Old, But New: An Inventory of Textile Mill Reuse in the Charlotte Urban Region

Rather than trying to copy what other places do, some cities turn to the preservation of local historic, cultural, and environmental resources as an organizing force that defines recent development efforts. Historic preservation and adaptive reuse of old buildings is pursued in areas where industrial building stocks, left in the backwash of economic restructuring, provide resources that are geographically unique to individual places. Abandoned industrial buildings mark the decline of old economic systems and identify formative periods of urban economic and spatial evolution that comprise important elements of the heritage of contemporary landscapes. The southern Piedmont of North Carolina, for example, became the Carolinas' largest concentration of mills as the southward diffusion of the American textile industry occurred between 1880 and the early 1900s. A century later, that concentration remains in a stock of textile mills that have found new uses in a new regional economy. Our research inventories over 100 existing mills and explores their reuse. A wide mix of textile mill reuses occurs in a geography determined by regional growth patterns of the 1990s.