For 200 years, the site of the Rocky Mount Mills in Rocky Mount, N.C., has been a defining feature of the community’s natural and built environment. There the long history of the state’s coastal plain has been enacted: as a riverine resource for American Indians and early European settlers, as a site of industrial slave labor, as a nexus of plantation cotton production, as one of the largest textile operations in the state, as a racially segregated mill community, as the center of a way of life for thousands of white families over many generations, as the site of an important civil rights victory, and since 1996 as a shuttered reminder of the collapse of the state’s most important industry for more than a century. The mill was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1980; the mill village in 1999.
In 2013, the 150-acre site was acquired by Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC) with an ambitious plan to do for Rocky Mount what its American Tobacco Campus project had done for downtown Durham: to transform a once iconic industrial site into a center for economic development and innovation. It was also imagined as a place where people would live and play, and where the community would gather. On the occasion of its bicentennial in 2018, the mill site officially reopened as apartments; rehabilitated mill houses; commercial, retail, and leisure space.
At the suggestion of Bob Anthony, long-time director of UNC’s North Carolina Collection, Rock Mount Mills project manager Evan Covington Chavez invited Robert Allen to visit the site and learn more about the vision that informed developer Capital Broadcasting’s long-term plans. They also discussed Capitol Broadcasting’s commitment to recovering and representing the mill’s long and complex history. Evan was particularly eager to use a planned “reunion” of former mill workers in the fall of 2016 as an opportunity to conduct life history interviews. With funding from Capitol Broadcasting, the CHW organized oral history stations around the site. One focus was work at the mill and life in the mill village, another was the experience of African American families during the period of racial integration in the 1960s and 70s.
Capitol Broadcasting encouraged and provided funding for the CHW to extend and expand its work in Rocky Mount. The UNC Southern Historical Collection and Rocky Mount’s Braswell Memorial Library became partners. For the CHW this was an opportunity to model how the adaptive reuse of iconic historical sites could catalyze open-ended community history and archiving. An online archive was created to display Wilson Library’s extensive collection of mill-related materials. “History harvests” and additional oral history interviews served to preserve community memories and stories. CHW research fellows and students in Robert Allen’s American Studies classes developed ideas for digital exhibits and tools. They shared their work with the local UNC alumni community at a special event in April 2017.
The CHW’s relationship with Capitol Broadcasting provided a foundation for securing support for the next phase of work. Underwritten by a grant from the National Archives and Records Administration, the CHW was able to extend its work for another year (2018-19) and hire a full-time project manager. She collaborated with the university’s Carolina K-12 teacher-support program to organize a workshop for middle and high school teachers in using local history in social studies classes. Bernetiae Reed, a staff member at the Southern Historical Collection who was a descendent of slave who had operated the mill between 1818 and 1850, prepared a guide to local slave genealogy and helped to lead a workshop at the mill. The concluding event of the initiative was a “charrette” on adaptive reuse, hosted by the mill.
View the full Rocky Mount Mills Initiative Here
Accessible RMM Initiative Version
RMM Projects
To learn more about each project in this initiative, click on the project icon or title.
Digital Archive
The RMM Digital Archive is a collection of digitized images related to the history of the Rocky Mount Mills in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
Pinboard Visualization
The Pinboard Visualization is a digital exhibit of historical sources designed to engage the user with the history of Rocky Mount Mills and the surrounding mill village.
Stories of the Mills
Our interviews with former mill workers provide stories from the last years of the mill’s operation in the 1990s and insight into the day-to-day life of a worker at RMM.
Rocky Mount Home Movie
Mill superintendent M.G. Frye made a home movie, shot in 8mm, of various people and places at the mill and mill village. The film is from 1939.
Partners
RMM’s collaborative partners helped expand the sources, resources, skills, knowledge, imagination, and connections that shaped the course of this initiative.
Origins of the Initiative
Learn more about the history of Rocky Mount Mills and the CHW’s involvement in uncovering, engaging with, and communicating the mill’s history.
