Though its fate may seem certain, area historic preservationists have vowed to do whatever they can to save the Long Mill property from impending demolition.

“When you walk into this complex, it’s like walking into a town,” Danville, VA Historical Society member Greg Grant said Friday as he stood outside the Long Mill’s west gate. “(Tearing down the Long Mill) is like tearing down a town.”

The city on Friday morning issued demolition permits allowing the property’s owners to tear down all 12 of its remaining buildings. Thus began the latest chapter in the historical society’s battle to save a piece of Danville’s past.

THE LONG MILL

The Long Mill’s buildings encompass 674,000 square feet of space on 28 acres of land on the Dan River’s northern bank between the Union Street and Martin Luther King Jr. bridges.

For more than a century, the mill buildings were a center for Danville’s textiles industry, with thousands working in yarn spinning and fabric knitting operations.

But by 1996, the mills had closed as the textile industry changed. The buildings were left behind - empty shells, overlooking the river like ghosts.
With the buildings set to be torn down, Dan River Inc. in 1999 donated the property to the Danville Historical Society, which along with two developers announced plans to turn the buildings into a shopping, residential and tourism mecca - featuring condominiums, restaurants, shops, offices, and museums commemorating the region’s textile history.

That project never materialized.

Then in early 2002, a group of area businessmen purchased the property at auction. They ambitiously announced plans to develop the complex into their version of an urban village, with residential, retail, restaurant, office and museum space.

Their efforts, too, failed.

“It was just too large of an undertaking for the city of Danville’s growth rate to absorb,” Long Mill partner Ben Davenport said Friday. “The real difficulty of this whole thing has been the magnitude of the 13 buildings that were there.”

The group was promised $2 million worth of low interest loans and a $500,000 grant to further their efforts to rehabilitate the property in the winter of 2003, but it did not receive this aid because it never moved forward with the project.

One of the buildings, a former flour mill that the businessmen wanted to turn into a restaurant, was hit by a tornado and demolished in April 2006.
One year later City Manager Jerry Gwaltney gave Davenport and the other Long Mill partners a simple choice: Bring the remaining structures up to code or tear them down.

“At some point they’ve either got to fish or cut bait,” Gwaltney said. “It is for them to determine what to do with the property and not for me. They can do whatever they want so long as it compiles with the city code.”

The Long Mill Group chose to tear down the buildings.

PREPARING FOR BATTLE

Long Mill Group partners met with city officials on April 26 to discuss demolition. Once the historical society learned of this meeting, it asked the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities to add Long Mill to its list of “Virginia’s Most Historic Places.”

The APVA answered by placing the entire city on its list, citing problems facing other Danville historic sites, such as including the Worsham Street Bridge and the Danville General Hospital building.

Bolstered by this response, the Danville Historical Society addressed the Danville City Council on June 5 and asked its members to do whatever they could to save the property.

Gwaltney said he had already done what he could and that the complex’s fate was solely in the Long Mill Group’s hands.

The Long Mill’s fate took a devastating turn when City Building Inspector Jerry Rigney condemned the property on June 12.

After inspecting the site, Rigney notified the Long Mill Group of 16 building code violations he found at half of the complex’s buildings.

“We were given an order to demolish the buildings or make repairs,” Davenport said, adding those repairs would cost at least $1 million, almost twice the $578,500 the Long Mill Group paid for the property.

Since the cost of repairing the buildings seemed prohibitive, Davenport said he and his partners saw no choice but to tear them down.

Meanwhile the historical society was doing whatever it could to save the complex.

The society’s Carla Minosh said she had arranged a meeting between some Long Mill Group partners and representatives from the National Trust for Historic Preservation on Monday, so she was stunned by the fact the demolition permits went out.

Minosh also said the complex’s fate may seal that of the White Mill building, which sits across the Dan River from the Long Mill and is best known for its “Home of Dan River Fabrics” sign.

She said that if Long Mill is torn down, then the White Mill building would no longer qualify for up to $30 million worth of historic tax credits that could help potential developers renovate that property.

“If these buildings come down, the White Mill will fall too,” Minosh said Friday, adding the White Mill could continue to sit and deteriorate if those incentives were lost.

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