Willie Collier swept floors, packed peanut brittle and managed workers at the Sophie Mae Candy factory on North Avenue during his 40-year confectionery career.

Friday, amid the flattened brittle boxes and exposed wiring, Collier again picked up a broom, maybe for the last time. Atlanta's Sophie Mae is history.

A faded Southern belle, Sophie Mae fell victim in part to America's waning taste for peanut brittle. The Chicago-area company that owns the factory stilled the conveyor belts in April, trucked the candy-making machinery north and left Collier behind to bury a 90-year-old Atlanta institution.

"It's like your wife getting up and leaving you one day —- and you thought you were happily married," said Collier, the warehouse manager.

Sophie Mae's local demise —- the owners, who didn't return calls seeking comment this week, are expected to continue peanut brittle production and the Sophie Mae name —- is insignificant in the grand scheme of America's declining manufacturing base.

But Sophie Mae's story is Atlanta's story on many levels: a once prosperous hometown industry disappears, a neighborhood that attracted Georgia's rural poor gives way to yuppies and condos, and Atlanta's manic reinvention rolls on.

"It's a sad passing of an era," said Beauchamp Carr, an Atlantan whose grandfather founded the company. "For the sake of nostalgia, I'd like to see Sophie Mae perpetuated and prosperous."

Sweet beginning

John Beauchamp Coppedge, a country boy from Williamson, Ga., moved north to Atlanta at the end of the 19th century, married a woman named Sophie Mae and started making candy. The Sophie Mae Candy Co. opened a factory on Ivy Street downtown in 1918.

Coppedge sold chocolate-covered cherries and loose candies from a shop in the long-gone Peachtree Arcade, a glass-domed shopping mall below Five Points. In a Jan. 9, 1927, interview with The Atlanta Constitution, Coppedge boasted of 6,000-plus dealers nationwide, a shop on Fifth Avenue in New York City and sales of 120,000 packages of stick candy annually, at 50 cents apiece, in the Empire State alone.

The company sponsored an advertising contest that year. Anita Minter of Rogers Street won with an ad titled, "While the Wife's Away, Send Her Sophie Mae."

In the late 1930s, Coppedge obtained a load of cheap peanuts and hired some men to blend it with a sugar-corn syrup mix and —- voila! —- peanut brittle. The nutty concoction became Sophie Mae's top product, although honey-roasted peanuts and cashew brittle remained popular offerings.

Carr recalls bags of Spanish peanuts unloaded at the plant. The ingredients would be boiled together in huge, copper kettles.

Burly men would upend the lumpy brown goo onto a greased steel table with cold water pipes running underneath to cool the candy and make it brittle. The candy would then be transferred to marble-topped tables and broken into pieces.

"In those days, the factory labor in Atlanta would be country people who'd come to town with rural Georgia, twangy accents," said Carr, executive vice president of Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center. "They worked hard. They might've lacked teeth, but they were good people."

The confection was, until the application of aluminum foil in 1949, a cool-weather treat. The peanut crop wouldn't arrive until August. And sticky brittle didn't hold up well in the heat.

In the 1950s, Sophie Mae moved into an old root beer bottling plant on North Avenue, an area filled with laundries, small manufacturers, trucking companies and the cavernous Sears, Roebuck and Co. warehouse. Coppedge's son sold the business in 1969 to an Augusta businessman, the first in a slew of owners.

Tastes change

Willie Collier sharecropped cotton and corn alongside his father in Locust Grove for $2 a day. Collier's mother worked as a maid for the Carr family, which got Collier hired at the Sophie Mae plant in 1967.

Sweeping floors paid $1.25 an hour. Collier still marvels at the production of peanut brittle.

"When it came out of the cooker," he said, "it was like lava coming down the mountain."

At its peak, Sophie Mae churned out 3,000 cases of peanut brittle in an eight-hour shift, Collier said.

Eighty employees worked at 317 North Ave.

Passersby, including hungry children, would stand outside the plate-glass windows ogling the production within.

"You'd give them a box of candy, but the bad part about it was that every other kid in the neighborhood would come on back," Collier said.

Today, condos creep up on North and Ponce and a younger crowd moves into the neighborhood.

"Everybody used to talk about how great it smelled along here," said Collier, 59, bespectacled and mustachioed. "You've got Sophie Mae, Krispy Kreme, the Spaghetti Factory, Mary Mac's, Burger King, Dairy Queen. They used to say, 'Well, we can tell when y'all are cooking.'"

That happened with less and less frequency. Tastes change. Peanut brittle harks back to a time gone by.

"It certainly reflects the tastes of the older generation," said Bernard Pacyniak, editor of Candy Industry magazine. "Candy companies have also been hit by rising commodity prices. [And] peanut brittle is labor-intensive, which is obviously one of the industry killers today."

Collier, plant manager from 1998 to 2004, saw wages freeze, equipment break and suppliers demand cash up front. When the Georgia Nut Co. of Skokie, Ill., bought the factory in 2004, Collier felt as if a parachute had been fitted to the free-falling company.

Georgia Nut —- Georgia was a grandmother's name —- paid $2 million for the company and, more importantly, the Sophie Mae peanut and cashew brittle brand names. The company invested $1.5 million in equipment, opened an on-site retail store and gave employees raises. Company COO Dave Drebohl spoke of doubling revenues to $10 million within three years. The optimism wouldn't last.

"Don't ever underestimate how difficult an acquisition can be," Drebohl told Candy Industry in a 2007 article.

"It will cost you much more money than you thought. The company needed a major overhaul."

In January, Georgia Nut shipped a candy cooker to Illinois, Collier said, a sign that Sophie Mae's Atlanta days were dwindling. The retail store closed in March. Candy-making ended in April. The work force dwindled to less than a dozen. Walgreens said Thursday it will drop Sophie Mae peanut brittle and offer another brand.

Carr, whose family still owns the North Avenue factory and the land upon which it sits, looks forward to the eventual redevelopment of the property.

Collier laments the passing of an era —- and a job.

"My daddy taught me if you do a job well and take care of the job, the job will take care of you, so I can't complain. It was a good job," he said. "But tell folks that a 60-year-old needs a job and to give me a call."

Staff researcher Richard Hallman contributed to this article.