Asheville Cotton Mill (extant ruin)

The south wing stands, and a square smokestack — what's left of the 1887 Asheville Cotton Mill at 122 Riverside Drive. C.E. Graham built it. Moses and Cesar Cone owned it later — the Greensboro brothers who supplied denim to Levi Strauss. More than three hundred people worked here until 1953.

The mill village that grew up around it — they called it Chicken Hill, local tradition says — housed the workers. When a fire tore through in 1995, it took about two-thirds of the building. What survived reopened as artist studios.

Asheville made denim before it made a name selling the mountains. The Cotton Mill is one of the few standing reminders of that older economy — looms and wages, not galleries and craft beer. Now it's studios again, artists working in a building that once turned raw cotton into cloth. The smokestack still marks the skyline in the River Arts District, a landmark of what the city used to be.