Belmont: Benedictines, Bishops, and Cotton Mills

Belmont sits at an unlikely intersection of monastic life and industrial cotton. In eighteen seventy-two, a Caldwell family plantation was donated to Benedictine monks, and by eighteen seventy-six Bishop Leo Haid had established what became Mary Help of Christians Abbey, still active today as Belmont Abbey. The monks eventually opened Belmont Abbey College, one of the few Benedictine liberal arts colleges in the country.

The town incorporated in eighteen ninety-five. Six years later the Chronicle Mill opened, and Belmont's industrial chapter began in earnest. By nineteen thirty nearly twenty textile mills had been built here, drawn by the railroad, the rivers, and proximity to Charlotte and Gastonia.

The abbey and the mills grew up side by side, giving Belmont an identity that is part medieval European cloister and part Piedmont mill town.