Mill work.

• Position: UPFRONT

Sometimes at night, I lie in bed and listen. The old mill seems to moan, as if weary of wearing the million bricks in which it's clad, its timber posts and joists creaking under an acre of roof and clerestory glass. Something haunts this place, but I don't believe it's ghosts, not even the one who supposedly does: a woman whose husband cut her throat with a straight razor as she tended her spinning machine in 1935.

My wife and I have a second home in the Edenton Cotton Mill. It was marketed as a luxury condominium, and though it's more spacious--and cost more--than our house in Charlotte, it's ironic we chose to live in a place where people, like many of mine, had no choice but to make their living. Once, cotton mills were North Carolina's future. Between 1880 and 1900, an average of six were being built each year, but this was one of only two along Albemarle Sound.

"The erection of cotton, tobacco and other factories in Edenton will double its wealth and population in 10 years," a newspaper editor wrote in 1886. It wasn't until 1898, long after the paper went under, that 19 local residents formed Edenton Cotton Mills Co. At the time, the town's population was 3,046. It still hasn't doubled. But the mill, built in phases between 1899 and 1916, provided back then what northeast North Carolina needs now. Just read Ed Martin's...