This article is part of a series created in collaboration with UPLIFT North Carolina, a program that supports rural tourism throughout the state. Since July 2023, our partnership has provided participatory workshops and mentorship, working with partners to support and develop festivals and cultural heritage tourism experiences that benefit both visitors and communities.

At the geographic heart of North Carolina, a USGS marker stands between two chicken houses in the town of Star. With fewer than 1,000 residents, Star’s Main Street stretches between leaning utility poles and sagging wires—weathered by time, storms, and change. They hang like tired arms, silent witnesses to a town that’s lived more than one life.

Head one way and you will pass places where life unfolds: a new community health center, the post office, elementary school, auto parts store, and funeral home. Head the other way and storefronts quickly fade, giving way to the old Star Hotel—built in 1897 by the Leach family, now a B&B with a cherub-topped fountain that spits unnaturally blue water into a small garden. Just beyond sits the train depot, once the only place in North Carolina where north-south trains could shift east-west without a roundhouse.

By the early 1900s, North Carolina was a land of small farms, and Star was no exception. But by the early 1960s, factories started arriving from the north, lured south by cheap land, tax breaks, and a workforce raised on long days and hard work. The governors called it progress; the locals called it a job. Entire communities traded the rhythms of planting and harvesting for the steady hum of factory floors.

Like many Southern towns, Star became a mill town. In the 1940s, local J. Paul Russell bought the old Carolina Collegiate and Agriculture Institute and turned it into Russell Hosiery Mill. The small factory expanded rapidly, eventually attracting a national textile company that grew it into a 200,000-square-foot operation. At its peak, 1,200 locals worked there. For over sixty years, the mill was Star’s largest employer—and its identity.

The factories shaped everything: who stayed, who left, who thrived, who struggled. Modest neighborhoods sprang up nearby, close enough for workers to walk to their shifts. Others commuted from surrounding farms. Generations grew up with one belief: work hard, and the mill would take care of you.

One of those workers was Larry Kissell. For nearly three decades, Kissell walked through the same doors every morning, rising to become production manager. The day after the mill closed in 2001, he became a high school teacher—and, not long after, a U.S. congressman. Elected in 2008, he served two terms representing the same working-class towns that had shaped his own life.

I asked Kissell how deeply the mill was tied to the town’s heartbeat.

“There were two mills in town, and people often switched back and forth between them,” Kissell said. “There were no secrets—everybody knew everybody’s business.”

Beneath the steady hum of industry, cracks were forming. By the 1980s, globalization and the search for cheaper labor were draining textile jobs. In 1984 alone, thirty-five North Carolina mills closed, costing 17,000 jobs. Trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement and Central America Free Trade Agreement in the ’90s and 2000s accelerated the decline, flooding the market with cheaper imports.

In towns like Star, the numbers stopped adding up. Russell sold the mill to Fruit of the Loom in 1986; it later passed to Renfro Corporation, which shut it down in 2001. Over just a few decades, more than a thousand jobs vanished, along with the community bonds they once sustained.

200,000 Square Feet of Opportunity

After the machines stopped, Renfro tried to sell the century-old building—but it was too big, outdated, and costly to maintain. By 2004, demolition was on the table.

But Star pushed back. The building had been a school, a mill, and a part of the town’s identity. A local business owner offered to buy and donate it to Central Park NC—a regional economic development organization where I served as executive director—on the condition we use it to help the town. Many residents held out hope for another manufacturer, another big employer. That was the old model: wait for rescue. But this time, no one was coming.

At Central Park NC, we had already been thinking differently. Formed in the early 1990s, we imagined new futures for rural communities like Star built not on chasing the next factory but on preserving and growing what these places already had: culture, craft, and a deep sense of place. We recognized Star’s cultural currency, and we were taking action to save it.

In 2005, we walked into 200,000 square feet of emptiness, hoping to spark entrepreneurship with a business incubator. But space alone wasn’t enough—we needed people. The fall of mill culture had drained the region’s entrepreneurial energy. When the mills disappeared, so did the small businesses that supported them, and the lingering legacy may have discouraged new ventures from emerging.

But my team and I remembered: this state, this town, even this building, were places built on making things.

This is the story of how Starworks Center for Creative Enterprise—or, simply, Starworks—was born. It’s a new model, a place where artists, makers, and dreamers come together not to wait for salvation but to build their own future—one piece at a time. It envisions a future where community development is economic development, a future where Star makes things again.

Building New Foundations

It’s a familiar American story: a company arrives with promises—jobs, stability, hope. Towns rush to accommodate, cutting public services to instead build infrastructure and housing. For a while, it works. Then the factory leaves, lured by cheaper deals, mergers, or market shifts. Jobs vanish, but the bills remain. Local businesses collapse. Families once secure face mounting debt and uncertainty.

We know this story well. It’s a modern parable. Companies rarely stay put, and while big cities may recover, small towns like Star often stake everything on a single employer. When that brittle beam snaps, there’s little left to catch the fall. The nonprofit that would become Starworks knew this story and worked for something better. To do that, we started with the quiet strength already woven into a community’s fabric.

First, Listen

When I first walked into the factory, I felt the weight of it, the loss in the air. The long rooms were silent, but they carried echoes—faint sounds of conversations that had once filled the space, the rhythm of machines that had run for decades, the hum of people who had spent their entire working lives there. I could almost smell the coffee from old break rooms, hear the shift-change laughter, and feel the quiet buzz of a place that had once pulsed with life.

The building had been everything to Star, and yet, it was completely still.

When we took over the factory in 2005, we had almost no budget—just a building, skilled people, and a chance to grow from the inside out. Our goal: rebuild Star’s economy using its cultural roots. We had no grand plan, no big investor, no state funding. We started simply by listening.

Our first action was to connect with as many people in Star as we could. We organized a town meeting to introduce our organization and mission and our plans to acquire the old mill building. Out of the 800 Star residents, nearly one hundred showed up to listen to us. Based on the initial meeting, we scheduled more meetings in several corners of the community: business owners, fifth-grade school children, the Halcyon Women’s Club, and organizers of Star Heritage Day.

The older residents told us stories of what Star had once been. They remembered the vibrant Main Street—the grocery store, the hardware shop, the pharmacy, the diners. “We had small businesses before,” many of them said. “We can have them again.” They didn’t see the past as something lost forever. Because they had seen the town thrive with their own eyes, they could imagine it happening again.

The fifth graders surprised me the most. Their vision wasn’t about jobs or factories. They dreamed of bookstores, ice cream shops, bowling alleys, and places to gather with friends. They saw their town not from behind a steering wheel but from their bicycles. They just wanted a place to belong.

The middle-aged workers—the ones who had lost the most—were the hardest to hear. Their lives had been built around the factory’s steady work and decent pay. With a kind of quiet resignation, many of them said the same thing: “Unless another big manufacturer comes, we’re done.”

I understood that fear, that loss, and the longing for something familiar to come back and make things whole again. But the truth was, the old model wasn’t coming back. And maybe—just maybe—that opened the door for something different.

Second, Look

Around this time, my team and I reached out to economist Michael Shuman, author of Local Dollars, Local Sense and The Local Economy Solution. He generously gave us his time, and we discussed with him strategies to use the old factory to revive a small-town economy. He suggested we start by looking at what’s already here: the few family-run stores still operating that could expand with the right support and the untapped skills and crafts hiding in plain sight. He also asked that we look at what’s not there: the goods and services people currently drive to neighboring towns to buy. He helped us recognize the seeds of real, lasting economic resilience.

We asked ourselves: what are the resources in the community on which we could start to build?

The answer was right beneath our feet: clay.

We were in the heart of North Carolina’s pottery country, where the tradition stems from rich veins of excellent clay in the ground. Just ten miles north of Star is the historic clay community of Seagrove, the largest concentration of working potters in the country: over a hundred among a population of nearly 300. Yet few potters still used local materials, and they would drive hours for supplies. With limited funds, we bought a small batch of clay materials, sold them, reinvested, and slowly grew.

In 2008, we launched Starworks Ceramics—processing native clays, offering residencies, and building on the region’s heritage to grow a craft-based economy. We saw an opportunity to introduce ceramic artists from across the state and country to these special clays. Our residency program welcomed artists to Star for weeks or months at a time to experiment.

Today, the clay program attracts artists worldwide to study, create, and explore native clays and processes.

Third, Lead

We didn’t stop there. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, a small glass equipment company, Wet Dog Glass, needed a new home. When Starworks and the old factory had become a hub for potters from all over the country, we asked: why not glass?

We opened our doors. Wet Dog Glass moved in and began building world-class glassmaking equipment, as well as a new state-of-the-art glass studio in the factory—not with faceless labor but with people who understood the work, loved the materials, and brought care to every design and every weld.

The hum of machinery returned—this time as dozens of small voices working together. It was the buzz of artists working in studios, students learning, small businesses supporting each other—creativity feeding commerce. As we shaped our programming, one truth became clear: sustaining a vision in a rural community with limited support required bold outreach and imagination. We didn’t see this as a barrier; we saw it as a challenge to think bigger and cast our net wider.

We reached beyond Star, engaging regional corporations, state agencies, federal partners, and national supporters who recognized the arts as a catalyst for economic renewal. That persistence paid off in 2014, when we received a prestigious ArtPlace America grant—a turning point. This competitive, National Endowment for the Arts-supported initiative helped rural and urban communities diversify their economies through entrepreneurial arts. With that support, we launched transformative programs: workforce training in glass, ceramics, and metal arts; internships, apprenticeships, and residencies; and new retail opportunities that generated income and visibility. It sparked a larger movement.

Building on that momentum, we secured additional support from private foundations, federal agencies, and regional partners—including corporate champions like Uwharrie Bank. These investments allowed us to expand programming and make critical renovations, ensuring our facilities serve artists and the community for years to come.

What began as a challenge became a foundation for growth, resilience, and impact—proof that creativity and determination can achieve extraordinary things.

Like Planting a Garden

Slowly, life in Star has returned through the creation of a new purpose, a future to work toward. Starworks supported artists and became a leading voice in the country’s craft fields. This led to tourism becoming a part of Star’s economy for the first time and had a spillover effect in supporting small mom-and-pop businesses like electricians, plumbers, caterers, and roofers. Today, our events bring thousands of people into town.

This is why models like Starworks matter.

When artists and makers settle into a place, they do more than create art. They create jobs, rent spaces, teach classes, open cafes and galleries, and attract visitors. They weave themselves into the local economy in ways a distant corporate headquarters never can. Art fosters not just culture but commerce. Creativity becomes industry. And resilience takes root.

“Starworks has the distinction of keeping its community connected historically to an important part of its past,” Kissell said, “both academically and industrially, while also providing a focus on new more creative opportunities for growth and community involvement through the arts.”

The story of a community’s future doesn’t have to hinge on the arrival—or departure—of the next corporate giant. It can be built, patiently and intentionally, on the foundation of what is already here.

This is not a story about saving a town with one grand solution. It’s about listening to what’s already there. It’s about honoring the past while imagining a future built not on the shaky promise of a single big employer but on the steady resilience of many small hands working together.

We didn’t rebuild Star overnight. We still haven’t finished. But we planted something—not a factory but a garden, one bag of clay, one piece of molten glass, one artist, one neighbor, one quiet act of hope at a time.

Nancy Gottovi is the executive director of the Starworks, a nonprofit hub for local and global artists working in ceramics, metal and glass; and a partner of UPLIFT North Carolina, a team that supports tourism through community-driven efforts in rural North Carolina.