After decades in business, the Fulton Birds Eye plant has closed their doors for good. Our Candace Hopkins has more on the plant's last day and the facility's future.

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FULTON, N.Y. -- Duane Graves, the self-described longest employee at Fulton's Birds Eye plant, spent 57 years working in the facility's maintenance department.

"I started here when I was twenty-years-old," Graves said.

Working at Birds Eye was his first and only job. And after spending his entire adult life working inside these walls, Friday he drove away from the building for the last time, but not before sharing some memories of this factory from long ago.

"Work’s a lot easier than it was back then, everything was made by hand, cartons were all made by hand and we would run 60 cartons per minute," said Graves.

Graves is looking forward to his retirement, but the majority of the almost 300 other employees were not so lucky. Most will now be looking for jobs in Oswego County, where the unemployment is rate is already well above nine percent.

That's why county officials and Operation Oswego County Executive Director Michael Treadwell are now scrambling to find a new company to take over the plant and hopefully put the remaining employees back to work.

"We think we have, logistically, workforce and assets, the physical facility, that is a good building, but it's an asset we certainly think is marketable and we hope this strategy helps to identify somebody," Treadwell said.

That process of identifying new manufacturing businesses to buy the building and begin operations in Fulton is now in full swing, with an aggressive advertising campaign that has reached nearly a thousand companies. Now it's a waiting game to see if any of those businesses decide to give Fulton, and its workers, a shot.