Charlotte, NC: The Global Evolution of a New South City

A Place for Old Mills in a New Economy: Textile Mill Reuse in Charlotte

Tyrel G. Moore and Gerald L. Ingalls A Place for Old Mills in a New Economy Textile Mill Reuse in Charlotte extilemillreusebuildstangiblebridgesbetweenCharlotte’s oldnineteenth-andtwentieth-centuryandnewtwenty-firstcentury economies. The place-defining continuity inherent in renewed functions for old mills wraps a sense of heritage, place, and community into new economic and social environments . Furthermore, mill reuse creates a mutually supportive intersection for diverse interests including developers, preservationists, and municipal and regional governments whose initiatives focus on economic revitalization to restore sagging tax bases and revitalize blighted industrial landscapes and neighborhoods. More recently, “smart growth” advocates who promote “green” planning processes that yield sustainable, vibrant communities have been added to the list. From their multiple motivations for preservation and for successful business ventures, these groups realize that old buildings’ sense of place and architectural character provide amenities that draw people back to once-blighted, empty urban spaces.1 The places that Charlotte’s old mills find in a new economy represent more than innovative business ventures and public sector initiatives. They evocatively reveal the layers of past geographies and economies that have shaped the city’s transition toward becoming a global city. In their initial development and in their reuse, Charlotte’s textile mills are emblematic of stages that first defined the city as a center in the industrial transformation of a rural agrarian South and, in their recent reuse, redefined the city’s textile heritage in a maturing postindustrial urban landscape. This chapter provides a spatial perspective on that process of change. Key elements of Charlotte’s path in the process involve the ways the city first adopted a textile economy and later made adjustments in embracing the heritage of its early economic landscape. Data for that analysis are derived from histoT 120 moore and ingalls ries of the southern textile industry; the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission and the City of Charlotte Planning Commission; historic maps of Charlotte; fieldwork and interviews related to our previous research on the topic; and a content analysis of local news articles on the textile industry and the reuse of mills. We begin this chapter with details of the southern textile mill expansion and the ways that it was significant to Charlotte’s emergence as an urban place within an economy in transition. That nineteenth-century coverage is followed by a discussion of Charlotte’s contemporary potentials and challenges for mill reuse in its varied forms. Finally, we discuss the city’s individual postindustrial reuse projects with an emphasis on place-specific attributes of mills that made some of them catalysts for nearby redevelopment and made others candidates for reuse by virtue of redevelopment initiatives already taking place around their sites. Charlotte’s mill reuse is significant: it offers a case study of how solutions can be created as old city-forming industrial corridors become dormant, neglected landscapes in the wake of a postindustrial hollowing out of central cities that take jobs and people into the suburbs. Charlotte’s Transition in an Industrial South Charlotte, and the more rural region around it, was a concentration of cotton textile mill activity during a formative period in the southern expansion of the industry that occurred at an accelerated pace from the early 1880s to the 1930s. Southern-born textile industrialist and engineer D. A. Tompkins , who designed or built many of the Charlotte region’s mills during its industrial transition, was an early voice for economic change. As a newspaper publisher, he was a strident supporter of the industrial shift, vigorously promoting southern industrialization on the pages of his Charlotte Daily Observer.2 Historian C. Vann Woodward summed the gravity of the late nineteenth-century rise of the southern textile industry in this way: The dramatic elements in the rise of the Southern cotton mill gave the movement something of the character of a “crusade.” The successful competition with New England, the South’s old political rival, the popular slogan “bring the factories to the fields,” and the publicity that attended every advance, have combined to enshrine the cotton mill in a somewhat exalted place in Southern history. Burdened with emotional significance, the mill has been made a symbol of the New South, its origins, and its promise of salvation.3 Old Mills in a New Economy 121 Woodward also recognized the entrepreneurial skills of a group of southern businessmen who led the shift away from the long-standing southern colonial and antebellum planter...