Nations rarely lose their oldest institutions all at once. They lose them a plant, a promise, and an unpaid invoice at a time — while everyone assumes someone else is watching. This page is about watching.
In early 2024, the machines stopped in Ilion, New York — for the first time in 208 years. The plant Eliphalet Remington’s forge grew into had survived the Civil War, two world wars, the Depression, a dozen changes of ownership, and two bankruptcies. It did not survive the relocation. A village of eight thousand people, organized for two centuries around one employer, watched multi-generation careers end and an anchor institution go dark.
That is what losing Remington looks like where it has already happened. It is not an abstraction. It is a fenced parking lot where a workforce used to be.
For LaGrange, Georgia — population about 30,000, seat of Troup County — the November 8, 2021 announcement was the kind that changes a town’s trajectory: Remington’s global headquarters, advanced manufacturing, and approximately 856 jobs over five years, announced jointly by the Office of the Governor and the company itself. “We are very excited to come to Georgia,” CEO Ken D’Arcy said in the official release. The town, the LaGrange Development Authority, the city, and the county backed that promise with real public resources: land, cash incentives, tax rebates under the state REBA grant program conditioned on job creation — and, according to the Verified Complaint, a waiver of the performance bond that would ordinarily have protected the construction project. (Verified Complaint ¶27; the waiver characterization is an allegation.)
The sworn complaint now on file alleges that the enterprise’s own internal planning documents projected a workforce below 200 — and that the gap between the public pledge and the internal plan “is not a forecasting error.” (¶¶28–30, an allegation the defendants are entitled to contest.) For a town that budgeted its hopes on the difference, the answer matters enormously.
This is the saddest part of the story, and the best documented. The firms that graded the site, poured the concrete, hung the panels, and plumbed the mechanical systems of the LaGrange plant are, in large numbers, still waiting to be paid for finished work. These are not distant corporations. They are the small and mid-sized businesses a town like LaGrange runs on — companies that meet payroll every Friday, carry their crews’ health insurance, and extended months of labor and materials on the strength of Remington’s name.
A mechanics’ lien is a builder’s last resort — a public, recorded declaration that the work is done and the money never came. The Troup County record books now hold them in a row: Southeastern Site Development (Lien Book 184, p. 288; Lien Book 185, p. 124), Accuwright Mechanical (Lien Book 185, p. 98), Reinicke Athens (Lien Book 185, pp. 514–517). Pemmco Manufacturing sued, won at trial, and won again on appeal, per the Verified Complaint (¶34). AAR of NC and Panel Systems Unlimited have pending lawsuits. And the complaint alleges the full list of unpaid creditors exceeds 250 — printers, security firms, tradespeople — most of them local, none of them able to absorb the loss the way a national enterprise can. (¶33, an allegation.)
Every unpaid invoice on that list lands somewhere specific: a delayed hire, a canceled equipment purchase, a line of credit drawn down, a family business carrying debt for work it completed in good faith. That is what it means when a town’s biggest project doesn’t pay its builders — the loss doesn’t disappear, it is distributed onto the people least able to carry it.
Was this mismanagement, misfortune — or something worse? That question is now before the Superior Court of Troup County. The Verified Complaint, sworn under oath and filed June 29, 2026, gives the plaintiffs’ answer in unusually direct language. It alleges that every part of the pattern flows from a single design:
“…a scheme built to extract value from every party who came near it — investors, contractors, suppliers, public bodies, tradespeople — while ensuring that no one who could stop it ever had enough information to do so until the extraction was complete. The creditors are not background figures in this case. They are its central victims.”
— Verified Complaint, Introduction (an allegation of the plaintiffs)
The complaint names the people and entities it holds responsible — Scott Soura, Ken D’Arcy, Virginie Boutin and “Jane Doe Boutin”, Roundhill Group LLC, RemArms, and a web of related entities — and pleads eleven counts, including fraud and Georgia RICO claims, describing selective payment of creditors, a diverted construction draw, and undocumented ownership transfers. (§§IV.B, IV.E, IV.G.)
A brand is lost when the record of what happened to it is lost — when no one can any longer say, with documents in hand, what was promised, what was built, who paid, and who didn’t. That outcome, at least, is preventable, and preventing it is this site’s work: every lien indexed, every filing preserved, every promise documented. The rest is up to courts, communities, and citizens who insist on answers.
Read the record while it is being made. Share it. And stand with the communities and builders who are living it.
Meet the Unpaid Contractors