DOUGLAS, Ga. -- When the fourth factory quit town, 535 more voices joined the luckless chorus asking what was happening to this rural center's hardest-won jobs.

Lewis Burkett knows the answer.

He knows because, when his plant closed last year, Intermetro Industries asked him to spend two more weeks on a special assignment--smoothing out the bumps at a new wire-shelving factory replacing the one where he'd worked for 17 years.

Burkett arrived in the northern Mexican city of Cuauhtemoc to find a spotless building housing many of the very same machines, rebuilt and repainted, that commanded the factory floor in Douglas.

A Catholic priest was ushered in and laborers gathered as he solemnly blessed the machinery with holy water. Then the production line wailed back to life.

"When I went to the plant and saw them doing the same things we did ... well, to tell you the truth, I was kind of proud of those folks," Burkett says now, sitting at his kitchen table hunched over a road atlas opened to a map of Mexico. "They're doing for $8 a day what we were doing in Georgia for $11 an hour."

Understanding the quandary Douglas faces doesn't offer much solace, however.

Nor does it stop the situation from getting worse, as it did on June 30, when Tecumseh Product Co. closed its Douglas plant--one lured here just seven years ago, where workers were frequently told that the quality of the engines they built was so good that customers insisted on Douglas-made products.

The angst over lost manufacturing jobs is shared by rural communities across the United States. Many of the very towns that benefited from a rebound in manufacturing during the 1990s that helped them net thousands of new jobs, have now shuddered through three years of wrenching layoffs and plant closures.

All face more or less the same conundrum as people here in Douglas: What do we do next?

"I wish I had jobs to offer ... all my students. But I'll be honest, fellas, I don't," says George Foster, a former worker at a now-shuttered factory, addressing a class mostly composed of layoff casualties seeking retraining at East Central Technical College in Douglas.

"I don't know the answers. I wish I did," Foster says later, pacing through the workshop where he teaches refrigeration and air conditioning repair. "I wish I did."

Of the 2.7 million jobs the U.S. economy has lost since early 2001, 2.4 million were in manufacturing. The downturn has been particularly tough on some rural communities, which have lost a significantly larger share of manufacturing jobs than urban areas, often because of outright factory shutdowns rather than partial layoffs.

Douglas is a city in name but a small town in character. It's a place where people shake their heads at the crowds and pace of Atlanta, four hours north, and point to their town's suitability for raising a family.

It boasts a tidy downtown aspiring to be a tourist stop and a busy commercial strip of chain restaurants and discount stores. More important, Douglas has seeded a crop of brick and aluminum factory buildings amid the worn grain elevators and whitewashed tobacco sheds that gave the town its start.

Many of the factory jobs here are relatively unskilled, tapping a labor force of which nearly half lack a high school diploma. When state and local officials held a job fair downtown in July, more than 1,700 jobseekers flocked in over four hours--in a city with a population of 10,600.

"What we need more than anything is just jobs," says Herbert Tanner, a 57-year-old engine assembly worker at Tecumseh. Tanner is losing not just his paycheck but also the health insurance that picked up $58,000 in medical bills last year, mostly for cancer care.

"What good is drawing industry here if they're just going to stay three or four years and leave us flat?" he asked.

Douglas had long depended on its role as a tobacco, peanut and cotton center, as well as on some apparel plants, now mostly closed.

About 20 years ago, some local bankers decided the town couldn't sit still. Douglas' future would be made by aggressively pursuing new industries and training residents to fit the jobs.

The strategy worked. For a while.

The community pitched a cheap and willing non-union workforce, job training programs, incentives like tax breaks and ready-built, cinderblock factory buildings waiting for occupancy.

The first gains came in the early 1980s, when poultry processor Gold Kist Inc. brought 1,500 jobs. Not long after, PCC Airfoils Inc. was lured here to make aircraft parts.

The town built its first speculative factory shell in the mid-1980s and Intermetro moved in. A second building was snapped up in 1995 by Tecumseh, a Michigan-based manufacturer whose engines supply the heart of Toro lawn mowers.

Tecumseh offered starting pay of around $8 an hour, generous health insurance and a chance to advance.

"For around here, that's good money," said Maryland Winters, a former supervisor who got a raise to $12.13 an hour shortly before the shutdown. "You're not going to find something else like that even if you go uptown and put on your pretty heels and go to some office."

Douglas last year moved ahead with long-contemplated plans for a third building, in an industrial park on the west side of town whose only businesses are a commercial greenhouse and a mini-sports park.

There's a problem, though. Both of the earlier buildings, and several others around town, are sitting idle.

Intermetro closed in January 2002, laying off the last 112 people from a payroll that had once been near 200.

Manufactured housing producer Fleetwood Homes closed one of its several area plants the same month, eliminating 120 jobs. In December, Owens Corning Fabricating Solutions, known locally as Fabwell, closed and sent its 130 workers home.

Some remaining businesses also have shed jobs. PCC has cut 283 in two layoffs since last spring.

But the damage was relatively limited until a Friday morning in early April.

"They told us the day before we were going to have a plantwide meeting," says Rhonda Pease, a 32-year-old mother of two who worked on the engine line at Tecumseh, and whose husband worked in diecasting. "They told us to be on time."

Close to 300 gathered in the open space of the shipping and receiving department that morning, listening quietly as plant manager Kevin Johnson read a letter from the corporate office telling them the company's time in Douglas had come to an end.

Tecumseh said it would move production to Curitiba, Brazil, as part of an "ongoing strategy to reduce excess capacity by shifting production to overseas' lower-cost manufacturing facilities."

The Douglas plant closed without ceremony June 30, eliminating 535 jobs in a county with a working population of just over 15,000.

Until then, the jobs picture in Coffee County wasn't too bad, with unemployment at 5.7 percent in May, up from 3.6 percent in late 2001.

That rate is lower than the national unemployment rate of 6.1 percent in May. Officials expect the local jobless rate to top 7 percent once the Tecumseh layoffs are counted.

Beyond the numbers is the declining mood of people who have lost their jobs, and those who are worried they might be next.

Many of the people who've lost jobs in shuttered factories have flocked to the area's high school equivalency programs and technical colleges, seeking retraining.

The most popular choice seems to be anything related to health care. Students reassure themselves about their chances for future employment with morbidly upbeat pronouncements.

"There'll always be sick people," they tell one another.

"I get calls every day from Tecumseh workers," said Kim Nolan, who runs Coffee County's literacy and high school equivalency programs. "This is my motto: It's never too late to learn."