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Carrollton • From Page 6 • Kansas City, Carrollton is the quintessential small town.

Main Street Restaurant sells the classic omelets, pork tenderloins and homemade pies. Across the street, the Romanesque county courthouse towers over the tidy green lawn of the town square.

Over by the high school, pickup trucks fill the gravel lot of Ol’ Boys Barbecue at lunch hour. And images of the local mascot, the Trojans, hang on ruby red signs all over town.

But Carrollton houses a mix of vibrancy and decline.

Even on the square, some buildings are boarded up. Little fingers created drawings, like finger paint, on the thick layer of dust covering one storefront.

More than three decades after its closure, people still mourn the loss of the Banquet Foods factory, once the town’s largest employer.

“You don’t replace 500 jobs,” said Mayor Scott Bartlett. “The identity of Carrollton for a long time was with Banquet.”

In more recent years, another major employer, Fuller Marketing closed its doors. The name of that company, which made retail displays, is still painted on an old brick building downtown. And just last year, Shopko, the town’s big box retailer, closed as that Wisconsin-based chain went out of business.

The mayor has lived those losses personally: Now a loan officer at a local bank, he was previously the manager of the Shopko store. And both his parents worked at the Banquet Foods plant back in its heyday.

Yet he remains bullish on the future. Not just because of the marijuana facilities, but other developments as well. A local bank is expanding. The school system is adding new real estate. The Orscheln Farm & Home store is expanding to move into the old Shopko space. And smaller boutiques and retailers are expanding on the square.

“The town has struggled to get past that,” he said of the Banquet facility. “But we have a lot of things now that we didn’t have then. We may not have a Starbucks but we’ve got our own coffee shop. We’ve got our own brewpub uptown. We’ve got a lot of things homegrown.”

In 2018, the Census reported Carroll County had a median household income of $42,149 — more than $10,000 below the state average of $53,560.

In recent years, doctors, lawyers and pharmacists have come back home to Carrollton after leaving to chase education and careers. And the housing market is heating up with a limited inventory and rising home prices.

“I don’t want to say it’s a sleepy little town because it’s very busy,” the mayor said.

With a more diverse economy, Carrollton is no longer a company town. But the mayor said it’s just too early to tell whether it might carve out a new identity based on the marijuana business.

Could it be “the cannabis capital of Missouri?”

“I don’t know if that moniker would stick or not,” he said. But we’ve all got to be the first at something or good at something.”

Inside C4, most employees work with dirt under their fingernails. Soil covers hands, arms and T-shirts as they move pots of pot around the facility.

The work is a mix of hard labor and science. They plant everything by hand, but the temperature, lighting and humidity of each grow room are closely monitored.

The company started growing with seeds but plans to reproduce all plants from clones in the future. In one room, a narrow aisle separates the racks of towering pot plants, almost ready for harvest.

“There’s a lot of challenges, because it’s brand new,” Klein said during a recent tour.

A good portion of the structure remains under construction. That’s where staff will manufacture marijuana-infused products like gummies and vape cartridges. Outside, crews are preparing a pad for an expansion of the grow operation.

Klein said he’s already spent more than $5 million on the business, a mix of personal debt and investment. But he takes pride in making that investment here. He previously ran a construction business that built clean rooms and pharmaceutical labs.

He considered building a marijuana businesses in various locations across Missouri, but felt it would have the most impact — and receive the warmest welcome — in his hometown. Adding a few jobs in, say, Kansas City would be a blip on the radar. But with 20 people already on board in Carrollton, he said it’s already making a difference in the community. And he hopes his company alone may soon employ more than 100 people.

At full capacity, the power needed to run the operation will rival the collective electricity demand for the entire community. That’s partly why the city-owned utility agreed to build a new substation nearby to ensure reliable power.

Klein runs the operation with his childhood friend Brandon Green, who just moved back to town to work as C4’s vice president of sales. The two are hoping to be among the first in the state to harvest product on Oct. 1.

“Then, every 12 days after that we’re going to harvest for eternity,” Klein said.

Photo Courtesy of Trenton Middle School

Trenton Middle School has named its October Students of the Month for the character trait of “respect.” They include, from left, front row, fifth grader Lilliahana Sosa, daughter of Megan Sosa and Gerardo Sosa; sixth grader Laney Woldridge, daughter of Colby and Logan Woldridge; back row, fifth grader Drake Weaver, son of Mackenzie and Scott Weldon and Jim and Hannah Weaver; sixth grader Aiden Gott, grandson of Kathy Reeder; seventh grader Brayden Sharp, son of Sabrina Day; and eighth grader Wade Houser, son of Matt Houser. Not pictured are seventh grader Kiona Lawrence, daughter of Rebecca Gamble and Rodney Lawrence, and eighth grader Kiley Lawrence, daughter of Rebecca Gamble and Rodney Lawrence.

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