Don’t Laugh, Charlotte. The Gateway to Gastonia is Growing. – Charlotte Magazine

In the late 1950s, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg, author of such eloquent and democratic works as The People, Yes, allegedly opened a speech in Charlotte by asking, “What do you get when you have too many Mecklenburgers?”

You know what’s coming.

“Gastonia.”

Sandburg joined a long tradition of laughing at the expense of our western neighbor, which has been variously referred to as the South Carolina of North Carolina, the Florida of North Carolina, Myrtle Beach without the beach, the worst town in the state, Little Chicago, and a murder capital. Gastonia, they say. Don’t get it on ya.

Sure, every region has a redheaded stepchild, but what gives? Does the stereotype reflect the county today? Did it ever? Is it the county’s reputation that stifled growth, even as the Charlotte area boomed? Or is the town’s tumultuous history to blame? 

For a century or more, Gastonia—and, more broadly, Gaston County—has been a reliable regional punching bag. Charlotte’s relatively cultured cosmopolitans can scoff at the places across the Catawba on their way to climb Crowders Mountain and squint at their skyline on the horizon. But every year, amid Charlotte’s hungry sprawl, Gastonia, along with the 12 other incorporated towns in the county, grow closer. Metaphorically, at least, that hazy skyline looms just a little bit larger.

In February 2021, Saturday Night Live skewered Charlotte. Kenan Thompson—playing LaVar Ball, with his trademark wry grin—called the city the “gateway to Gastonia.” But while Charlotteans make snide remarks, Gaston County has developed on its own terms, luring business not only from across the country but across the world. Gastonia’s development is Charlotte’s development, and vice versa. Thompson’s cheeky nickname, it would seem, isn’t far off.

Kristy Ratchford Crisp grew up just outside Gastonia, in a rural area that the city later annexed. She was all too aware of the taunts about her hometown. They were all over morning radio and still are. John Boy and Billy have taken shots at Gastonia, Billy’s hometown, on WRFX since 1986. “It’s hard when you hear that,” she says, “to not at some point believe that about yourself.” 

She planned to get out and never look back. She went to UNC Chapel Hill to study biology, but after graduation, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She found a job as a stormwater public educator with the City of Gastonia, and though her role has evolved, she hasn’t left her hometown. In fact, since May 2017, as the city’s economic development director, Crisp has been Gastonia’s biggest cheerleader. Her teenage self, she says, would be shocked.

Gastonia used to be a big city. At the intersection of two rail lines, the small depot named for U.S. Rep. William Gaston unfolded into a major textile hub. By 1910, Gastonia had 11 cotton mills. For several years in the 1930s and ’40s, the City of Spindles hosted the Grand Cotton Festival, which celebrated the fabric of kings, queens, “and the millions of average citizens who comprise America’s own royalty.”

Mill owners rarely treated average citizens like royalty. In the 1920s, the “stretch-out” system doubled work and depressed wages. Workers, often women and children, earned mere cents per hour, and conditions grew dirtier and more dangerous. In April 1929, 1,800 workers at Gastonia’s Loray Mill went on strike to protest their working conditions. Over the month, tension escalated. Workers were evicted from their homes. The event, which made national headlines, spiraled into violence over the course of several months. Seventy-one protesters were arrested. Mobs ran them out of the county. In September, a mob fired on a vehicle full of strikers, killing one: Ella May Wiggins, who was pregnant.

Loray Mill, a former textile and tire plant and the site of a violent 1929 labor strike, is now a prominent mixed-use complex with retail and office space and luxury loft apartments.

The strike featured in at least six 1930s novels, and it emblematized the tenacity of American mill workers. But the symbolic victory failed to produce material gains. Mill owners kept fueling their behemoth industry with expendable labor.

The bonanza would last about a half-century longer. In 1970, textile employment in the county peaked at 27,880. Then mills began to move overseas, and jobs evaporated. By 2000, that number had fallen by two-thirds. The collapse smothered progress as the city groped for a new identity. Jibing Charlotteans were happy to define Gastonia in the meantime.

“The river has kind of been a psychological barrier,” Crisp says. As Charlotte’s growth crept north toward Cornelius and Kannapolis, east toward Mint Hill, and south into Fort Mill, development seemed to stall at the Catawba River, a sort of moat between Mecklenburg and Gaston counties. It didn’t help that, despite the airport, that side of Charlotte has remained largely rural. The River District, a major planned community, will bring 1,400 acres of development to the eastern bank over the next several years, but already, people are flocking to Belmont and other spots on Gaston’s eastern edge. Since 2000, Belmont’s population has grown by 78%, Mount Holly’s by 91%.

I-85 crosses the Catawba River and cuts a path through Gaston County.

On weekday mornings, traffic bottlenecks on the bridge across the river. About half of Gaston’s residents work outside the county, and about 25,000 of them travel to Mecklenburg. But lately, more and more workers travel the opposite way, too. Patrick Mumford is one of them. The former Charlotte City Council member spent two decades at Wachovia and another decade with the City of Charlotte, leading development strategy. Now, he’s president and CEO of the Gaston Business Association.

He points out that Gaston County is still in the textile business, but rather than dark, dangerous Depression-era factories, it’s high-tech manufacturing. And it’s not just textiles. The county has broadened its economic base, and today, Gaston’s biggest industries include manufacturing, health care and social assistance, retail, construction, education, and accommodation and food services. The county is home to more than 30 international companies from 16 countries. Eleven German companies, including Bayer Corporation, Braun Instrument Company, and Nussbaum Automotive Solutions, have facilities in the county. 

Gastonia, Mumford emphasizes, isn’t a handmaiden to Charlotte. Instead, he says, the relationship is cooperative, “trying to put the theory of regionalism into practice,” so that both counties can benefit. “It goes both ways,” he says.

And Gaston County isn’t a tough sell. With 15 towns within its borders, many with quaint, century-old downtowns, there’s a variety of options, both near and far from the hubbub of Charlotte. Cramerton, McAdenville, Mount Holly, and Belmont are near the airport and make for a relatively quick commute uptown. The Catawba River, Crowders Mountain, and various trail networks provide outdoor recreation when Freedom Park just won’t cut it.

Gaston residents have easy access to outdoor recreation, like Crowders Mountain (above) and the U.S. National Whitewater Center, which lies just across the river.

And it’s only getting better. Gaston’s late renaissance means it can approach growth intentionally, with perspective from other cities, especially Charlotte. I ask Mumford which of Charlotte’s issues serve as cautionary tales.

“Well, housing,” he says, “which is no surprise to anybody.”

He hopes the county can learn from other communities how to address affordability, how to manage transportation and prepare for the infrastructure that comes with it. The median home price in Gaston County in 2022 was $206,700, Census data show—more than $100,000 less than in Charlotte, where the same figure was $312,800. The same year, median rent in Gaston County stood at $1,005, compared to about $1,400 in Charlotte.

Gaston, like Charlotte before it, grows more diverse by the day, Mumford says: “How can the voices of those diverse folks who are choosing to move to Gaston, work in Gaston, to have a business in Gaston County—how can they be a part of planning for the future, since it will be their future?”

When Mumford imagines the outlook beyond his tenure, he says, “My hope is that the outside world sees Gaston as a great place to be. It’s positioned itself to be the place of choice for business, and for people, and for visitors,” he says. “I know that sounds a little hokey, but somebody has to be leading that charge.”

In the last decade or so, downtown has experienced something hard to imagine in the early 2000s—foot traffic.

Donny Hicks has been the executive director of Gaston County’s Economic Development Commission for 40 years, and he’s been thinking about the area’s growth even longer. His late father, Gary Hicks, worked for the city for a quarter-century and spent 13 years as Gastonia’s city manager. “It gave me a sense of place,” the younger Hicks says. 

But that didn’t mean he wanted to pick up his father’s mantle. He pursued public administration in Chapel Hill and didn’t plan to come back, but when an internship opportunity on the commission opened, he took it. “It was like prison,” he jokes. “I just ended up here.”

At the time, the county’s economic development efforts were much smaller, and Hicks enjoyed the challenge of taking on “situations of high ambiguity and trying to create some clear path that people will believe in, and invest in, and can all work on collectively.”

Donny Hicks has been executive director of the Gaston County Economic Development Commission since 1984.

Hicks speaks in lofty terms—“setting a whole new direction,” “substantial projects with big payoff”—but often, the big-picture vision hinges on low-glamour goals. Like sewage.

In the ’80s and ’90s, companies wanted to locate in business parks near similar types of companies to protect their investment, since they wouldn’t have to worry about conflict with incompatible neighbors. In Gaston County, Hicks spearheaded an effort to extend water and sewer services and develop business parks. “Since then,” he says, “we’ve had somewhere north of 17 million square feet of new space built.”

Although Gaston competes with other counties for investment, Hicks echoes Mumford’s emphasis on regionalism. When he started, competition with other counties and municipalities was a “street fight.” Since then, “everybody has essentially ceded to the fact that we are better off collectively,” he says. “We still compete, but the collaboration greatly outweighs the competition factor.”

Capital flows both ways. When companies locate in Gaston, they hire, for example, accounting firms based in uptown. They use the airport. Investment in Gaston—or any of Mecklenburg’s neighboring counties—is an investment in Charlotte. “They need us,” Hicks says, “as much as we need them.”

Making Gaston attractive to business and luring cash to the region isn’t the end goal, though. Just as individual jobs support families, the county’s economic development supports quality of life throughout all of its towns. Tax revenue from business goes to build schools, invest in parks, and preserve land. Just like a family, the county seeks to “create an economy that can pay for those things without struggling,” Hicks says. “We’ve built a substantially stronger economy than we’ve ever had.”

On May 4, the fruits of Crisp’s, Hicks’, and Mumford’s labor blossom all over the county. It’s not the Grand Cotton Festival, but people across the county come together in celebrations that reflect Gaston’s towns of today. Kings Mountain marks its 150th anniversary with carnival rides and games. Cramerton hosts the Goat Island Games, with yoga, live music, and arts and crafts. Gastonia celebrates Cinco de Mayo with folkloric dance, food trucks, and mechanical bulls. In Mount Holly, at Springfest, dancers take the stage. 

Hicks, who’s worked for the well-being of the county for four decades, doesn’t mind the jokes about Gastonia and Gaston County.

“They don’t bother me,” he says. “I laugh all the way to the bank.”

ALLISON BRADEN’s writing has appeared in Outside, Oxford American, Sierra, and more. She has contributed to this magazine since 2017.