FRESH START: A vacant mill is revitalized as a center for promoting technology in a rural setting.

• Author: Barkin, Dan
• Position: GREENSHOOTS--Revitalizing rural N.C.

Like a lot of small rural towns, Red Springs in Robeson County struggled to reactivate an abandoned textile plant that once employed 400 people in the community of about 3,100 residents.

As the U.S. industry struggled against foreign competition, the factory went through multiple owners. The last textile company left in 1995, donating the site to the town. Another company arrived in 2010 with a distribution operation but left in 2015.

The plant has some advantages that have helped transform it into a military and tech innovation company called the Emerging Technology Institute. It's 28 miles from Fort Bragg and has 55 acres of empty, adjacent land.

Institute founder James Freeman concluded that he could offer flexibility that Fort Bragg lacks because of the base's tight restrictions on ranges, airspace and spectrum.

Freeman's company now employs 11 and has an impressive list of customers and partners, including high-tech contractors, elite military commands and university researchers. Recently, there was a demonstration of drones that can fly and land in rugged terrain and carry blood to the battlefield, for example.

At an upcoming event led by the Army's U.S. Special Operations Command, vendors will demonstrate technology to help soldiers see the enemy, particularly in buildings, and how to communicate without being detected. Demonstrating this technology requires movement of all-terrain vehicles, the use of radio spectrum and airspace and an indoor range simulating a building with walls.

Freeman came up with the idea for the institute while working at UNC Pembroke, helping small business startups navigate Fort Bragg. One day, a Special Ops contact asked Freeman to meet with a soldier. It was a fateful meeting.

"He took me to a hangar space where I'd never been before," recalls Freeman. "We went to another room where soldiers were learning to work with the flight controls of the drones, showing me how they see and stuff. And all of a sudden there were more soldiers populating this room. They were looking for airspace." Around the same time, Freeman's brother-in-law took him to Red Springs to look at the empty factory, which the brother-in-law thought might make a good haunted house for Halloween.

Freeman saw it as just...