Henry River Mill Village

The story

Henry River Mill Village was a textile company town on the Henry River in Burke County, built between about 1904 and 1907 around a cotton-yarn mill. The Henry River Manufacturing Company spun fine yarn for lace — 4,000 spindles in the early years, growing to 12,000 — and housed its workers in a tidy grid of some two dozen identical frame houses above the river, with a two-story company store at the center.

Like most Southern textile towns, it ran on the mill and died with it. The mill closed in the late 1960s as the industry declined, the workers drifted away, and in 1977 the empty mill building burned. What survived was the village itself: the company store and about twenty houses, weathering quietly in the woods off Interstate 40.

That preserved emptiness gave Henry River an unlikely second fame. In 2011 it was used as District 12 — Katniss Everdeen's home — in the film 'The Hunger Games,' and one of the mill houses was blown up for a scene. The village is privately owned and now runs guided tours, turning a forgotten mill town into one of the most-visited ghost towns in the Carolinas.

What remains today

About twenty original company houses and the two-story company store along the Henry River; the mill building itself burned in 1977, leaving its dam and foundations.