PAPERTOWN BLUES: Canton looks for a new role after the shuttering of its landmark.

• Author: Martin, Edward

The silence is back, this time for good. A few years ago, on a summer night, Lashine Reynolds stood on the deck of her parents' home as rain from a tropical storm swelled the Pigeon River. The house is next door to the billowing smokestacks, silos and rail sidings of Canton's gargantuan paper mill.

In the flooded mill, as water reached half up the walls of the storeroom where Reynolds' father worked, supervisors frantically killed the electricity. Outside, scores of brilliant floodlights flicked off.

The industrial rumble that filled this valley so long that residents no longer noticed it was stilled.

"Suddenly, everything was black," says Reynolds, born 54 years ago on the day her father, now retired, was hired by the mill. "I stood there on the deck thinking, 'This just isn't right at all. Not at all. Everything is just too quiet.'"

Now, North Carolina manufacturing experts, historians, Reynolds and others who've lived their lives here read more than lost jobs and death of a local industry into the quiet that descended on Canton in May when the Pactiv Evergreen paper mill closed, this time permanently. About 1,050 jobs with annual salaries averaging more than $80,000 were lost, along with an estimated $2 million in annual local tax and utility revenue.

Canton's issues prompted the state and nonprofits to offer help. Asheville-based Dogwood Health Trust, created from the $1.5 billion sale of Mission Health system in 2019, is giving the United Way of Highwood County $1 million for an emergency fund to help mill families.

About 150 miles to the east, the experience of Kannapolis gives Canton hope that dead mill towns can revive. Cannon Mills and the town's streets, rental houses, water, schools, police force and a YMCA were all owned by James Cannon, who founded the mill in 1905. Residents voted to incorporate in 1984, but 13 years later, Cannon Mills' successor Pillowtex shut down, throwing 4,390 out of work.

Kannapolis has bounced back strongly, benefitting from its proximity to Charlotte. In 2005, it landed the public-private N.C. Research Campus, developed by California investor David Murdock and backed by $23 million in annual lease payments from UNC System campuses. It's an inspiration for dead mill towns.

Zeb Smathers, 40, graduated from high school in Canton in 2001, then earned degrees from Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill. He rejoined his family's law practice in downtown Canton, and was elected to the council in 2013 and as...