Runs in the family: Mac Jordan spends decades reviving the mill in Saxapahaw his grandfather resurrected.

• Author: Archer, Katherine
• Position: FEATURE

The phone rings in the office on Saxapahaw-Bethlehem Church Road. Sherry Graves, wearing lavender eye shadow to match her scarf, picks up the receiver. "Hello, Rivermill Village Apartments, how may 1-help you?" She listens. "Honey, I wish I had something to show you, but we're all full." She pulls up a spreadsheet on her computer. "Uh huh, it's possible we could show you something in the fall, but right now we have 40 people on a waiting list." She hangs up and points to a pile of papers on her desk. "1 haven't even put these in the computer yet. We've had a waiting list for more than a year. Some people still pay the application fee and are on file, just waiting." She shakes her head. "I feel so bad for them." The secretary for Rivermill Village Apartments is used 'to delivering bad news. The phone rings a lot, and it doesn't look like any of the 75 units she help manage will be vacant anytime soon.

Completed in 2005, the apartments are another chapter in the history of Saxapahaw, a village on the Haw River in southeastern Ala-Mance County. Eighty-six years ago, B. Everett Jordan, who would one day be a U.S. senator, and his family bought the mill there. Workers shopped at the company store, went to the village school, prayed at the village church. in 1994, the mill, no longer owned by the family, closed. That's when the senator's grandson began trying to revitalize the place. With his father and brother, Mac Jordan, 51, has spent nearly two decades and more than $10 million turning the spinning mill into apartments, and its dye house into a general store, charter school and pub, plus 29 condos slated to open later this year. Together, the mixed-use development is known, as Saxapahaw Rivermill, and it's received acclaim from locals as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

A flood nearly drowned the project soon after it got under way, and a fire raged through the lower floor of the apartment building shortly before it was to open. But the biggest obstacle was finding funds to do it. Potential investors, banks and even locals laughed when they heard his plans. He kept working, remembering the words of his grandfather, who was fond of reminding people that when racing the hare, the patient, hard-working tortoise got the last laugh.

There has been a mill here since 1848 and people a lot longer than that. No one knows when they came, but the Sissipahaw had a village in the vicinity before Jamestown was settled in 1607, and English Quakers and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians began trickling in during the 1740s. Everett Jordan and his wife arrived in 1927 from Gastonia, joining his uncle, Burlington merchant Charles Sellers, and other...