This article from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis/St. Paul.   They retain all ownership and copyright!  However the article is to important to pass up.. (I had the pleasure of meeting and flying with Dennis Melchert COO of the company on my flight from Amsterdam to MPS on October 27, 2003 just a a few days before this became public.) BYLINE: Joy Powell Rebirth in Faribault FARIBAULT, MINN. -- To save Minnesota's oldest private company and the last woolen mill of its kind in the nation, loyal workers hung on despite pay cuts, new managers worked 12-hour days and corporate saviors, including a Polish billionaire, loaned the struggling company millions of dollars.    Today, Faribault Mills is battling back from near bankruptcy to weave not only the luxury wool blankets for which the company long has been known, but also the first blankets ever spun from corn.    The resurrection of this 138-year-old company comes as nearly every other woolen mill in the nation has shut down, with production steadily moving overseas. Faribault Mills is looking ahead and helping to pioneer the new corn-based fiber, which some say could ease the ailing U.S. textile industry's reliance on petroleum-based products.    "The little mill that could," as some call it, is leading what could well become a textile revolution that will give farmers a new avenue for selling corn and consumers a new way to stay warm.    These days, the most tangible symbol of hope at Faribault Mills arrives in the form of massive white bales. They are made of a corn resin spun into fibers under a process developed by agricultural processing giant Cargill Inc. of Minnetonka and petrochemical producer Dow Chemical Co.    The fibers are called Ingeo, a Native American term that means "from the earth." Ingeo is the first renewable raw material that can replace petrochemicals in fiber and plastics. Faribault Mills holds an exclusive contract with the Cargill-Dow partnership to market the Ingeo blankets in North America. Some are pure corn, and some are blended with wool.    In a market undercut for years by cheap labor in Asia, the deal that united Minnesota's two oldest private companies, Cargill and Faribault Mills, couldn't have come at a better time for the blanket maker.    The firm has seen the price of raw wool more than double in the past two years.    "There's a lot riding on it," said new president and CEO Mike Harris, whose family is risking its own money on the venture, which now includes a cotton mill in South Carolina. When Harris, 51, took over the struggling business in 2001, he quickly came to know the local sheriff on a first-name basis. That's because the lawman and deputies showed up regularly to serve 27 judgments -- the result of commercial disputes with the company's former management. The mill hadn't made a penny of profit since 1989 and was $12 million in debt.    It also wallowed in an industry crisis. Since 1997, the U.S. textile industry has been forced to close more than 250 plants nationwide, according to the American Textile Manufacturers Institute.    More than 200,000 U.S. textile workers have lost their jobs, including more than 30,000 since January 2002. At Faribault Mills and its outlet store, a roster of 171 workers in late 1997 fell to 74 workers by last June.    But in Faribault, the tide is turning. The mill has hired 11 people recently, including some former employees, said Gary Glienke, vice president of human resources.    Longtime Faribault Mills employees haven't had a bonus since 1988, and many can't remember when they got their last raise. Though they'll always spin wool, the employees say, they see the new corn blankets as a sign of better days ahead.    "Most of us here have stuck it out through the hard times," said Jesse Decoux, 33, who runs the scouring trains that clean the wool. "We're going to stay. This gives us hope." The past    Faribault Mills is the nation's last fully integrated woolen mill, taking in raw wool from ranchers and turning out finished blankets under the same roof.    As the last shots of the Civil War were being fired in 1865, German immigrant and cabinet maker Carl Klemer founded the company with a carding machine powered by horses on a treadmill. The family business plodded along conservatively, supplying blankets to the Army, military academies, airlines and department stores.    By the late 1980s, other U.S. textile manufacturers were spending billions of dollars annually on automated equipment, trying to turn out larger quantities so they could better compete with low-cost foreign producers for sales to big department stores.    Large mills in the southern United States, such as Pillowtex, Westpoint Stevens and Burlington Industries, bought smaller mills to consolidate. But the imports grew, led by those from China, and U.S. textile companies lost ground. Currency fluctuations intensified the crisis.    "In the early to mid-'90s, the textile mills realized they just couldn't catch up with the sheer output and cheap labor that the overseas manufacturers were able to produce," Harris said.    Today almost every U.S. woolen mill has shut down. After nothing but losses since 1989, the founding Klemer and Johnson families were forced to sell Faribault Woolen Mills in 1998.    The next year, private investors in Minnesota, led by business turnaround guru Peter Lytle, bought the mill. Harris was one of the investors.    New mortgage lender Bank of America persuaded the managers to begin liquidating. Harris, a former vice president at major investment firms, drove to the mill from his home in Wayzata and went over the books in early 2001. With $4 million in assets but $12 million in debts, the historic company was dying.    "We were so far bankrupt it defies description," he said. Still, he said, "it didn't seem right for the employees to lose their jobs. It didn't seem right for the investors to lose their money. And it didn't seem right for the company to file bankruptcy and stiff everyone in Minnesota that loaned money, and to tarnish the reputation of this historic mill." Harris took over and immediately replaced the board and managers. There was a third round of layoffs. Wages for those remaining were cut 10 to 20 percent. A mill in Maine and showrooms nationwide were closed. Altogether, Harris cut $6 million in overhead.    He hired former auditor Loren Lund as chief financial officer. Lund recalls walking into "a jigsaw puzzle" of judgments and messy records. Taxes hadn't been filed in five years. Since 2001, however, the company has cut net debt from $8 million to $2 million, Lund said.    Weaving supervisor Doug Remmey hopes that this new president finally will restore the mill to the high standing it once had. Remmey, a single parent of two children, stayed on the job for 25 years -- despite the stress of threatened shutdowns. He talks of loyalty to an "old-world craft" and to the mill itself.    "A lot of us feel that this is our company," said Dave Schuenke, a supervisor in the spinning department. "We're all in this together. . . . We want this company to succeed." Harris, they say, managed to keep open the doors with last-minute rescues. His forte is finding money: . From the Southeast Initiative Fund, Minn-Corp and Faribault Industrial Corp. came $850,000. . Then came a $1 million loan from the richest man in Poland, Jan Kulczyk, whose net worth is estimated at more than $3.3 billion. Harris traveled to Warsaw in the fall of 2001 to close the deal.    Jarek Paczek, an integration director for Kulczyk Holdings, said the investment was a "no-brainer" for them. Kulczyk Holdings was aware that containerized imports could be shut out of the United States if terrorists chose that route for an attack. That makes a fully integrated mill in the United States a strategic asset.    The Polish investors also analyzed the textile market, which is dominated by exporters from Asia and India.    "We found many synergies between what was happening in the Faribault Mills and what was happening to the woolen mills in Poland and Western Europe, and we decided to build this bridge," Paczek said from Warsaw this week.    Since then, a private foundation in the United States has loaned Faribault Mills several million dollars more, which enabled the company to buy a cotton mill in South Carolina. The future    The corn-blanket venture was seeded in January 2002. Faribault Mills' chief operating officer, Dennis Melchert, was at a textile show in Germany when he spotted Cargill Dow's corn-based resin products, which are used as fiber filling for pillows and comforters.    By that fall, Melchert developed a process for turning the fiber into blankets. Cargill Dow executives first saw them in January 2003. "They were thrilled," Melchert said.    The corn wove beautifully but the finished fabric was stiff and waxy. The softening solution came from Avinash Bhatnagar, who has an extensive background in textile manufacturing in India, Pakistan and Africa. Bhatnagar joined the mill as plant manager in February and moved his family from Kenya to Faribault. He discovered that a common chemical made the corn blankets soft and supple. The Ingeo blankets are now hitting the market, with Marshall Fields leading the way. Faribault Mills also secured a licensing agreement to use the John Deere brand, said Mike Porter, a Deere licensing specialist.    Because the use of corn for textiles supports Deere's core customer -- farmers -- Deere will let the mill sell its goods at 3,500 implement dealerships.    Meanwhile, in Faribault, smiling mill workers are busier than they've been in six years. The new corn blankets and growing sales are generating excitement and pride.    "The great day will be when we make money," Harris said. "And we're so close." Joy Powell is at jpowell@startribune.com.