The old Meyer Factory
Ancienne usine Meyer
In 2000, the Claude Vigée Cultural Center was built on the site of the old used textile fraying factory of Emile Meyer, Claude Vigée's uncle and father-in-law. My uncle's enterprise was medium-sized, so it was important within the modest local industry. At the time of its greatest prosperity it employed a hundred workers and clerks. I used to spend a lot of time in the vast grassy, flower-filled garden, playing savages with my classmates, or building cone-shaped Indian tents by crossing beanstalk supports covered with old, flaky, smelly canvas that had come out of the company's large burlap sacks. These bags put to waste were used to import textile raw material from abroad for fraying. It was transported from the station near the processing workshops by special wagons that traveled on a short private track connected to my uncle's factory. Several times a week, service workers would open the large iron gate that surmounted the black, tarred ballast of the track. They then allowed freight trains loaded with huge burlap bales larded with wire and crammed with carded or worsted woolen waste of different origins. My uncle imported from Poland, Hungary, Spain and the Pyrenees.
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Claude Vigée
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