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Even today, 25 years after he left town, nobody likes Floyd. He was a real home-wrecker — literally. The Category 2 hurricane destroyed approximately 8,000 homes in eastern North Carolina.

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Even today, 25 years after he left town, nobody likes Floyd. He was a real home-wrecker — literally. The Category 2 hurricane destroyed approximately 8,000 homes in eastern North Carolina.

Even today, 25 years after he left town, nobody likes Floyd. He was a real home-wrecker — literally. The Category 2 hurricane destroyed approximately 8,000 homes in eastern North Carolina. The Bridgers family, owners of The Cloth Barn on Ash Street in Goldsboro, has a deeper relationship with Floyd than most. After the hurricane blew through town, Stoney Creek, usually a genial trickle of a waterway, began to swell. It spilled. It raged. It covered the cars in The Cloth Barn’s parking lot. It poured fish into the store’s elevator.

Johnny Bridgers, the third generation to run his grandmother’s store in the Barnyard Shopping Center that his father built, watched, helpless.

A photo of the Cloth Barn during Hurricane Floyd

The Cloth Barn has been a staple in Goldsboro since 1956. In 1999, when it anchored the Barnyard Shopping Center, Hurricane Floyd swamped the store, but customers stood by the Bridgerses. photograph by Baxter Miller

“It was heartbreaking,” he says. “You couldn’t make it into the store. You had to wait for the water to go.”

“It was horrible,” remembers Johnny’s wife, Elizabeth. “Horrible.”

After the waters receded and the fish were swept from the elevator, the mud was left to cling to fabric bolts, where mildew crept, black and insidious, forming foul constellations in the patterns. The Bridgers family came back to see what they could salvage. Nothing.

Johnny looked at the reams of slime-covered cloth moldering in the fall heat. Then he gathered his parents, his children, and their friends, and they got to work.

• • •

Today’s Cloth Barn displays about 50,000 bolts of fabric, organized by predominant color, propped upright in aisles like a brilliant library made of textures and patterns, and hefted onto great rolls like giant, beautiful paper towels. More than 500 miles of cloth, hand-picked by the Bridgerses. Designs feature playful dogs chasing each other around one bolt of fabric while a panoply of gentle-looking insects take flight around another. An ocean’s treasures float between dizzying feats of geometry and colors. Walking without distraction takes restraint. Everything wants you to touch it — the rough linens and textured velvets, the satiny cottons and rich, buttery silks, the tassels, fringes, borders.

You can take your time, but you don’t need to restrain yourself: The Bridgerses want you to see everything, to feel it all just as they’ve felt it. They can unravel choices for you, help you plan. This store is their archive; it holds the colors and textures from their shared past and unfurls current fabrics to brighten others’ futures.

Elizabeth, John, and Johnny Bridgerses inside the Cloth Barn in Goldsboro

The Bridgerses — including (from left) Elizabeth, John, and Johnny — are the unofficial first family of fabric, their Goldsboro store a mecca for textile fans. photograph by Baxter Miller

People arrive from up and down the East Coast to experience its selection. Television and movie studios come to buy fabric for their sets. Others are here to choose fabrics for their most special bedding, draperies, upholstery, and anything else humans want to wrap themselves in.

When Johnny’s mother, Lillian, opened The Cloth Barn with her mother-in-law, Kitty, in 1956, North Carolina hummed with textile mills. Lillian was a decorator, and the store in Ash Street’s Sunrise Shopping Center sold fabrics and supplies for upholstery and clothing. Johnny’s father, “Chubby,” was a builder. He built the racks for fabric reams and added space for Lillian’s drapes in the homes that he built.

Lots of fabrics inside The Cloth Barn

A rainbow of colors and range of textures fill The Cloth Barn.  photograph by Baxter Miller

“He’d put extended headers in the windows of his homes just so they could install draperies,” John says.

Like his father, John grew up in the store. “After school, someone would pick us up and take us to the store,” he says. “I’ve always paid attention to the fabrics.” He and his twin sister, Mimi, would run through fields of silken poppies, chenille clouds, and rich damask forests, where stern owls peered down at frisky little children.

These days, John travels all over the East Coast installing The Cloth Barn’s high-end draperies in homes and businesses. He loves coming to the store, but what he really loves is seeing the utility of the fabric in action. He’s a perfectionist in his labor and admires the perfection in his parents’ labor.

Tassles at The Cloth Barn in Goldsboro

An emporium of patterns and designs dazzle the eye. photograph by Baxter Miller

“We make drapery with eight inches of hem at the bottom and eight inches of hem at the top,” John says. “There’s two four-inch hems, so it’s double-folded four inches at the bottom and top. At the top, the drapes hold those pleats so much better and it makes it look like there’s substance there,” he says.

John’s father understands his son’s love for fabric. As a child, Johnny also played in the fabric forests. He watched his mother and grandmother in The Cloth Barn as they measured and cut. He listened to the dry clap of a yard stick over cloth on a hard table. He listened to the satisfying snip of cloth scissors as they separated fabric from bolts. Back then, the fabric became draperies and bedding, but it would wrap and pleat to form other things, too. Wedding dresses and work pants. Ribbons for a child’s Sunday bow.

• • •

Tug a thread at The Cloth Barn and you’ll find that it spools and twines through generations. Not just the four of the Bridgers family but also across the generations of customers who have chosen their perfect fabric there, who used their own hands to make something special. It loops around families who use its billboard as a milepost on the way to the beach and who wonder what the big deal about a barn filled with cloth might be. It stitches memories of a community that watched, powerless, as angry waters swallowed a landmark.

Most of the state’s textile mills are silent now. Floyd and Matthew drained into Stoney Creek long ago, but other storms will come. They won’t sink The Cloth Barn; its threads are the resilient variety, woven from love and community.

Each of us touches dozens of pieces of cloth every day, whether we sit on them, pull them over our heads, wipe water from our chins with them. We tread on them and pull them close across our windows. Wherever we go, we bring cloth with us. Each of our days could be measured in the yards of cloth we use. They could also be measured by the beauty and comfort that cloth gives to us. The Cloth Barn measures both ways. It sells goodness by the yard.

The Cloth Barn
1701 East Ash Street
Goldsboro, NC 27530
(919) 735-3641
theclothbarn.net

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This story was published on Oct 29, 2024

Eleanor Spicer Rice

Eleanor Spicer Rice earned her Ph.D. in entomology at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Ants of New York City.