Lansford, like many small Pennsylvania towns, was once abuzz with factories as one of its main industries.

The machines have long since stopped running, but thanks to resident and artist Renee Mariotti, the faces of the men and women behind them will not be forgotten.Many of those factory workers in the Panther Valley area were featured in an art exhibit on display Sunday outside the former Kiddie Kloes clothing factory on the corner of Cortright and West Bertsch streets in Lansford.Mariotti drew the faces of 18 men and women and included the local factory or factories where they worked and the position they held.Her daughter Michele Novak has owned the Kiddie Kloes building for just over a year."I had done around 10 or 12 coal miners for a previous exhibit based on the photographs in George Harvan's Coal Miners of Panther Valley book," Mariotti said. "I wanted to do another project and to be honest this was pretty inexpensive and easy. After I got the photographs of the factory workers, I put it on the light table and traced them. I've been doing this kind of thing for a long time. For one of our Lansford school reunions, I made caricatures of my classmates based on photographs in our yearbook."The Kiddie Kloes factory building is over 100 years old, but has been vacant since the 1990s."This exhibit is one way of getting the community involved with this factory that we would like to someday have repaired or become another viable part of Lansford," said Kim Novak, Mariotti's daughter and Michele's sister. "We don't want it to be the horrible eyesore it's been in past years."Mariotti is involved with the Lansford Historical Society and at one of the organization's events, she had a book and asked former factory workers to sign their name, where they worked and what they did.People then sent her pictures to use for the drawings."We'll continue to build up our files," Mariotti said, "and hope to do similar events in the future."