By Joanie Morris

Kannapolis Citizen

The push of a button ushered in a new era for Kannapolis on Saturday morning.

Sirens blasted the two minute, one minute and then 30 second marks before half of the Towel Distribution Center was imploded. On the top floor of Mill 7, about 50 city officials, D.H. Griffin employees and their families and members of the media stood watching for the destruction.

After a series of short blasts, followed by silence and then the crumbling of brick, concrete and wood, a cloud of smoke rose through the air and floated west, toward Landis. The building that was once part of "The greatest year yet in industrial expansion" was gone.

In place, the North Carolina Research Campus will be built.

The Towel Distribution Center was completed in 1964. At the time, Don S. Holt, president of Cannon Mills, talked about mill expansion and "more to come in 1965." According to Holt, the center was "the most modern distribution center in the world."

In the Cannon Collection at the Kannapolis Branch Library, in file 150, a few pieces of paper document the building for the future. T.O. Sills wrote the description on Nov. 16, 1962, and described the girders, pipes, stone, sand and reinforcing bars that went into constructing the building.

"There are 4,750 beams and girders with a combined length of 21 miles which would reach from Concord to Charlotte," Sills wrote. "There are nine car loads of pipe in sprinkler systems, at 147,126 feet or 27.9 miles. This pipe connects 8,825 automatic sprinklers."

Portions of the well-constructed building are still standing, including girders and steel beams. The building was so large when constructed, Sills said 250,000 people standing at once in the building would equal the capacity of six Duke stadiums, 21 football fields, 116 one-half championship tennis courts or 833 swimming pools.

"On a clear day, the skyline of Charlotte can be seen from the roof," Sills wrote. "If we wanted to make a night club on the roof for dining and dancing, we could accommodate, comfortably, 8,000 people, or if we decided it would be better to convert to a sundeck, we would have room to expose 8,000 sun-lovers to the burning rays of Old Sol."

Whatever it could be used for, undoubtedly, Sills never had an idea that one day, the campus would become a state-of-the-art research facility.

That is David Murdock's vision.

Contact Joanie Morris at 704-932-3336 or jmorris@kannapoliscitizen.com.