Lifecycles of the Loray: Adaptive Reuse and Historic Value

Abstract: This article examines the growth, development, and evolution of historic value through a case study of the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina. Focusing on the first century of the building, it examines the tension between user-centered and capitalist valuation of places. This work incorporates research from oral histories, municipal and company archives, and urban planning and development records. Over the course of the building, use, and later redevelopment of the mill complex, narratives of value were developed as explanatory justifications for exploitation of workers and natural resources. Adaptive reuse projects make both economic and narrative use of the histories of place in a process that rearticulates those older justifications in the contemporary language of marketing and placemaking. This essay focuses on the complex definitions of historic value in a single place as an example of a larger process being repeated throughout the southern United States and beyond.