Many cities across North Carolina already have found new uses for old industrial plants:
• In Mebane an old mill has been converted to a public library.
• In Winston-Salem a 19th-century mill has become an upscale hotel.
• In Cooleemee a former mill village is being converted to a textile museum.
• In Wadesboro, South Piedmont Community College has moved into an old mill.
• In Durham former textile mills have been converted into housing units. Redbrick tobacco warehouses are used for shopping malls and condos. And a former cigarette factory is being rehabbed for similar uses.
Heritage Tourism
Hundreds of textile-town residents and former textile employees from across the South recently gathered in Kannapolis, North Carolina, where 16,000 people once worked at Cannon Mills.
There they talked about old times and brainstormed for ways to reuse old mills. Participants also discussed creating a textile heritage trail from Alabama to North Carolina to tell the collective story of the region's many mill villages.
Backers say such a trail could tap into Americans' growing interest in heritage tourism. Cheryl Morgan, an architect in Birmingham, Alabama, attributes this interest in part to the terrorist attacks on New York City and The Pentagon in 2001.
"One of the fallouts of 9/11 is that people are comfortable with the familiar," said Morgan, who also directs Auburn University's Center for Architecture and Urban Studies. She added that more vacationing travelers are seeking destinations within an easy drive of their homes.
"There's a nostalgia for historic places, for authenticity of place, where people can stay longer and spend more money," Morgan said.
The buildings in Valley—some of which date from the 19th century—contain about 500,000 square feet (46,500 square meters) of space. Planners think the former mill can be refurbished to accommodate everything from small businesses and a museum to condominiums and a conference center.
"Part of the mill overlooks the river, and there's a spectacular space on the top floor of one building," Morgan said. "It'll make a spectacular ballroom or meeting room."
Civic Community
There's more to the Langdale Mill site than just empty space, however.
Morgan said the old buildings also offer a special ambiance that was created in an era when priorities were quite different from those of today's business and political leaders. Those old-fashioned priorities are clearly evident in 19th-century public buildings—such as courthouses—that foster a sense of common values and purposes, Morgan said.
"They had a set of values about coming together in a democratic society, about coming together with their peers to make rules and follow them," Morgan said.
Modern buildings don't reflect the same sense of community, Morgan said, because priorities are no longer focused on courthouses, schools, parks, and "things that create value in a community."
"We invest huge amounts in things that isolate us, such as roads, and there's nothing left for things that bring people together," she said.
She believes many of today's public buildings are often dull and sometimes oppressive. "We're not creating public and civic buildings that are worth preserving," Morgan said.
The Langdale Mill was built in 1866, one year after the U.S. Civil War ended and the defeated southern states were looking for some way to resurrect their ruined economies. Towns across the South scraped together the capital to start textile mills.
Although the southern textile mills had dramatic ups and downs, by the late 1950s the industry employed millions of workers. But in the past few decades the jobs that once underpinned the economies of thousands of towns have evaporated.
Bonnie Durham, an ARC program manager in Alabama, said 7,000 people once worked in northern Alabama's mills. But about one-third of those jobs have been lost, she said.
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