Flowers for Kannapolis, NC

For most of a century Kannapolis was a company town — Cannon Mills stamped the street grid, the little brick mill houses and the name itself, Greek for city of looms. The looms are long quiet, but the bones are still here, and the last decade has poured new life onto them: the NC Research Campus rose on the old mill footprint, Atrium Health Ballpark and the Cannon Ballers brought summer crowds back to West Avenue, and the downtown between Main and Vance filled back in with storefronts. Flowers move through all of it. A florist's afternoon in Kannapolis might mean a congratulations bouquet to a lab on the Research Campus, an anniversary arrangement to a restored bungalow in the mill village, and a sympathy piece routed to a service at Whitley's — three very different corners of the same tight town.

Other North Carolina cities.