Bailey Power Plant

The tobacco industry built Winston-Salem, and R.J. Reynolds built the tobacco industry here. The Bailey Power Plant was the machinery behind the machinery — a coal-fired facility constructed in 1947 to keep the Reynolds factories running. That work is finished. What replaced it is something the city couldn't have planned for.

Reynolds American donated the plant to the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter in 2010. Wexford took on the redevelopment. In February 2018, the building reopened as more than 111,000 square feet of office, retail, and restaurant space — part of what the brief describes as the largest historic redevelopment project in North Carolina history.

The building holds onto its past deliberately. The two original smokestacks still stand, all 130 feet of them, now fitted with LED lighting that marks the skyline after dark. The industrial bones inside remain visible rather than buried — the renovation treated the building's history as an asset, not an obstacle. Multiple preservation and architecture awards followed.

The broader Innovation Quarter, anchored here, pulls in biomedical research, information technology, and clinical services alongside academic institutions — a different kind of production than the one that came before, but production nonetheless.

The "Camel City" nickname Winston-Salem carried for generations came directly from Reynolds' Camel cigarettes. That industry shaped the east side of town, put up these buildings, and eventually walked away from them. What remained got handed over and remade into something that draws researchers and students instead of factory workers. The smokestacks stayed. The work changed. That's the whole story of this part of Winston-Salem, written in brick and lit up at night.