The Factory That Refused to Disappear: How Shelbyville's Fly Building Became an Arts Center

The Building on South Main Street

There are buildings that announce their importance with a courthouse dome, a columned entrance, or a bronze plaque. Then there are buildings that simply keep standing. In Shelbyville, the old Fly Manufacturing Company building on South Main Street belongs to the second category. Its brick walls do not shout. They remember.

Today, at 204 South Main Street, the building is home to the Fly Arts Center. People come for community theatre, art exhibits, classes, live music, festivals, meetings, and the occasional evening when a small town seems to gather under one roof. But before the gallery lights and stage curtains, this was a factory. Before it was a cultural center, it was a place where Bedford County workers made clothing by hand, shipment after shipment, through some of the hardest decades in American history.

The story of the Fly building is not just an industrial anecdote. It is a compact history of Shelbyville itself: ambition, improvisation, work, adaptation, decline, and an almost unreasonable refusal to let a useful place vanish.

A Factory Begins with a Few People and a Lot of Nerve

Joel Orvel Fly moved his family from Clarksville to Shelbyville in 1914. The timing mattered. Shelbyville citizens were actively trying to encourage economic growth through the Shelbyville Commercial Club, a local organization that understood a simple truth about small towns: civic pride is lovely, but people also need paychecks.

With help from his father-in-law and Oliver D. Edwards, Fly established the Fly Manufacturing Company. Production began on February 15, 1915, in a small building near Depot and Jefferson Streets, across from what is now First Baptist Church. The factory employed eighteen to twenty people and made overalls, pants, and work shirts.

That number sounds modest until you picture the town around it. Each job connected to a household. Each order meant fabric, thread, freight, bookkeeping, repairs, meals, and local spending. A factory did not merely occupy a room. It altered the daily rhythm of a community.

Demand grew quickly. Within a year, the company needed more space, and Fly arranged to expand into a building on Depot Street owned by Ray B. Jean. Then, just before the new quarters were ready, fire destroyed the original factory beside the Kirkpatrick Livery Stable. Shelbyville had already learned that fire could erase a town block in a night. Fly rebuilt and carried on.

The 1927 Building Was a Statement

By 1925, even the Depot Street location had become too small. On November 12 of that year, Fly purchased property on South Main Street for $5,000. Construction began in May 1926. Col. Morgan Raney received the contract, estimated at $40,000, an impressive investment for a local manufacturer and one of the largest building projects in Bedford County at the time.

The finished structure was more than a shed for sewing machines. It had two stories and a full basement, and it was described as having every modern convenience available to a factory of its era. A cornerstone placed near the top of the building recorded the date, 1927. During that August, office furniture, machinery, and equipment moved from Depot Street to South Main Street.

You can still feel the logic of the building when you look at it. Its scale is practical, but not timid. It was designed to hold an enterprise that expected to grow. In a town built around agriculture, commerce, rail connections, and the courthouse square, the factory represented another kind of future. Shelbyville was not only selling what it raised. It was making things.

Work During the Depression

In 1928, Fly hired seventy-five employees for its shirt manufacturing department. The company sold finished goods to major retailers including Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, as well as to local stores. Those contracts gave the factory something many businesses lost during the Great Depression: a reason to keep the doors open.

Fly's response to the crisis was unusually personal. Rather than allow workers to leave town in search of jobs, the company rotated schedules so employees could receive at least two or three days of work each week. That was not prosperity. It was not security in the modern sense. But it was a lifeline, and lifelines matter most when the river is high.

Imagine the sound inside the building then: the steady machinery, scissors opening and closing, conversations rising above the work, footsteps on stairs, trucks arriving with materials or carrying finished garments away. The factory would have been hot in summer, cold in winter, and relentlessly busy in between. Yet for generations of families, it was also dependable. A place where neighbors worked beside one another. A place that made a difficult town slightly more survivable.

When the Factory Served the War

During World War II, the Fly Manufacturing Company received a contract to make pants, jackets, and fatigues for the United States Army. The old brick building became part of the enormous domestic effort that clothed soldiers and supplied a military fighting on several continents.

War production changes the meaning of ordinary work. A jacket is no longer simply a garment. It is a uniform waiting for a person whose family may be listening to the radio at home. A pair of fatigue pants carries the labor of the person who cut the cloth, the person who stitched the seam, the person who inspected it, and the person who packed it for shipment.

For Shelbyville, the contract also tied local hands to a national emergency. The factory was rooted on South Main Street, but its products traveled far beyond Bedford County. In a small way, the building became part of the country’s wartime geography.

Ownership Changes, and the Old Identity Fades

The company continued as an independent textile manufacturer until Joel Fly died in 1960. In 1972, as the apparel market grew more competitive, the company was sold to Bayly Corporation, a Denver-based garment manufacturer. The Shelbyville operation became a southeastern distribution center.

Eight years later, a stockholding dispute within Bayly led to another sale, this time to Woodway Corporation. Garment production returned to the historic building, but the revival did not last. In 1985, after a severe decline in business, Woodway ceased operations there.

That is the part of the story where many industrial buildings disappear. Windows break. Roofs leak. Machinery is hauled away. The building becomes an obstacle on a redevelopment map, then a memory, then nothing at all.

The Fly building endured a decade of neglect instead. Endurance is not the same as triumph. It is messier and less photogenic. Still, the walls remained, and the structure retained enough of its character to make preservation possible.

A Second Life with a Different Kind of Work

The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a significant part of Shelbyville’s industrial heritage. In 1992, the Bedford County Arts Council restored it for use as a cultural arts center. The conversion did not erase the factory’s past. It gave that past a public future.

Now the building holds a community theatre, an art gallery, a museum, arts classes, festivals, live music, community meetings, and private events. The work inside has changed completely. The old production floor may host actors instead of garment workers, painters instead of cutters, musicians instead of shipping clerks. Yet the central idea remains familiar: people come together, practice a skill, make something, and send it into the world.

That continuity is what makes the Fly Arts Center more interesting than a restored shell. It is not a frozen exhibit. It is still active. Children take classes there. Audiences sit in the dark waiting for a scene to begin. Local artists show work. Residents gather for events that have no obvious connection to overalls or wartime uniforms, but are connected by the same civic energy that helped Joel Fly establish his company in 1915.

Why the Fly Story Matters

Local history often arrives wearing a uniform. A battle, a famous politician, a courthouse fire, a celebrated horse. The Fly story is quieter. It belongs to workers, managers, families, retailers, truck drivers, and people whose names may never appear in a textbook.

That is exactly why it deserves attention.

The old factory shows how a town creates resilience through ordinary institutions. A commercial club attracts investment. A manufacturer creates jobs. Workers keep the operation alive during a depression. A wartime contract connects a rural community to a global conflict. Later, an arts council sees possibility where others see an obsolete building.

There is no single heroic moment. There are dozens of practical decisions, made over more than a century. Someone bought the lot. Someone laid the bricks. Someone kept the payroll moving. Someone decided the building was worth saving.

In 2027, the Fly building will reach its centennial. The Bedford County Arts Council is planning a special commemoration of the building’s 100 years and the nonprofit organization’s 50 years. It will be an anniversary, certainly, but also a reminder that historic preservation works best when history is allowed to keep happening.

If you visit Shelbyville, stop by the Fly Arts Center on South Main Street during its posted visiting hours. Look at the brickwork. Notice the proportions of the old factory. Then stay for a performance, browse the gallery, or attend a class if the schedule allows.

You will not be seeing a building that merely survived. You will be seeing one that changed jobs, changed owners, changed purpose, and somehow remained useful. Shelbyville’s most revealing landmarks are often the ones still earning their keep.

Plan a Visit

The Fly Arts Center is located at 204 South Main Street in Shelbyville, Tennessee. Its current posted visiting hours are Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; check the center’s calendar before traveling, especially for performances, classes, and special events.