In 2007, massive mill buildings dating to Danville’s glory days in the textile industry stood vacant and deteriorating. Victorian and Civil War-era homes became dilapidated, and more storefronts were empty than occupied downtown.
That year, the entire city was considered a historic endangered place by Preservation Virginia, the nation’s oldest statewide historic preservation group.
Each year, Preservation Virginia compiles a list of historic sites facing imminent or sustained threats.
Usually, list entries are specific buildings or sites, not entire cities.
It’s rare for a city to have as many old buildings as Danville does, said Sonja Ingram, a Danville historian and former Preservation Virginia associate director of field services.
“When I say this, people think I’m crazy sometimes, but these buildings are like our pyramids,” Ingram said. “Right now, people might not see it that way, but in 500 years when they’re still standing, they might.”
When the Preservation Virginia list came out, Danville “had a really terrible reputation,” Ingram said.
After the 2006 closure of the city’s main economic driver, Dan River Mills, many empty mill buildings were demolished, despite calls from local preservationists to save them. The city has lost other historic buildings and homes, sometimes in the name of blight removal and often in Black neighborhoods, as part of what were called revitalization efforts.
Much has changed in Danville in recent years, as the city began to see preservation efforts contribute to economic successes. The city is now in the process of creating a historic preservation committee to ensure that this work continues alongside the city’s rapid growth.
This does not mean that every historic building in Danville is safe. Demolition still occurs; the city earlier this year approved a permit to tear down a centuries-old warehouse in the River District to make way for an apartment complex, to great consternation from preservationists.
Preservationists acknowledge that there simply aren’t enough historic buildings in Danville to meet housing needs in the rapidly growing city, even if each and everyone was renovated — something that is unlikely to happen.
They caution that new construction needs to be done appropriately and in the right places.
What can preservation do for a community?
Historic preservation involves finding creative ways to repurpose old buildings for new use, guided by regulations designed to protect original features such as roof lines, windows and walls.
Often, people think of historic preservation as safeguarding the past, said David Brown, the former chief preservation officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and former executive director of the Historic Staunton Foundation.
“They think of museums, things frozen in amber,” Brown said. “But that’s not really what historic preservation is today. It’s much more dynamic, and it’s about building continuity between the past and the present and looking to the future.”
Localities that use their historic resources to catalyze developments are often more attractive places to live, Brown said.
“They provide an identity. They’re not just any place,” he said. “If you go to a lot of new places, especially suburban developments, you’ll see a lot of cookie-cutter design … but old places help us tell our story. They’re part of our memory.”
People are attracted to cities that “launch off of their historic fabric and resources,” said Elizabeth Kostelny, CEO of Preservation Virginia.
Localities that do this are often more walkable, more accessible and more attractive to both residents and visitors, who like to feel connected to a place’s history, she said.
“The rehabilitation of historic resources often brings an interesting community together, where you have creative arts moving in, as well as traditional businesses,” Kostelny said. “It really makes a community multidimensional.”
These types of projects are referred to as “adaptive reuse,” a phrase that refers to repurposing existing structures for new use while preserving their historical significance.
Preservation also can bring environmental and economic benefits. Adaptive reuse often leads to fewer building materials ending up in landfills and to construction incentives like the historic tax credit program that rewards private investment in historic properties.
There’s a myth that preservation is always more expensive than new construction, Kostelny said. While it can be, incentives can reduce the cost of preserving and repurposing a building, making it competitive with new construction.
This kind of work can also bring economic impacts, Kostelny said, as formerly abandoned buildings will be filled with new businesses or residents.
A 2017 Preservation Virginia study looked at the post-rehabilitation economic impact of projects that received historic tax credits.
The state’s historic tax credit program, which is run through the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, provides a state tax credit of 25% of the eligible expenses to property owners who rehabilitate historic buildings.
The study analyzed 94 historic tax credit projects and found that an estimated $373.1 million was created statewide in construction output, alongside more than 7,000 new construction jobs, from these projects.
“[Preservation] is something that you’ve got to work on every day, but when you step back and look at what the impact is over time, you can show that there’s real value to a community in investing in the past,” Brown said.
Danville’s journey with historic preservation
After the 2006 closure of Dan River Mills, some residents and organizations pressed for the preservation of the mill buildings, most of which dated to the 1880s to 1910s, according to the entry for the city on the 2007 endangered places list.
Proponents of preservation argued that if the buildings “could be restored and brought up to current building and fire codes, they could be important economic successes for the city,” providing space for apartments, shops and museums with the goal of increasing job growth and spur heritage tourism, the entry says.
“Plans to save the remaining structures have been proposed, but unfortunately, most of them have been overruled by the city,” it says.
Almost two decades later, Danville is in the midst of a preservation boom.
The shift in perspective happened when the lack of redevelopment and preservation efforts started to cost the city.
More than a decade ago, the CEO of a major manufacturer and his wife came to Danville unannounced, said Telly Tucker, who was economic development director from 2014 to 2020.
“They took one drive up Main Street and saw a bunch of boarded-up buildings, no one there, this dead downtown,” Tucker said. “It didn’t take long for them to say, ‘This is not the place where we want to put our business.’”
Losing that opportunity was painful, Tucker said, but it was “actually a blessing to hold that mirror up.”
The city began to view its old buildings as unique assets, he said, and developed the River District Revitalization Plan in 2011.
Annual tax revenue significantly increased in the city once preservation efforts began.
Since 2011, 17 historic tax credit projects have been completed in the River District, according to a city analysis of real estate taxes.
Those 17 structures generated about $25,000 of annual real estate tax revenue for the city prior to redevelopment. Now, those sites generate $480,000 in tax revenue annually.
Many of the tobacco warehouses in the city’s River District have been repurposed as apartments, with others housing shops and restaurants.
At least initially, some of this was achieved unintentionally.
The same economic downturn that led to so many vacant buildings in the city also helped save them, said Danville preservationist Rick Barker.
“During the ’70s and ’80s, when a lot of cities were growing, they sacrificed all the antique architecture for surface-level parking,” Barker said. “Well, Danville wasn’t growing in the ’70s and ’80s, or in the ’90s. So rather than our buildings being torn down, they gradually became vacant.”
Many of those buildings, especially in the River District, remained standing simply because it cost too much to raze them.
For a while, the city didn’t have the money to fund demolitions, said Paul Liepe, a resident of Danville’s Old West End neighborhood, a designated historic district in the city, who has been involved with preservation efforts there.
This left many historic buildings standing long enough for the city to make the connection between historic preservation and economic opportunities.
Danville has had more historic tax credit projects than any city in Virginia for the last several years, and it now has more historic buildings than Charlotte, North Carolina, or Atlanta, said Barker.
Visitors interested in local and state history travel to Danville from all over the country.
“A large part of the reason that Danville is experiencing a revitalization is the cumulative effect of the tax credit projects that people have undertaken,” said Julie Langan, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “I would argue that were it not for those, things would be very different.”
When the city formed the River District in 2011, a survey indicated that there were about 5 million square feet of antique buildings in the district, and 3.5 million of that was vacant or underutilized space, Barker said.
“Danville started to see how these places can be reused, and it’s done a great job of looking at that as the preferred alternative to demolition,” Kostelny said. “It’s made it a more attractive city.”
Ongoing efforts, past losses
One major historic tax credit project in Danville will transform Dan River’s White Mill, which closed in 1996, into Dan River Falls, a mixed-use property.
“If you had taken a vote every year, the majority of people would’ve said, ‘Tear it down.’ But because we didn’t, today it’s going to get $100 million in investment,” Barker said. “The atmosphere and feel, you can’t recreate that with new construction.”
These economic benefits are a powerful driver for preservation efforts, he said.
“The reality is, business people incentivized by the profit motive have saved more buildings in the River District than preservationists,” Barker said.
The 22-unit T.B. Fitzgerald apartment building is the latest of many adaptive reuse projects in the River District that made use of existing infrastructure and historic tax credits.
Developer Rory Dowling said that adaptive reuse projects are beneficial to an area, despite their unique complexities and cost.
“These projects are very complicated, they take a lot of time, and it can be difficult to raise capital for them,” Dowling said. “You also have to get a lot of approvals in place at the state and federal levels. … That’s why people choose not to do them. Your typical developer will just build new because there’s less regulation.”
Dowling specializes in revitalization development in smaller communities, which often means using historic buildings.
“Some developers might get frustrated when they can’t buy a property, tear it down and go higher, but once you let that happen, you’re just going to create Charlotte, where they destroyed all of their historic buildings,” he said.
Adaptive reuse projects can be financially risky, Dowling said.
“You have to spend a lot of money on the front end to get plans in place from an architectural standpoint, but you don’t necessarily know that you’re going to have those plans approved,” he said.
The cost for the construction itself, after plans are approved, can be 40% to 50% higher than new construction, Dowling said. This is where historic tax credits come into play.
“Most of your hard costs, construction costs for these projects, will be eligible for that,” he said. “That’s the real reason why the tax credit is there because, without it, you would never have any ability to save these buildings and use them.”
Still, many historic properties have been lost, both mill and tobacco buildings.
Danville once boasted many more tobacco warehouses than what remains today — “probably four or five times the amount we have now,” Ingram said.
One major loss was in the city’s Schoolfield district, which once housed mill employees and is now the home of Caesars Virginia.
In 2005, after Dan River closed its Schoolfield division, it sold the Schoolfield Recreation Center to CVS Pharmacy despite strong opposition from residents and mill employees.
“I was not happy,” said Paul Gentry, a former Dan River employee who now volunteers with the Danville Historical Society. “I worked for Dan River for 31 and a half years. And for all but a year and a half of that, I was usually at Schoolfield Recreation Center either for slow-pitch softball, bowling or volleyball.”
His wife worked there when they first met, he said. The demolition of the rec center was “a travesty,” he said, adding that he knows folks who still don’t shop at that CVS branch in protest.
Countless other mill buildings have been lost over time, and Danville, like every city, has an urban renewal story, said Karice Luck-Brimmer, a local Black historian and genealogist.
Historic neighborhoods, often predominantly Black areas, have been displaced to build things like highways.
One of the goals of Danville’s preservation plan — an appendix to the updated comprehensive plan — is to promote a greater understanding of local history, especially underrepresented and minority communities in the city.
The plan aims to help the city partner with groups that are involved in promoting these neighborhoods, involve historic preservation in the annual Juneteenth celebration and pursue landmark designation for underrepresented sites in Danville.
Liepe said that much of the work laid out in the preservation plan hasn’t happened yet.
“From my own experience, fostering preservation requires a significant manpower investment,” Liepe said. “You have to have someone thinking about it every day, and if you don’t think about it but once a month when there’s a preservation committee meeting, nothing happens.”
The plan also recommends a staff member position dedicated solely to these efforts, which Liepe said would help preservation be a more continual effort in Danville.
Even without this, “it’s gotten so much better over the years,” with city leadership and residents becoming aware of the benefits of historic preservation, Ingram said.
Now, Dowling describes Danville as the “number one location in the Southeast” when it comes to successful historical preservation.
And Danville wants to make sure the preservation work continues, even if major players in the private and public sectors leave, said Assistant City Manager Earl Reynolds.
Danville hired Brown to build a case for a citywide preservation committee in 2022, Reynolds said.
Such a committee would “ensure the longevity of the emphasis on preservation, even if things begin to slack off in other areas,” which could include city hall administration and the work of local preservationists, he said.
There’s no set timeline for the formation of the committee, Reynolds said, although an application for funding is in progress. The committee would not include city staff, he said, adding that members would be paid, overseen by a volunteer board of directors.
“The whole idea is to make sure that there is continued guided, professional, intentional thought about the identification, maintenance and protection of historic resources in the community,” not just in the River District, but throughout the city’s other historic districts and neighborhoods, Reynolds said.
Where do demolition and new construction fit in?
Especially in growing communities, not every need can be met through historic building stock, Langan said.
“A really vibrant and appealing community is one that combines thoughtful new design and construction with its historic buildings and neighborhoods,” she said.
While these two types of developments can coexist, both need to be done intentionally, Barker said. Building a new single-family home or apartment complex in a historic district can interrupt and detract from the antique architecture, he said.
And a push for new construction can threaten empty historic buildings because “you can tear down a one-story building and on the same lot, put a four-story building,” Barker said.
While preservationists often embrace new construction alongside preservation, the idea of historic buildings being demolished is hard for them to swallow.
When developers want to demolish a building, a common refrain is that it’s too far gone to save, Langan said, adding that “most of the time … they don’t know that for certain. That’s just the answer people give as an explanation for why [a building] needs to come down.”
DHR and Preservation Virginia can help property owners explore historic tax credits and rehabilitation options for buildings that are thought to be unsavable, she said.
In cases where a building is actually past saving, it’s usually because building codes haven’t been enforced and the structure has become unsafe, Langan said.
DHR and Preservation Virginia offer best practices for balancing preservation with growth, Ingram said. It also takes buy-in from city government and public support, and a public advocacy group dedicated to preservation can be helpful, Brown said.
Much of the work comes down to raising awareness.
“The job of the next few years in the preservation community will be to educate,” Barker said. “Generally speaking, when people are hardcore for or against [preservation], it’s because they’re not educated and don’t have a balanced view.”
The need for housing in the region can’t be ignored, he said. Danville actually has lots of houses available, they just aren’t houses that people want to buy, he said.
“We need quality construction, modern architecture for modern lifestyles,” he said. But it doesn’t belong in historic districts. “New construction should go on vacant lots. That’s what land is for.”
Dowling agreed that the city’s housing needs to extend past what adaptive reuse projects in the River District can do.
“When you look at the amount of housing demand in Danville and the growth happening, you’re not going to solve it with these one-off, smaller, 20- or 30-unit projects,” he said. “You still need to generate more single-family units and find areas where you can create that product.”
The tension between preservation and demolition was recently evidenced by a Danville City Council decision to allow a circa 1900 tobacco warehouse to be torn down.
A request to demolish the building to construct an apartment complex came before the River District Design Commission twice in the past year. The commission denied the request both times.
But the developers appealed, bringing the issue to the city council in May. The council approved the demolition permit 8-1.
The developers argued that because of the Lynn Street building’s lack of large windows and the concrete columns throughout it, it would be impossible to repurpose the structure with historic tax credits.
Councilman Lee Vogler said at the May meeting that he is often a cheerleader of preservation and rehabilitation in the River District. But he didn’t see a clear vision for the Lynn Street building, which has been standing vacant for about 20 years, he said.
“I agree, it’s a great piece of history, but will it be beneficial to our city and our citizens and our taxpayers if it continues to sit and rot as it is currently doing?” Vogler said. “If we’re not going to approve what the developers are asking, then what is going to happen? All I’ve heard so far is that it’s just going to continue to sit there and not be utilized.”
Ingram said demolition should be reserved for buildings that are beyond saving.
“Anything can be repaired if you take enough money to it, but in this case, that warehouse has nothing wrong with it,” she said. “It’s in really good shape, and if it was in bad shape or if there was a safety concern, it’d be a different story.”
This demolition is something that might’ve happened 15 years ago, she said. The city has made so much progress prioritizing preservation that the decision was “perplexing and sad,” she said.
Langan said that the DHR also pushed for the building to be saved, and Barker said he believes the original denial was the correct decision.
DHR had encouraged the developers to consider using historic tax credits to rehabilitate the property, Langan said.
“We think it’s premature for a demolition request to be on the agenda without first exploring the potential for that property to be rehabilitated,” she said. “It’s disappointing.”
The developers did revise their initial proposal to make the exterior of the new apartment building more consistent with the River District. It will have a brick exterior and look like many of the other historic warehouses, even though it will be a new build.
Council members were happy with this revision, saying that the existing warehouse has been sitting empty for about 20 years with no recent plans for development.
A preservation committee, once established, will be able to weigh in on these decisions in the future.
“At the policy level, because we have such rare and significant architecture, that we need to get the policies right so that it can be protected so that everyone can appreciate it,” Barker said.
This conversation isn’t going to go away, Barker said. In fact, Danville will likely have to grapple with these questions more frequently as the city experiences a continued housing shortage and economic growth.
