Ruth can't resist peeking into Glencoe Mills during her stay with the Holt family. What she sees there, the machines and the child workers, changes how she views her own comfortable life. Built between 1880 and 1882 along the Haw River, Glencoe was one of ten early textile mills that helped launch North Carolina's cotton industry, producing plaid fabrics shipped worldwide until it closed in 1954. Today, the mill village is one of the best-preserved 19th-century textile communities in the Southeast, and the old Company Store now houses the Textile Heritage Museum, with original looms, photographs, and artifacts from the mill era. Visitors can walk the same streets, cross the footbridges over the Haw River, and see the mill dam that once powered it all.