SALENA ZITO: Promised Land Lost.

Only ghosts and shadows haunt the empty halls of Sheaffer Pens, the onetime giant pen manufacturer on H Street.

Its locked doors and worn brick stand like weary sentinels along the banks of the Mississippi in this struggling southeast Iowa river-and-railroad town.

Rust weeps through the paint on the window frames; the once magnificent illuminated-letters sign with the trademark white dot that faced Illinois is gone, no longer serving as a gatekeeper for its fortress of employees.

At its peak, it employed more than 2,500 people in a town of 14,000; nearly everyone here had someone in their family who worked there — sometimes, two or three or more.

By the time they were bought out by French-owned BIC in 2003, the 40 employees left in the iconic company’s pen-point assembly department were told it was only a matter of time before the operation would be moved to a third-party manufacturer in Asia; Slovakia would become the home for customer service, purchasing, warehousing and distribution work, as well as packaging and quality control.

What made Sheaffer special?

Ingenuity.

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It’s a sad story, and one repeated in too many town across the nation. But relying on fountain pen sales in the second decade of the 21st Century might indicate that the ingenuity had run dry.