Photo by ekelly80

On Wednesday, the machines shut down and the conveyer belts stopped moving. Yesterday, employees turned in their uniforms. The Good Humor plant in Hagerstown, Md., is no more.

We knew this was coming, but for the Hagerstown community and the 400 people who worked at the Good Humor plant, this shutdown brings a drastic change. The plant was one of Good Humor’s primary facilities of some of its best-known summertime staples—Klondike bars, Popsicles, Toasted Almonds and Chocolate Eclairs.

But now those treats and others will be produced at factories in Missouri and Tennessee, where the labor costs are much cheaper for Unilever, Good Humor’s corporate parent. The Post, earlier this week, interviewed some of the men and women whose lives were upended by the shuttering of the Hagerstown plant.

“This job paid the bills, fed the kids, put a roof over our heads,” Luther Brooks, a pasteurizer who made about $40,000 a year, told the Post. Now he’s worried that as a single father with four sons, he might not have an immediate solution to make ends meet.

But the costs of living and of doing business in Hagerstown have increased in recent years, the Post reported. Things are getting more expensive as the region seeks to cash in on the the growing number of higher-educated workers moving to western Maryland to avoid the even higher cost of living closer to Washington.

Still, for people whose lives revolved around Good Humor, the shuttering of the ice-cream factory is, obviously, the end of an era. The union that represented the plant’s employees is just about finished, too, the Post reported:

“We’re scared, and we’re frustrated,” said Larry Lorshbaugh, president of the United Steelworkers Local 9386, the last steelworkers outpost left in Hagerstown.

Lorshbaugh has worked at the plant since its beginnings in 1983, when it was owned by Gold Bond Ice Cream. He is a pasteurizer. His hands are gnarled and battered, and so, too, is his psyche — from defending his union against Unilever, against city officials he says haven’t been supportive to the union and even against the international union his workers belong to.

Although we briefly freaked out about shortages of Good Humor products when the plant started its shutdown process last month, if it is in fact 14 cents per item cheaper to produce them in Missouri and Tennessee, those shortages will likely be abated.

Reviving Hagerstown, however, will take much longer. Even though Maryland is giving each laid-off worker $4,500 for retraining, the former Good Humor workers worry that won’t suffice. “They are really leaving all of us in a rotten position,” Brooks told the Post.