Will Eaton Rapids Mourn This Abandoned Factory?
Congressman Tom Barrett has secured funding to help tear down the eyesore that's stood vacant since Eisenhower was president
Eaton Rapids — For the past seven decades, the first thing you’ve seen when driving into town from the north has been a dilapidated factory. But now that there might finally be a plan to get it torn down, some folks in town are wondering if they’ll miss it.
The original factory opened in 1844 and was purchased by the Horner family in 1880, becaming the Horner Woolen Mills. It grew to become one of the most prestigious woolen mills in the country. They supplied blankets for cruise ships and the U.S. Naval Academy, and in 1941, they secured a contract to supply a half-million blankets for the Army.
The factory employed thousands of people in Eaton Rapids through the years, and their products were beautiful. Even now, you can find vintage Horner Woolen Mills blankets on eBay.
But in the years following World War II, though, synthetic fabrics started to gain in popularity, and a lot of clothing manufacturers moved on from wool. The contracts started to dry up, and sometime around 1955, the Horner Woolen Mills factory closed down. They kept the showroom open for a few more years, but the factory sat empty.
And it’s been that way ever since. They factory closed down when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and now that Donald Trump is in his second go-round, it’s still there, looking pretty much the same.
The U-shaped main factory, the administrative offices, and the smokestack are all still standing. The windows are broken out, the roof has caved in, the bricks are falling apart, but it’s all still there.
The question is: Why? Why hasn’t somebody torn this place down in the past 71 years? Along with the Packard Plant in Detroit, small parts of which are still standing, this is probably the longest-tenured abandoned factory in the entire state.
“To redevelop or rebuild it, the structures are very bad, the foundations are very bad, it really just needs to be demolished,” Eaton Rapids Mayor Pam Colestock said in 2023. “It’s time to move forward, and get that area cleaned up, so we can move forward in a better direction for the whole city.”
So after seven decades, why is it still here?
Money, mostly. The city has also been at odds through the decades with the various families and companies that have owned it. There were some efforts in the early years to redevelop the property as is, and as recently as 2004, they were looking at relocating Lansing’s BoarsHead Theatre there. Then it just got too cost-prohibitive, and the property was bought and sold by a series of absentee, out-of-state owners who had no desire or inclination to tear it down and put something else there.
By the 2020s, the estimates to demolish the site had risen to $3 million or more, and the Utah-based company that owned it had no interest in tearing it down. So there it sat.
In the past few months, though, a couple of major developments have given hope that maybe, possibly, after 71 years, the Holden Woolen Mills buildings might finally be coming down.
The first domino fell in November 2025, when the Eaton County Land Bank Authority purchased the site for the whopping sum of $10. The out-of-state owners paid $21,000 in back property taxes to clear the sale, and the land bank took ownership.
The second domino fell just a few weeks ago when Congressman Tom Barrett came to Eaton Rapids and announced that he had secured $1 million in federal funding to kickstart the demolition.
“It’s really a public safety hazard. It’s a health hazard. It’s an environmental contamination hazard,” Barrett said. “And it also is an infrastructure project to try and bring this back to a usable purpose.”
Barrett is now working with local leaders to find the rest of the financing to get the site torn down so that it might become a park or something else that’s a little more visually pleasing. There are still plenty of hurdles to clear, but if Barrett can do it, he’ll be the first politician in seven decades to get the woolen mills factory demolished. Good on him if that happens.
Among the locals in Eaton Rapids, though, there seems to be some disagreement as to whether they actually want it torn down. After all, this broken-down eyesore, looking just like this, is all that most people in Eaton Rapids have ever known. If it comes down—particularly the iconic smokestack in the middle of the property—Eaton Rapids just won’t look the same.
The woolen mills factory is a frequent topic of discussion in the Eaton Rapids Community Connection Facebook group, and plenty of people voice the opinion that even if the buildings come down, they need to preserve the legacy in some way.
“It’s been a part of Eaton Rapids for a lifetime,” Rick Wade said. Some say they should at least make an effort to save the smokestack.
Patricia Brooks chimed in with, “I agree it should be a park with a plaque commemorating the Woolen Mills’ importance in local history. If it weren’t for the woolen mills, E.R. would have faded away like Kinneville or Charlesworth or any one of the once-significant locations (including Millett, where I live near Dimondale). DON’T LET THE WOOLEN MILL HERITAGE FADE!”
Plenty of other Eaton Rapidians, though, share the sentiments of Joan Raines: “OMG can we just do something? I can't believe it is not polluting the river as it sits there rotting. It sure is an eyesore and shows lack of engineering moxie and problem-solving capability with your city fathers and wealthy donors who have offered to help.”
It’s a part of Eaton Rapids history that’s frozen in time, to be sure. Whether it’ll be here for another 70 days or another 70 years is still to be determined.
