wear and lingerie in Pennsylvania and dyes and finishes the fabric in its 50-employee Norwich plant.

Vice President Pat Flynn said the company is able to beat competition from foreign producers because it can guarantee good quality fabric with speedy delivery at a low cost.

“It’s a very niche-type business,” he said. “Unless it’s a small niche business with extremely low overhead and a low-cost producer, eventually all the U.S. textile jobs are going to be down in Mexico.”

North Carolina and Georgia now account for one-quarter of the almost 2 million U.S. jobs in textile production, apparel manufacture, and production of synthetic fibers and cotton.

California also commands a huge percentage of the jobs: about 181,000 in various textile-related industries, three times more than all of New England.

Companies that have put in high-tech systems or turn out high-tech products are most likely to succeed.