Revolution Mill’s roots date to 1891, when brothers Moses and Ceasar Cone, the two eldest sons of a prominent German-Jewish immigrant family in Baltimore, formed the Cone Export & Commission Company to broker Southern textile products. Soon they decided to operate their own mills and built their first Greensboro plant, Proximity Cotton Mills, which began weaving denim in 1896. Revolution was the brothers’ second mill; they opened it in 1899 with business partners Emanuel and Herman Sternberger specifically to produce cotton flannel. Six years later the Cones finished building White Oak Cotton Mills, which became the world’s largest denim factory, eventually supplying material for Levi Strauss, Lee, Wrangler, and others. Proximity Print Works, opened in 1912, was the South’s first plant to specialize in printed cotton fabrics.
Like other mill owners in the region, the Cones built self-sufficient villages for their employees. The company provided land for churches, stores, schools, playing fields, and recreation centers, and constructed hundreds of simple clapboard company-owned houses that workers leased. Black employees lived in a separate village and often worked lower-paying jobs at the mills or toiled in the houses of company higher-ups who occupied an area dubbed “Snob Hill.” By the 1940s, more than 2,600 workers lived in 1,500 houses around the four plants.
But by the 1970s, the American textile industry was in decline, as manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Revolution Mill produced its last flannel in 1982, and the complex was left to deteriorate. The local economy also declined as workers sought opportunities elsewhere. The other Cone mills closed, with White Oak hanging on until early 2018—one of the last remaining denim mills in the country.
Proximity Cotton Mills was razed, and many thought Revolution Mill would suffer the same fate. “Mills were not celebrated as part of North Carolina history at all,” says Benjamin Briggs, head of Preservation North Carolina, who previously consulted on the rehabilitation of Revolution as executive director of Preservation Greensboro. He says lawsuits from brown lung and the rapid decline of United States–made textiles precipitated the demolition of historic mills across the state. “How did you deal with our deep textile mill history?” asks Briggs. “You got rid of it.”
But starting in the late 1990s and into the 2000s, a couple of local developers, Jim Peeples and Frank Auman, saw an opportunity. They purchased Revolution Mill and transformed several buildings into office and event space. Although the economic bust of 2008 forced the pair to abandon their plans, Briggs credits the duo with saving the complex. In 2012 one of their creditors, Self-Help Ventures Fund, a Durham-based nonprofit and community development lender, acquired the property. It has since pumped more than $140 million into the project, with just over $40 million coming from federal and state historic tax credits and about $13 million from New Markets Tax Credits. The National Trust Community Investment Corporation (NTCIC), a for-profit subsidiary of the National Trust, provided critical tax credit financing needed for the Mill House rehabilitation, completed in May 2023.
Self-Help tapped Chicago native Nick Piornack, who had previously redeveloped historic buildings in Greensboro’s South End into a bustling restaurant and entertainment scene, as business development manager. Piornack says his role was to help “sell the sizzle,” but at that point, there wasn’t much of a spark. Although the mill sits just two miles northeast of downtown, it might have been another world. “The people downtown and in more wealthy areas had no reason to come here,” says Piornack, now general manager of the property. “It’s an old mill and it’s collapsing. How the heck are we going to get this thing back on the map?”
Piornack thought Revolution Mill was a project that “people had to touch.” He began inviting different groups—young professionals, garden clubs, Rotary clubs, Kiwanis members—luring them with the promise of free food and drinks and “behind the scenes” tours. Using renderings created by Belk, he painted pictures of the mill’s future. “You’ll see this place in two years and you won’t believe it,” he told them. For several years, Piornack sold the promise, telling everyone he could. “All of a sudden, the buzz started,” he says. “People were telling people, ‘Boy, you won’t believe what they are doing over there!’ It just snowballed.”
