The massive Mill No.8, and its lost architectural companion across the river, the Dye House, marked the last major phase of construction at Dan River's original (Riverside) division.  Just downriver is Mill No. 1, the rambling brick complex where the company began in 1882.  Together, these buildings represent the "alpha and omega," the first and the last mills (of at least 15) along the river. They chronicle the remarkable story of how Danville, the early-1880s tobacco town, population 7,000, was transformed – largely by textiles – into the City of Danville, population of some 20,000 by the time the "White Mill" opened for production in 1921, on Thanksgiving Day.  With the White Mill, and the company's growing textile town Schoolfield just upriver, the city assumed its place as a world textile leader.

Mill No.8 hugs a remnant of the antebellum Roanoke Navigation canal, first adapted for hydropower with the Schoolfield brothers' pioneering experiment with cotton textiles at Mill No. 1.  The building's reinforced concrete construction stretches some 832 feet along the river and millrace, by 140 feet wide – a giant footprint situated on 18-3/4 acres.  Designed by one of the nation's premier industrial architectural firms, Lockwood, Greene & Co., of Boston (and Spartanburg), it was constructed, in part, by the hands of Italian laborers housed on-site, under the supervision of Aberthaw Construction Co.  Its cost in the early '20s totaled $3,370,000.

In stark contrast to the earlier mills at Riverside – all solid brick of post-and-beam, slow-burn construction – the White Mill's modern Gothic (industrial) style is emphasized by "segmental arches with off-set block motifs and peaked details cast into its concrete envelope."  Four five-story elevator towers reinforce this Gothic "factory" silhouette.

Inside, rows of giant "mushroom-capped" columns, 20 inches in diameter, are aligned in a grid pattern atop concrete floors or a combination of concrete and maple.  Occupying these spaces originally were dyeworks and slashers, on the first floor, with the upper floors housing looms and other weaving equipment.  At the time of construction, Carrier installed air washers to humidify the interior to 80%.

Even after its Riverside Division was shuttered in the 1990s, Dan River Inc. continued to use Mill No.8 for storage.  Following the company's dissolution in 2007, developer John Gieser purchased the building.  With its solid concrete construction, the White Mill, Gieser asserts, "will be here in 1,000 years."  Consequently, he's confident that this early-20th-century former textile behemoth, state-of-the-art at the time, is the perfect setting for 21st-century technology.  Interestingly Mr. Gieser, who's masterminding this second incarnation, hails from Spartanburg, South Carolina – the southern satellite office for Boston-based Lockwood, Greene & Co. responsible originally for the mill's arresting design.