What happens to a mill town when the mill closes? Residents may have to accept change or move elsewhere.

Once known for its good-paying paper mill jobs and stinky smell, the small town of Canton, North Carolina, faced an uncertain future after the mill suddenly closed in March 2023. "Canton’s paper mill set the rhythm of life here for some 115 years," reports Emma Goldberg of The New York Times. Despite its sulfur-laden odor, "locals were proud of the mill, which employed hundreds in town and allowed its residents to build homes and send their children to college."

After the mill closed, residents weren't sure if the town could survive without the salaries the factory had provided for generations. "Canton lost its life source, and with it any sense of certainty about its economic future. It became one of more than 60,000 manufacturing hubs that have been wiped off America’s map since the late 1990s," Goldberg writes. "Just over a year after it closed, Hurricane Helene destroyed more than 30 homes and businesses in the area."

After its doors were shuttered, the mill sat vacant for two years until a developer from Missouri purchased it and worked to rally Canton residents to help reinvent the town. "Eric Spirtas closed the deal to buy the mill site," Goldberg reports. "He arrived in a flurry of ideas." 

Canton, N.C. is roughly 20 minutes from Asheville.

While Spirtas cheered for making Canton a must-see tourist destination, locals, including the town's mayor, Zeb Smathers, didn't see tourism jobs as a solution. Goldberg writes, "Smathers knows that many of the locals do not want hospitality jobs. They want high-paying manufacturing jobs. They talk excitedly about President Trump’s promises to make America once again a 'manufacturing superpower.'"

Now that the town's rotten-egg smell has disappeared, new residents and shops have moved in. "Canton’s main street has welcomed an apothecary, a record shop and a guitar store. Amanda Barta, who moved from Texas during the pandemic, opened a soap boutique weeks after Helene," Goldberg writes. 

Even as the town attracts new business, many former mill employees have taken jobs in nearby cities or moved away. At a recent Canton celebration, 77-year-old Gail Mull, a former mill worker who now serves as mayor pro tem, took a good look at the crowd and told Goldberg, "As my mother would say, these are not locals.”