Twelve years ago this summer, Opelika got official confirmation of something the people who grew up in the mill village already knew: Pepperell Mill and the neighborhood built around it are a piece of American history worth keeping.
On June 10, 2014, we reported that the National Park Service had added the Pepperell Mill and Village Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places. The citation covered all three of the reasons that district matters: industry, because from 1925 on the mill was the largest employer in town and the reason Opelika grew the way it did; community planning, because the village was a deliberately designed place, roughly 240 buildings with a church, a post office, a drugstore, a barber shop, a gas station and a childcare center; and architecture, all that standardized mill housing with its Craftsman and bungalow details.
It reads differently now. The mill itself burned in 2011, and in the years since, the village has been rediscovered by people restoring those little houses one at a time. Whatever comes next out there, the listing is the written record of what was built and why it counted.
Read the original June 10, 2014 story on ODN →
