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When Myrick Howard first started visiting Glencoe Mill Village in 1981, the community on the Haw River north of Burlington looked ragged but salvageable. By 1997, it looked doomed.

“You went around and porches had fallen off the fronts of houses,” said Howard, president of Preservation North Carolina (PNC). “There was one house we called ‘the leaner’ that had literally fallen off its foundation.”

Working with the late Sarah Rhyne, widow of Graham Mayor Myron Rhyne, PNC bought the village and in 1999 began an ambitious restoration project. On Saturday, the nonprofit will celebrate the project’s 10th anniversary with a Glencoe Open Village, which will include open houses at several restored homes and a presentation by Howard about “The Rebirth of Glencoe” at a historic church in Graham.

“It was clear that Glencoe was reaching a critical point in the summer of ’97,” Howard said. “It was just gonna get lost.”

Drive through Glencoe today and you’ll see comfortable houses in pastel colors, flowers blooming in manicured yards and neighbors out walking their dogs. All the surviving houses in the village have been purchased, and all but two have been fully restored. People have even bought vacant lots and constructed new houses in the style of the modest two-story mill houses.

Glencoe has come a long way from the overgrown ghost town Howard remembers, the result of decades of neglect after Glencoe Mills stopped manufacturing cotton plaids in 1954. The village had about 40 salvageable houses in 1981, but that number had dropped to 32 by the time PNC bought the property 16 years later. Rhyne was unsuccessful in her initial plan. She enlisted the help of U.S. Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., in trying to create a Southern version of Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, which commemorates the early days of the textile industry in New England.

“When I was first talking to her, her vision was trying to get the National Park Service to buy it for a park,” Howard said. “Quite frankly, under the Reagan administration, that wasn’t gonna happen.”

In the meantime, PNC took on an ambitious project renovating an old mill village in the eastern part of the state, and that gave the organization the confidence to take on Glencoe.

“Things were going well in Edenton, and we thought, ‘Well, let’s try again,’” Howard said. “Glencoe was a different challenge than Edenton. On one hand, Edenton is more remote; on the other hand, Glencoe was way more deteriorated.”

So why bother? Why not let the elements continue to reclaim what little was left of Glencoe?

“Glencoe is really a remarkable survivor of the early North Carolina industrial revolution,” Howard said. “There is no other mill village from that early, water-driven mill history in North Carolina. There really is nothing like it left in North Carolina, and there really is not much left like it in the South. Most of the mill villages that people know of and think of were built along the railroad tracks after the steam engine made it possible to operate with a smokestack instead of a dam.”

The village is also unique because of the architectural style. Even when the houses were brand-new in the early 1880s, they were something of an anachronism.

“We scratch our heads about those houses, because they are more typical of houses built 50 years earlier,” Howard said.

At the time Glencoe was built, Alamance County had distinct English and German communities on opposite sides of the Haw. That heritage may explain why conservative, Greek Revival houses with heavy-timber construction were built in Glencoe at the height of the Victorian era.

“We take a wild guess that these houses were built by older German craftsmen,” Howard said.

Contact Eddie Huffman at 373-7335 or eddie.huffman@news-record.com.