Woven Into the Ground: The Textile History of Greensboro, NC and What It Means for Real Estate Today
Fabric runs through my family like a thread through a loom.
My grandmothers both sewed. My father's mother upholstered furniture and ran her own gown shop, making custom pieces for women in her community. She made the gown I wore at my own wedding. My mother sewed. My sister sews. I sewed when my kids were young. Eric worked at a menswear store all through high school and college and can hem pants with a precision that most tailors would respect. Both of my daughters sew. Ivy makes custom clothing from upcycled vintage quilts and textiles and has woven me scarves on her small table loom. Ellie is a fiber artist too. The women in my family have been making things with their hands across generations, not as a hobby, but as a form of knowledge, of care, of economy.
So when I tell you that Greensboro was the last city in America to weave selvedge denim on original American shuttle looms, I say it as someone who understands in her hands what that means.
This city was built on thread. And if you want to understand Greensboro real estate, really understand why certain neighborhoods look the way they do, why some streets still feel like small towns inside a bigger city, why property values in east Greensboro still trail those across town by a significant margin, and why mill buildings are becoming apartments and music venues and nail salons and piano bars, you have to start at the beginning.
Before the Mills: Greensborough Is Founded
Greensboro was founded in 1808 on 42 acres that Guilford County commissioners purchased for exactly $98. A surveyor plotted 14 blocks of lots for sale and they named the town for Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. It was a courthouse town, modest and slow, with three basic kinds of property: large estates for the wealthy, town lots along Market and Elm streets, and working class cottages near the small Mount Hecla cotton mill north of center.
Greensboro was founded in 1808. Slavery was not abolished until 1865. That is 57 years of this city's early life during which enslaved people were held as property right here in Guilford County.
The Labor That Built This City
Cities are not built by one kind of person. Greensboro required surveyors, financiers, architects, lawyers, engineers, and skilled tradespeople across every trade and industry, most of them white and compensated. The Cone brothers were businessmen and strategists. The mills required foremen, accountants, and designers. None of that is erased.
But cities also require an enormous base of physical labor. In the fields, in construction, in the mills, in the homes of the people who ran everything else. Cotton moved through a long chain of hands before it ever became denim: planted, tended, picked, ginned, baled, shipped, traded, bought, and finally fed into the looms. Many kinds of people and many kinds of labor were involved across that chain. The physical labor of picking, of heavy lifting, of the dirtiest and most dangerous work inside the mills, was disproportionately performed by enslaved people before emancipation and by Black workers after it, and those workers were consistently paid the least or not at all.
By 1860 the American South was producing two-thirds of the world's cotton, and a steady stream of that cotton supplied the industrial textile mills that drove the national economy. The entire industry the Cone brothers built their empire on in the 1890s rested on that foundation.
Inside the mills themselves, the pay structure made the hierarchy visible. The heaviest work went to Black men, who moved large bales of cotton, loaded wagons and rail cars, and worked in the dust of the opening and picking rooms. Black women were excluded from the weaving rooms altogether. The jobs that paid best went to adult white men, followed by white women, then Black men, and finally children.
| Worker Category | Avg. Weekly Wage (NC Mills, 1904) | Hours/Day | Days/Week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adult men (white) | $6.50 | 11 | 6 |
| Women | $4.46 | 11 | 6 |
| Children | $2.60 | 11 | 6 |
| Black men (heavy labor only) | Below women's rate | 11+ | 6 |
To put those wages in context: a Model T Ford cost $780 in 1910, dropping to $290 by 1924. A male mill worker making $6.50 a week in 1904 would need to save his entire paycheck for nearly two years to buy the cheapest car available. That is exactly why the Cones built garage sheds into the mill village design and why owning a car at all was notable enough to mention in company records.
Guilford County had its own specific character within all of this. Unlike many large slaveholding cities in eastern North Carolina, Greensboro's economy was not based on large-scale agriculture requiring hundreds of laborers. Most enslaved people in Greensboro worked in local businesses or as personal servants and domestics. But enslaved people were present, and the harm was real. By 1830, Guilford County was 84% white, 14% enslaved Black, and 2% free Black. The Guilford County Register of Deeds has made its Slave Deeds project available to the public, documenting 254 deeds of men, women, and children of color sold as property prior to the Civil War, with records going back to 1774. Each one of those is a person. A family. A name that belongs in this story.
What made Guilford County unusual was what some of its white residents chose to do about slavery while it was still legal. A high concentration of Quaker abolitionists and free Black communities made Guilford County a sort of Grand Central Station for the state's Underground Railroad. The state's first abolitionist organization was formed in Guilford County in 1816, called the Manumission Society, and it soon had 1,600 members. There were already small communities of free Black Americans living in the New Garden Woods before the Quakers organized around them, people who had bought their freedom or escaped slavery and evaded recapture. A 350-year-old tulip poplar tree still stands on Guilford College's campus in those same woods.
The Railroad, the Gate City, and the Mills Arrive
Everything changed in 1856 when the North Carolina Railroad came through. Stimulated by rail traffic and improved access to markets, the city grew substantially, soon becoming known as the Gate City due to its role as a transportation hub for the Piedmont. During the Civil War the city was both a storehouse and a rail center for the Confederacy, with civilian refugees and wounded soldiers transported and sheltered there. In April 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis arrived in Greensboro in the course of his flight southward.
What rebuilt Greensboro after Reconstruction was not politics. It was fabric.
Moses and Caesar Cone built their first denim plant, Proximity Mill, in Greensboro in 1896. Four years later they opened Revolution Cotton Mills. By 1938, Revolution Cotton Mills claimed to be the largest exclusive flannel mill in the world, producing 50 million yards of fabric each year. Then came White Oak Mill, named for a 200 year old white oak tree that stood nearby and served as a gathering place for people traveling to Greensboro from the surrounding countryside. The mill's first bobbin of yarn was produced on April 20th, 1905.
After the town struggled in the Civil War and Reconstruction, it was textile manufacturers who gave the town an industrial base that brought jobs and prosperity. Many of these companies practiced welfare capitalism, taking on duties such as building houses, schools, and recreation centers for workers and their families.
The Mill Villages and the Neighborhoods They Became
The Cone brothers did not just build factories. They built whole communities. Cone Mills built five villages to serve its Greensboro factories, each containing churches, stores, schools, playing fields, recreation centers, and company-owned houses. A separate mill village, East White Oak, housed Black workers.
The mills needed workers sometimes around the clock. Transportation was nonexistent. Cars belonged only to the wealthy and most roads were impassable. The Cones built 1,600 homes in four mill villages, three named for the adjacent mill.
Greensboro's streets in the early mill era were not paved. Horse and buggy was still the norm well into the 1910s. North Carolina cities ran on streetcars through the 1920s and into the 1930s, originally pulled by mules and horses before being electrified. By the time the mill villages were fully built out in the 1920s, the car was becoming affordable to some workers, but barely. Rent for a four-room house was 92 cents a week during the Great Depression, and a person lucky enough to own a car could shelter it in a garage for another 25 cents a week.
At their peak the mill villages covered 450 acres, with 2,675 workers residing in about fifteen hundred houses, before eventually being sold off in the late 1940s. When the company began selling, many workers bought the homes they had rented for years. Those streets became the independently owned neighborhoods we still have today.
Those neighborhoods are still there and still identifiable. White Oak is a current northeast Greensboro neighborhood centered around what was the White Oak mill on Revolution Mill Drive, with original 1920s stucco houses on North Church Street, Spruce Street, Hubbard Street, and Cypress Street, organized around a grid bounded by the former Southern Railway tracks to the east. East White Oak is the adjacent neighborhood, now a diverse community with its own community center in the former Cone schoolhouse. The Revolution village surrounds what is now Revolution Mill at 850 Revolution Mill Drive. The Proximity Hotel nearby takes its name from the mill that once defined that stretch of northeast Greensboro.
Workers were called lintheads because cotton from the mills clung to their hair and clothes. The word was a term of derision. But as those times grew distant, many millworkers embraced it to remind themselves of simpler days in their close-knit communities.
The executives and mill owners lived very differently. Many of the tobacco and industrial tycoons who built Greensboro lived in Old Irving Park, a community featuring a mix of stately Federal, Georgian, and Italianate manors. The geography of wealth and labor in Greensboro was written in brick, in rent, in which side of town you were permitted to live on, long before the redlining maps made it federal policy.
The Boom Years and the Wonder of the State
By the early 20th century, the Gate City had become one of North Carolina's largest and most important cities, and the boom years of the 1920s saw rapid growth. In 1923, Greensboro annexed enough property to increase its size to almost eighteen square miles and over 45,000 people, making it North Carolina's third-largest city.
Greensboro's real estate was considered the wonder of the state in the 1920s. Growth continued even through the Great Depression, as Greensboro attracted an estimated 200 new families per year.
For white residents, that prosperity was largely real. The mills funded a new railroad station, the Carolina Theatre, and the King Cotton Hotel. Insurance companies grew. The skyline rose.
For Black residents, that same prosperity was being systematically blocked at the exact same time.
Redlining: A Line That Is Still Visible
In the 1930s, as part of New Deal era federal housing programs, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew maps of American cities and graded neighborhoods from A, meaning best, to D, meaning hazardous. The hazardous grade almost always meant Black. Those grades determined where the federal government would and would not back mortgage loans.
Greensboro was not an abstraction in this story. A researcher at the University of Virginia found an FHA map of Greensboro, North Carolina with a literal red line through it, drawn in pencil, that appeared to be the demarcation between areas where the agency would and would not lend.
An in-depth study of FHA lending patterns found that in Greensboro, neighborhoods graded hazardous received only 2.2% of all loans the FHA made in the city between 1935 and 1940. High graded areas received 53.1% of FHA loans made during that same period.
That is the mechanism by which an entire generation of Black families in Greensboro was prevented from building equity, from passing wealth to their children, from participating in the same homeownership economy that built the white middle class during those exact same decades.
"We can see a direct connection to the value of homes from the 1930s to today. Here in east Greensboro, property values remain relatively low compared to home values in some of the more affluent neighborhoods in Greensboro." — Harvey D. Long, Greensboro community leader
You can still see where that pencil line was drawn. The east-west divide in Greensboro property values is not a coincidence and it is not a mystery. People who identify as Black are most likely to be living in the east areas of Greensboro, while there are more white people in the southeast areas of the city. The map of race in Greensboro today still roughly traces the maps drawn in the 1930s.
As a Realtor working in this city, those numbers are not abstract to me. They show up in comps. They show up in appraisals. They show up every time I pull data in east Greensboro and compare it to data two miles west. Knowing where that gap came from is part of doing this job honestly.
February 1, 1960: Four Students Sit Down
If Greensboro's real estate history is shaped by segregation, its moral history was shaped by the people who fought back against it.
On February 1, 1960, four young Black men, Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, all freshmen at North Carolina A&T, sat down at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro and refused to leave after being denied service. By February 5, some 300 students had joined the protest, paralyzing the lunch counter and other local businesses. Heavy television coverage sparked a sit-in movement that spread to college towns throughout the South and into the North. By July 25, 1960, the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro was serving Black patrons.
The sit-ins happened in the same city, in the same era, as the mill villages were transitioning from company-owned to privately held. Workers whose families had built this economy were simultaneously being denied service at a lunch counter five miles from the looms. That is what Greensboro was in 1960. Both things at once.
The building is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, and the original lunch counter is on display. If you have not been, go.
The Last Selvedge Denim Mill in America
This is the part that gets me every time.
Selvedge denim is woven on narrow shuttle looms that finish each edge of the fabric as a clean, tightly bound border that resists fraying. It takes longer to make. It costs more. It is durably, unmistakably American. For over a century, the White Oak plant stood as the heartbeat of American selvedge denim production, earning a global reputation for premium selvedge denim woven on vintage shuttle looms, machines that created tightly woven edges with a distinctive, clean finish.
At one time the world's largest denim mill, occupying more than a million square feet, you almost could not see where the looms ended. Between 1915 and 1970, the lion's share of denim produced for Levi Strauss was made there.
International Textile Group announced in 2017 that they would cease operations at the Cone Mills White Oak Plant in Greensboro on December 31, 2017. The White Oak Plant had been in operation for over 110 years and would be the last selvedge denim mill in the United States. About 200 people lost their jobs. With the closing of the White Oak denim mill in early 2018, Greensboro saw the end of 124 continuous years of production of denim fabrics.
124 years. My grandmother made gowns in her shop. Eric's mom ran machines in Asheboro. My daughter weaves scarves on a table loom in her kitchen. That kind of history does not end cleanly. It just changes hands.
What Happened to the Buildings: Revolution Mill Today
It would take two 21st-century trends, industrial design and mixed-use development, to bring the mill back to life. Revolution Mill is now a thriving mixed-use campus with offices, art galleries, apartments, restaurants, and one of the best live music venues in the Triad.
Eric has played piano at Grapes and Grains. I get my nails done at Cure. We have eaten at Kau and Cugino Fiorino and Taco Ono. My dear friend Marie, a wonderful human who has never met a stranger, works there Monday through Friday at the Wrangler Lee office. One of the most iconic American denim brands in history has its offices inside the last American denim mill campus. That detail could not be invented. And Revolution Mill gets to have Marie, which is its own gift.
We ride our bikes there on the Greenway urban trail. It is beautiful there in every season.
I will be honest: I wish I could buy a condo there. All the residential units are rental only, and the more I think about it, the more I believe that is the right decision. Keeping residential under unified ownership is likely the best way to ensure a 121 year old building is maintained properly for the long term. The economics of historic preservation favor consolidated stewardship over a hundred individual HOA opinions.
Printworks Mill, a collection of industrial buildings constructed in multiple stages beginning in 1913, is currently undergoing a major restoration, bringing historic apartments to Greensboro with mixed-income housing, boutique retail space, and modern amenities.
At Revolution Mill, local textile historian Evan Morrison organizes artifacts and historic displays that line the hallways, including the first documented, handwritten order placed by Levi Strauss for White Oak Cotton Mills denim in 1913. The White Oak Legacy Foundation continues to steward the history of the mill and keep its original Draper looms in active use for education and preservation.
On Looms, Handwork, and Why This All Connects
My background in Waldorf education deepened my love of making in a particular way. If you are not familiar with it, Waldorf is a philosophy that treats handwork, music, movement, and practical skill as essential parts of a complete education rather than extras to be cut when test prep runs long. The children who attended Pine Forest Charter School in Flagstaff, Arizona, where my own kids went and where I volunteered countless hours and met some of the most wonderful people of my life, learned to knit, to sew, to build, to grow things. The Association for Waldorf and Steiner Education at waldorfeducation.org explains the philosophy well, and the New York Times published a readable plain-language overview for anyone who wants to understand it more.
I love industrial and domestic tools, especially the ones my own grandmothers used to make money and make dinner. A loom is both. A hosiery machine is both. A sewing machine is both. A gown shop in a small town is both. These are not decorative objects or nostalgic props. They are how people fed and clothed and housed themselves and the ones they loved across every generation of this country's history. That is the actual story.
And there are a lot of women in that story. There always have been. They just did not always get a byline.
The Real Estate Market Then and Now
The mill villages were some of the first places in Greensboro where working people owned real property. When the Cone family began selling the company-owned houses in the late 1940s, many workers bought the homes they had rented for years. For white workers, that transaction was the beginning of generational equity. For Black workers in East White Oak and other redlined neighborhoods, the same federal mortgage machinery that helped white families buy was actively working against them at the exact same time.
Neighborhoods like White Oak were developed when the denim industry was flourishing and provided affordable housing for mill workers. Today those same neighborhoods are seeing real investment. Investors have been buying older homes in White Oak and updating them, and the neighborhood continues to reinvent itself.
| Greensboro Market Snapshot | Figure | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Median home price (late 2024) | $290,000 | Up 7% from 2023 |
| Vs. national median | ~$120,000 below | Strong relative value |
| Avg. days on market | 32 days | Below national avg. of 44 |
| Old Irving Park median | $430,000+ | Sales reach $1.2M+ |
| Avg. undervaluation, majority-Black neighborhoods | $48,000 | Brookings research, vs. identical white neighborhoods |
The gap between east and west Greensboro is not a market phenomenon. It is a history phenomenon, and it requires honesty to discuss.
When I walk through a mill neighborhood with a buyer, I am not just talking about square footage. I am talking about 130 years of decisions about who was allowed to build wealth here and who was not. That context is part of doing this job with integrity.
One of my favorite things about being a Realtor is getting inside homes with buyers and seeing how people actually live. It is real life. It is not abstract. It is real people doing the daily work of feeding and clothing and housing themselves and the ones they love. The same work my grandmother did in her gown shop. The same work Ivy does when she cuts a jacket from a vintage quilt. The same work that happened inside every mill in this city, at every shift, across more than a century.
That work built this city. And the most honest thing I can do as someone who works in its real estate market is to know that, say it plainly, and carry it forward.
A Few Threads Worth Following
If you want to go deeper, visit the exhibits at Revolution Mill and at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum downtown, where the original Woolworth's lunch counter is preserved. Follow the work of the White Oak Legacy Foundation. The Guilford County Register of Deeds has made its Slave Deeds project available to the public, a sobering resource for anyone who wants to understand what property meant in this county before 1865.
My daughter Ivy, a certified herbalist and fiber artist who runs ivyherbal.com, writes about connection to place, natural materials, and the craft of living well. That sensibility feels very much at home in a city shaped by makers.
If you are thinking about buying or selling in Greensboro, including in its historic mill neighborhoods, I would love that conversation.
The Bottom Line
Greensboro did not just happen. It was built by surveyors and financiers and mill engineers and architects and merchants and foremen and skilled tradespeople, most of them compensated. And it was built by an enormous base of physical labor, in the fields, in construction, in the mills, in homes, much of it performed by people who were never paid, never permitted to own the land they worked, and whose descendants were then blocked from the same wealth-building systems for another century after emancipation.
The difference is not in who contributed. The difference is in who got to keep what they built, and who had it taken from them or simply never handed over in the first place.
The closing of White Oak in 2017 ended something irreplaceable. But Revolution Mill is full of music on a Saturday night. Printworks is becoming homes. The Woolworth's building is a museum. The neighborhoods where lintheads raised their families are being bought and loved by a new generation. The fabric holds.
If you are ready to plant roots in this city, I am ready to help you find your place in it.
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Joy Watson, Realtor® | Joy Watson Real Estate
Serving Greensboro, NC & the Piedmont Triad
(928) 699-8883 | joy@joywatsonrealestate.com
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