On this day in 1958, the North Adams Transcript reported that the owners of the Berkshire-Hathaway Company had passed a death sentence on their factory in Adams. The company announced that it was shutting down its operation, after nearly a century of producing cotton textiles in the Berkshire County town. Known locally as Mill Number Four, the plant was the last cotton mill in the state's westernmost county. For the shocked town, it meant the loss of 1,000 jobs and marked the end of a 150-year-long tradition of textile manufacturing. Adams had begun as a struggling farming village and grown into a vibrant mill town; now, like so many other Massachusetts towns that had lost their industry, it had to reinvent itself once again.