COLRAIN — The building where Barnhardt Manufacturing Co. and earlier companies processed cotton will go up for sale in an online auction.

Bidding for the property at 247 Main Road starts at $250,000. The auction will take place from Nov. 13-15 through LoopNet.

“We hope to get a new business in there as soon as possible,” said Harrison Klein, first vice president of Marcus & Millichap, the company that organized the auction.

Klein explained the building has several interested parties, though all are involved in real estate and have no immediate use for the building. Klein said he expects the building will ultimately be sold for much more than $250,000 and the owners chose to host a private auction to facilitate a faster sale.

Barnhardt announced plans to close its Colrain operations last December, and shut the plant down over the next several months. At the time, company President Lewis Barnhardt said in a statement that “business loss and other costs beyond our control” made it financially unfeasible to keep the wastewater plant in Colrain’s Griswoldville village operational. Upon closing, 31 local employees were let go.

Barnhardt Manufacturing Co., based in North Carolina, is a family-owned business that was founded in 1900 by Thomas M. Barnhardt to produce layered batting from unbleached cotton fibers. At the time, this cotton batting was used as a cushioning product for furniture, horse collars, buggy seats, quilts and comforters. Today, the business is run by the fourth generation of Barnhardts, with the facility processing raw cotton for use as hygienic material in medical and personal products.

In addition to processing cotton, the Colrain plant also processed the sewage for 21 homes and a church in an area known as the Colrain Sewer District. The homes were built to have the plant process their sewage, instead of needing individual septic systems. The Colrain Sewer District is an independent entity with no town jurisdiction created by a 1997 legislative act empowering residents of Church, High and Griswoldville streets — as well as one residence on Main Road — to manage their wastewater. The homes have since been left to their own devices to find a long-term solution for the processing of their wastewater.

The building is advertised as a “value-add industrial asset.” It was built in 1985, is 75,000 square feet and sits on a 5.26-acre lot. To view the LoopNet listing, visit bit.ly/3ucYBOw.