Long before and long after the strike, Gastonia was a textile town. Parkdale Mills - the largest manufacturer of spun yarn in the world - is still headquartered here. The company has closed plants and shifted production overseas like most of its competitors, but the corporate brain of global yarn still operates from a Carolina Piedmont city most Americans could not find on a map. Around it, the industry has thinned: Wix Filtration, Freightliner Trucks, Stabilus, Curtiss-Wright, the Italian-owned Radici Group. The mills that once employed entire neighborhoods now employ smaller, more specialized workforces. The 2020 census counted 80,411 people, up from 71,741 a decade earlier - the city is growing again, partly on its own merits and partly as a Charlotte exurb 18 miles east on I-85.

The Schiele Museum of Natural History keeps the area's deep history visible - the Hall of North Carolina Natural History, the Henry Hall of the American Indian, and the James H. Lynn Planetarium, the only one in the Charlotte region. Just southeast in Belmont, the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden spreads over hundreds of acres of cultivated landscape. To the west, Crowders Mountain State Park offers granite-faced summits and rock-climbing routes; to the east, the U.S. National Whitewater Center pumps Olympic-grade rapids through its artificial channels. None of this was here when the mills ran 24 hours. Most of it grew up in the four decades since the textile industry's slow collapse forced the region to imagine itself differently.

Downtown has been quietly working its way back. The historic district has filled in with locally owned businesses again. The newest civic landmark, CaroMont Health Park, opened in 2021 as part of the Franklin Urban Sports and Entertainment District. The Gastonia Honey Hunters played there until 2023; in 2024 they became the Gastonia Ghost Peppers, still in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, still independent, still drawing crowds to a stadium two blocks from the old courthouse. Roller derby bouts run at Kate's Skating Rink. The Gastonia Gargoyles play rugby. Sister-city ties go to Gotha, Germany and Santiago de Surco, Peru. None of it makes national news. All of it is what a recovering mill town looks like when it gets serious about being a city again.

Gastonia's notable-people roll is long and improbable. Thomas Sowell, the economist and political commentator, was born here. James Worthy of the Lakers and the Hall of Fame grew up here. Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit. R. Gregg Cherry, governor of North Carolina from 1945 to 1949. The novelist Lionel Shriver, the painter John T. Biggers, the swimmer Melvin Stewart with his Olympic medals, the golfer Harold Varner III, the basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell. A textile town three decades into deindustrialization, raising children who left and made names that the town then claims back. It is one of the quieter American patterns, and Gastonia is one of its truer examples.