Our State magazine recently released the April 2020 edition, which includes a feature on Rocky Mount Mills. Our State features editor Louise Jarvis Flynn penned the piece entitled, “Rocky Mount Mills: A Village on the Rise.”
She described how Capitol Broadcasting began developing the abandoned cotton mill and campus seven years ago.
For nearly two decades, the mill’s hulking shell of masonry and timbers sat mostly empty, a kind of permanent placeholder for a past that wasn’t coming back. But seven years ago, Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC), which owns the 150-acre campus, began an ambitious development plan, with the intention of doing for Rocky Mount what the American Tobacco warehouses had done for downtown Durham. That CBC project fueled the Bull City’s economic revival and remains a source of business innovation today.
She interviewed RMM Development Manager Evan Covington Chavez and Corp Senior Vice President Michael Goodmon, talking about the progress, atmosphere and continued possibilities for the Rocky Mount property. Jarvis Flynn focused on the women that have come to start businesses at RMM.
But since the mill campus reopened two years ago — showing off its soaring, light-filled interiors, tidy rows of remodeled cottages, and even an enclave of tiny houses to rent by the night — four restaurants, five breweries, and various businesses, including a law firm, have arrived on campus. The entrepreneurs, many of them women, are cut from the cloth of all optimistic self-starters. Like Chavez, they focus on the opportunities, rather than the uncertainties, of life in a place that’s transforming every day.
“Who knows what this is going to be?” Chavez says brightly, as though that’s the most exciting part of all.
Read the article in its entirety:
