Old mills hum with new uses

Like most people in Joanna, S.C., Lester Hightower lost his job when the town's 880,000 square-foot cotton mill closed.

But even as property values and population have dwindled, the "core" of townspeople are bucking against obsolescence, says Mr. Hightower.

After the initial shutdown shock, a local developer bought out the brick hulk that stares down at Joanna. Today, the 80-year-old mill is buzzing with activity.

"There's no buildings in this town empty," exhorts Hightower, who just got a job as a maintenance manager for one of the new tenants – a sawmill.

Not everyone is so fortunate. Sixty-two mills closed last year – a record for the Carolina textile industry since the Depression. In the past five years, 75,000 job layoffs have left hundreds of brick mills as quiet as wasps' nests in winter.

But some Carolinans aren't content to let the heavy-timbered mills haunt them.

Some developers, mill owners, and townspeople are turning them into symbols of rural economic growth: Instead of stitching underwear, many former cotton mills are now turning out alternators and baby furniture. In Joanna, there are plans to use the dank, abandoned halls of a mill to grow mushrooms. One mill in Anderson, S.C., is to be transformed into a dinosaur museum. The conversions of mills into centers of other forms of industry represent an economy in transition as the Carolinas shift towards a post-textile era.

One of the most successful towns in this regard is Eden, a remote mill town near the Virginia border. A few years after the Spray Cotton Mill closed, a Raleigh developer converted a four-story mill into 60 apartments, renting them for as $350 a month.

"This has always been a mill town, and to see those buildings empty was very tough on the community," says town planner Kelly Stultz. "The mills can serve as a monument to negativity, but now they symbolize rebirth. We're finding a way to survive – differently."

There is a precedent for what is happening in North Carolina.

In New England, many mills continue to be transformed into offices for the high-tech industry. But unlike previous mass mill closings in the Northeast and Midwest, the failure of the Southern textile mills is not limited to large centers of trade. Indeed, many of the South's now-dormant textile mills lie in remote one-company towns.

"Just about every small town in the South, starting back 100 years ago, had at least one cotton mill," says Bob Ragan, a historian in Charlotte. "Most of them I pass now are just there, dilapidated."

The unexpected breadth of the shut-downs (236 mills in five years) is a palpable test of the Piedmont's morale.

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