Not to be overlooked in the wake of Thursday’s Hartco announcement is that two other Scott County plants trimmed jobs. QCB, located in the airport industrial complex, and Huntsville’s Great Dane trailer plant both announced small layoffs, totaling 29 jobs.

Meanwhile, perhaps the most numbing part of the Hartco announcement is just how long the downtown Oneida flooring mill has been a leading employer in Scott County.

The mill has operated in some form or fashion since 1923. It was purchased by the Tibbals family in 1946 and immediately began to expand and grow. Since the World War II era, Tibbals/Hartco has been Scott County’s largest manufacturing employer, and at times the county’s overall No. 1 employer.

To find a time when Scott County didn’t rely heavily on the flooring mill for jobs, you have to go all the way back to pre-WWII, when the county was mired in poverty (even moreso than today), and folks carved out their living in coal mines and the lumber industry.S

Sufficiently depressed yet?

Someone said yesterday that talking about Hartco as if they’re no longer here is kinda like writing their obituary before they’re dead. Perhaps it is, in a sense. But even though they’ll still employ 110 workers, operations at the flooring mill are going to be just a skeleton of what it once was. To be sure, some employees impacting by the looming layoff say they’re holding out hope that Armstrong will reopen the strip mill and the yard and call employees back to work. But talk to others, including some supervisors, and you get the sense that the shutdown is permanent.