Kannapolis: The Cannon City

The name Kannapolis blends Greek words for reeds and city, long explained locally as meaning City of Looms, though a local historian notes Cannon himself never studied Greek. For nearly a century, cotton mills were precisely what this place was. James William Cannon founded his first mill in nearby Concord in eighteen eighty-seven, then in nineteen oh six selected open farmland in Cabarrus County for an entirely new mill town built to his specifications. Workers lived in company houses. The schools, churches, and stores all answered to Cannon Manufacturing. By nineteen fourteen, the operation had grown into the world's largest producer of sheets and towels.

Kannapolis became the largest unincorporated town in the United States, a distinction it held because the Cannon family saw no need to surrender control to elected government. That arrangement lasted until the mills began to collapse. In two thousand three, Pillowtex, which had bought Cannon Mills, went bankrupt. The factories were demolished in two thousand six. Kannapolis also happens to be the birthplace of Dale Earnhardt, the seven-time NASCAR champion known as the Intimidator, who was born here on April twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty-one, the son of a racing father and a mill town. The city has since reinvented itself around a biotech research campus on the very land where Cannon's looms once ran.