Hope Mills Historic District

Hope Mills Historic District covers the central core of a Cumberland County cotton mill town about seven miles south of Fayetteville. Its story begins with the Rockfish Manufacturing Company, built in the late 1830s under Charles Peter Mallett and the state's largest antebellum textile mill. General Sherman's troops burned it in 1865, and Thomas C. Oakman rebuilt it in 1872. A Philadelphia firm later renamed it the Hope Mills Manufacturing Company, and the community was incorporated as Hope Mills No. One in 1891. The district includes late Federal and Greek Revival officials' houses, Victorian houses, Mill No. 4, which still operates, and rows of mill housing with T-shaped two-family dwellings. A Colonial Revival company store, now town hall and library, anchors Main and Lakeview streets. Trade Street holds early twentieth-century commercial blocks, along with churches and a Masonic lodge. Together these buildings illustrate how the mill shaped a typical North Carolina textile village.