A converted 1880 cotton mill at the western edge of Fourth Ward

Camden Cotton Mills is the adaptive-reuse apartment community at 520 West 5th Street, occupying one of the two surviving nineteenth-century structures of Charlotte's first cotton mill. The surviving buildings are on the Charlotte Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission's designated landmarks list.

Verified facts about the current building

Address. 520 West 5th Street, Charlotte, NC 28202. Phone. (704) 850-9648. Leasing hours. Monday–Friday 9 a.m.–6 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Unit types. Studio through 2-bedroom, 1–2 baths. Operator. Camden Property Trust (publicly-traded residential REIT).

Unit features (per Camden's property description)

Floor-to-ceiling windows with skyline views, gourmet kitchens with stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops, industrial finishes, and full-size in-unit washers and dryers.

Amenities

A rooftop terrace with saltwater pool and grilling stations, a community room with full kitchen, a community workspace with Wi-Fi, and a 24-hour fitness center with cardio and free-weight equipment.

The historic mill that the building is

Camden Cotton Mills occupies what was built as part of Charlotte's first cotton mill, founded in 1880 under the name Alpha Cotton Mills by R. M. and D. W. Oates. Limited operations began in December 1880, and by March 1881 the mill had 5,800 of its planned 6,240 spindles running. The owners changed the name to Charlotte Cotton Mills in 1881; incorporation under that name followed in 1883, per the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission record. The original mill complex occupied more than a full city block. Only two nineteenth-century buildings survive: 520 West 5th (now Camden Cotton Mills apartments) and a sister structure at 500 West Fifth Street.

The mill's opening marked Charlotte's entry into the Piedmont textile industry. Before Charlotte Cotton Mills operated, cotton grown in Mecklenburg County was shipped north to be spun and woven. The original workforce of about seventy people, mostly women, cleaned, spun, and wove cotton thread into cloth on site. The Charlotte Mecklenburg Story historical archive documents the operation as the founding moment of what would become the city's dominant late-nineteenth-century industry.

What Mercury Local has not yet verified for this page

The exact year of residential conversion from mill use to apartments. The architect of the conversion. The specific unit count at Camden Cotton Mills (one aggregator reports 11 units; a full HOA-style unit count has not been directly confirmed from the building's management). Parking specifics. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission's designation documentation (hl.mecknc.gov returned 403-blocked; landmarkscommission.org returned SSL errors during research for this page).

The Archivist will publish a full building profile — including the ownership chain from Oates to the present, the conversion-to-residential year, and the sister building at 500 West Fifth — when CMHLC primary sources are directly accessible. For now, this page carries what is verified and names what is not.

Context

The two surviving cotton-mill buildings are a rare physical link between the late-nineteenth-century textile economy that gave Charlotte its first industrial identity and the early-twenty-first-century Uptown residential boom that made Fourth Ward into its current mix. A resident at Camden Cotton Mills walks out the door of a building that housed seventy women making cloth in 1881 and onto a block that is two minutes from 51-story towers, a food hall, and the Blue Line.

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Sources

• Camden Cotton Mills community summary referenced via Apartments.com, Zumper, Zillow, and Trulia listings, retrieved April 24, 2026. Camden Property Trust's camdenliving.com portal did not return full building-specific content in this session; WebSearch summaries of those rental aggregator listings provided the current feature and amenity data.
• Charlotte Mecklenburg Story, 1880 — First Cotton Mill. cmstory.org/exhibits/history-timeline-industrial-south-1879-1913/1880-first-cotton-mill, retrieved April 24, 2026.
• Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission, Charlotte Cotton Mills designation record, referenced via WebSearch summary. Direct fetch of the CMHLC page was blocked by the server in this session (hl.mecknc.gov returns 403; landmarkscommission.org returns SSL certificate errors). Facts cited from CMHLC — including the Alpha Cotton Mills origin name, the Oates family ownership, and the 1883 incorporation — are staged in the piece with explicit attribution pending direct fetch.