Well just down the road in Rock Hill, another community weaves its past into a bold new future.

A massive redevelopment project is transforming a historic mill into a thriving destination and fueling the local economy.

Carolina Impact's Dara Khalid and videographer Marcellus Jones take us inside.

(transition whooshing) (birds chirping) (gentle music) - [Dara] Take a walk inside The Thread in Rock Hill, and this is what you'll find.

- The old free elevator doors leaving the chains on there, the dirt, the grime, the grease.

- [Dara] Pieces of the 400,000 square foot buildings passed frozen in time.

- One of our main focuses with this was preserving as much of the old, you know, character and history, integrity of what it once was, which is a textile mill.

- [Dara] Since the 1900s, this building, which is the size of nearly seven football fields, has stood tall on West White Street in Rock Hills Knowledge Park District.

It's lived many lives.

In 1946, it was the site for Baxter Mill, in 1986, Springs Industries, in 2008 Springs Creative.

- This was the main employment hub for the city of Rock Hill and really the region.

At its height in the seventies, this textile mill corridor employed over 6,000 hardworking Americans.

- [Dara] With the price tag of over $100 million dollars, it now stands as South Carolina's largest adaptive reuse project.

Inside you'll find two restaurants plus retail and office space.

- We were very intrigued by this great property with great bones.

And then we undertook the six year process, which brought us here today.

- [Dara] Ken Beuley, president of the Keith Corporation, the developer for The Thread, says there were several things that help with the cost, like the city and county creating a tax increment financing designation for the area, mill tax credits through state legislature and it being designated as an opportunity zone at the federal level.

- If any one of those factors wasn't present, this probably wouldn't have happened.

- [Dara] The project was also eligible for historic tax credits, but... - We knew it'd be a challenge to stay within the confines of how we'd have to design the building to qualify for those historic tax credits.

So we forwent those, which really opened up the creative toolkit for our architect and our design team, - [Dara] Which meant they had the freedom to add modern touches like this.

- What we have here is a 6,500 square foot, essentially donut hole cut into the middle of the building to create this courtyard.

And again, it gets all the natural light to all the office floors above.

And then on the retail on the bottom here.

- [Dara] The same way contemporary features like this sleek floating staircase are woven together with the old historic walls bearing crack paint and words from the past.

The threat as a whole is being woven into the city's Storyline project, which is still in the works.

It'll be a linear walking path that connects Fountain Park to Winthrop University and includes areas like Downtown and The Thread along the way.

It's similar to what's been done in big cities like New York with The High Line, an elevated park that's revamped an old railway line and in Atlanta with The Belt Line, a 22 mile trail also on an old railway corridor.

- And to see that storyline sort of meander through downtown, through our alleyways across a to-be built pedestrian bridge and then to land it and just really make sure that you know, we're staying grounded in our history.

- [Dara] The threat helps revive the city's textile corridor, which is key to honoring Rock Hill's roots.

One example, Riverstone Logistics recently relocated its headquarters here, a $16.4 million investment that according to the city will bring 159 new jobs.

- We're seeing a lot of growth in downtown Rock Hill, but what we don't have is this kind of growth, good professional, business space for corporate clients to come in and set up.

We have some, but this is really a game changer for downtown.

- [Dara] Then there are companies like Springs Creative that have been headquartered here since last year, but its history in the building runs much deeper.

- The Thread was actually a distribution center for Springs Creative since 2007.

And so we were doing, you know, housing our inventory and doing our distribution work out of this building.

- [Dara] Springs Creative president Claude Close says his family's textile company was founded in Fort Mill in 1887.

In 2007, his dad Derek acquired the building that's now home to the Thread.

In 2019, he partnered with the Keith Corporation to redevelop it.

Now equal partners with Capital Broadcasting, they all own the building.

Claude takes pride in knowing he is carrying on his family's legacy of sowing into the community.

- It's been great, you know, I love to have a story behind what we're doing and it's fun to be able to tell that story each and every day.

You know, other people seem to get as much joy and excitement out of it as I do.

- [Dara] When you're passing the Thread on West White Street and see the giant needle out front, let it be a symbol of how they're proudly stitching Rock Hill's past to its future.

For "Carolina Impact," I'm Dara Khalid.