At this point, BlueOval City is a big dig, with thousands of construction workers boring deep holes for foundation footings using gargantuan drills that would look at home in a Mad Max movie. More than 6,300 holes that could accommodate a compact car dot the landscape. Rising from the Tennessee soil is the start of a white steel skeleton that will frame the half-mile long battery plant taking shape at one end of a site that a year ago grew cotton.
“Big trucks, big rollers, lots of things happening here and you just have to keep your head on a swivel,” Donna Langford, Ford’s project manager said as a giant earth mover turned in front of her car while touring the site.
In the small towns nearby, residents view the future manufacturing colossus with hope and trepidation.
Take Brownsville, Tenn., a town of 9,788 whose chief claim to fame is being Tina Turner’s childhood home. Signs welcoming Ford fill the storefronts, and a newly painted mural honoring the automaker adorns a building wall. Meanwhile, in the center of Brownsville’s town square stands a soaring monument topped with a Confederate soldier and bearing the inscription: “Honoring the Confederate Dead of Hayward County.”
John Ashworth, a retired airline worker, hopes the Ford plant will provide opportunities for the area’s Black community, and maybe bring Brownsville’s Black and White halves closer together. Working at the town’s corner drug store in his youth, Ashworth was required to eat lunch in the basement, away from White diners. Racial divisions continue to be part of local life, he said.
“This community has largely segmented itself – it’s either White or it’s Black,” said Ashworth, 79, over lunch with a friend in a restored 1950s-style diner, the kind of place he said probably wouldn’t have welcomed him as a young man. “Ford Motor Co. is not only going to cause Black and White to interact more, it’s going to bring other people from other parts of the world, and that is going to be good for everybody.”
Ford hopes to address that history by recruiting workers from communities of color, Drake said. She met last month with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to present Ford’s “curriculum” for the skills required for the high-paying jobs at BlueOval City. That’s now being incorporated into lesson plans at Tennessee’s technical colleges and high schools. Drake said Tennessee educators are even counseling eighth graders on what to study to land a job with Ford.
