How hike-and-bike trails offer a second act for lost factory towns

In Piedmont, Alabama, the city’s new industry had long remained invisible to many of its residents. 

Piedmont sits in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, in Alabama’s northeast corner. Rolling hills and thick green forests hug the town and its 4,674 residents. Buildings made from red clay brick dot the landscape. The old cotton mill, built in 1892, was made from that same brick crafted with “Bama soil.”

It’s been decades since the cotton mill, which had been the livelihood of so many, shuttered.

“Most everybody in town can trace some familial link to the mill, and there’s a bittersweet sentiment felt by many,” the Anniston Star wrote in 1995, when the long-abandoned building was finally torn down.

“They just weren’t seeing that they’ve had another industry here all this time that could change everything for them,” Kevin Cunningham said about the residents — his neighbors and friends since he moved to Piedmont in 2020.

“The economic distress, it’s been here for so long,” Cunningham, 58, said.

It wasn’t just the mill. By 1981, the trains that had helped spur Piedmont’s early growth had stopped coming through. Then, in 1999, nearby Fort McClellan ceased operations as part of the Department of Defense’s Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC). With each shutdown, peripheral business shuttered, too. Those who “survived,” spent decades bemoaning the departures, said Cunningham, and in the process, giving up on the town — working, shopping and eating elsewhere, he said. 

“Everything was negative about Piedmont,” he told Straight Arrow. “It was a bad cycle.” 

Can outdoor recreation replace lost manufacturing jobs?

Yet, through the veil of economic devastation, Cunningham and his wife saw in Piedmont an outdoor recreation industry goldmine.

Cunningham’s wife, Maggie, grew up in Piedmont in the ‘70s and ‘80s. She left for college and stayed away for more than two decades, living in Mississippi. Kevin had a connection to Piedmont too, having served in the Alabama National Guard with several stints in the town after natural disasters in the area. 

READ MORE: How one small city built a second act as a bio hub inside empty cigarette factories

Then, seeing opportunity in the town, in 2018, they bought a building in Piedmont that Maggie’s family had owned for decades. 

The deteriorating building that had once housed a hardware store and a knicknacks shop, among other businesses, stood adjacent to the train tracks; now it was on the corner of Main Street and the Chief Ladiga Trail. But in 1996, shortly after Maggie Cunningham left for college, the abandoned rail line was converted into a multi-use active transportation corridor; the first 8.9-mile section passed right by Piedmont. 

Spearheaded by the Rails to Trails Conservancy (RTC), the trail is one of more than 1,500 throughout the country converted from underused rail corridors into trails for walking, cycling and even horseback riding in some parts of the country, including in Piedmont’s Calhoun County. Since 1986, when the nation bragged only 1,000 miles of multi-use trails, more than 26,000 miles of abandoned rail corridors have been converted into trails; an additional 16,500 miles of trails have also been built.

A 2023 economic impact study found that 49,000 cyclists a year ride the Chief Ladiga Trail. 

“But, nobody’s had any vision to use it for business,” Cunningham said.

And, now that the trail has been extended another 6 miles, bringing riders all the way to the town of Anniston, financial opportunity for the residents of Piedmont has increased. At 39.5 miles, the trail ends at Anniston’s train station where Amtrak’s Crescent train stops bringing potential trail users from as close as Atlanta and as far away as New York City and New Orleans where the Crescent originates.

It’s not just cyclists. Thanks to its geography, Piedmont is teeming with all sorts of outdoor enthusiasts. Nearby Terrapin Creek, which flows through Talladega National Forest and past Piedmont, draws 130,000 kayakers and canoers each summer, said Cunningham. It’s a popular fishing spot, too. There’s also the 355-mile Pinhoti Trail that connects to the Appalachian Trail. Hikers abound. 

“It’s a trifecta … It’s a bonanza,” Cunningham said.

How do rail trails generate revenue for small towns?

The outdoor recreation industry is completely different from Piedmont’s shuttered textile industry. There are no manufacturing plants or products to build, no distribution centers or warehouses cluttering the landscape. And so, it remained invisible to those who lived in Piedmont, said Cunningham. 

That’s understandable, Brandi Horton, an RTC spokesperson, said.

“The concept of a multi-use trail is really quite new in our society,” she told Straight Arrow. “It’s only really taken hold at scale since the mid to late 1990s. So, it’s new infrastructure.”

When trails began rolling through, communities that already had an outdoor recreation destination strategy understood how to make the most of them, Horton said. 

When the first 9-mile stretch of the now 150-mile-long Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) came to Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, in 1986, the town had already had decades of experience as a white water rafting destination. The community knew “what visitors need to refuel and reset,” Horton said: restaurants with quick, healthy meals, accommodations and trail signage.

In Piedmont, “There was no reason to stop,” Cunningham said, so visitors hiked, biked and paddled right by the town, spending their money elsewhere.

What does it take to turn a trail into a local business?

“This is an economic lifeline,” Cunningham told Straight Arrow. “We decided that we needed to take a risk and see if we could help go in and revitalize the town.” 

So, in 2020, the Cunninghams moved to Piedmont and began transforming the  30,000-square-foot building. “The building was very rough, and the restaurant space was just a concrete block shell. I remodeled the entire building and built the restaurant myself,” Cunningham said. They added a vendor-based shopping area, as well, “for some much-needed retail shopping downtown,” Cunningham said. 

In the fall of 2024, the transformed building opened as Pinhoti Pizza Company. It’s the first restaurant on the Chief Ladiga Trail. 

“We had people literally tell us, ‘You’re going to lose everything. I can’t believe you’re investing in this town.’ And we tried to tell them, ‘You know, y’all are looking at it from a bubble, and we’re looking from outside the bubble.’ There’s a lot of opportunity here,” Cunningham said. “The Chief Ladiga Trail, for me, was a marketing bonanza.”

The pushback came from every direction, Cunningham said, including local politicians. In 2023, a state senator told the couple, “Nobody spends money that’s on the trail.” 

Cunningham disagreed. 

“I had to stand up in the middle of a big meeting and say, ‘You’re wrong. These people will spend money,’” Cunningham said.

“With the town in economic distress for so long, it’s been a situation where you have to show them,” Cunningham continued. 

And so, they did. The bike racks outside the restaurant began filling up just months after opening, 

“Full parking lots show ‘em,” Cunningham said. The restaurant “is our strobe light on the trail.” 

It’s a beacon not just for Pinhoti Pizza, but for the whole town, and residents are starting to recognize the opportunity. 

“They see that we’re capturing a customer, and then they’re like, ‘Maybe I can do that.’ And I tell people … there’s a vacuum in the small business sector to where there’s a lot of success just waiting to happen,” Cunningham said. The economic impact of the Chief Ladiga Trail, alone: $2.2 million a year.

Nationally, the 42,500 miles of trails are part of an $887 billion annual consumer spending economy that directly supports 7.6 million American jobs and generates $125 billion in revenue.

“If people recognize it, it can be a great thing to any town,” Cunningham said of the larger outdoor recreation industry and trails specifically. “They are trails of dreams rolling through every rural town living in a devastation bubble.”

Why is federal funding for bike trails facing political debate?

Yet, the Trump Administration calls multi-use trails ‘hostile’ to cars, and has clawed back grants for future trail expansion throughout the U.S. The Republican majority is planning to exclude trails from the transportation reauthorization bill up for a vote this year, which will shape transportation policy through 2031. In jeopardy of losing funding are at least 150 multi-use trail systems and expansions planned throughout the country.

Despite the rhetoric and the threats to trails, Horton remains hopeful.

“People are really starting to understand what it looks like to transform a trail into that economic generator for a town,” she said. 

It’s also a physical connector in a divided country. 

READ MORE: Can giving kids bikes help them learn to read? In this city, it works

“You spend more time enjoying your meals while talking to the locals. On a rail-to-trails, you go through small towns that were built around the train stops that many would not see in a car,” said Vicki Moseley, a 69-year-old cyclist from Tennessee. “One of the greatest gifts with cycling is seeing the world through different eyes.” 

Moseley has traveled the country by bike since the 1980s. Back then, she had to share the road with cars and trucks.  There’s a feeling of “safety,” she said, when riding a trail, “no cars, no maps needed, just relax and enjoy the scenery.” 

On her most recent ride in June — her third time biking the Chief Ladaga Trail — Moseley ate lunch at Piedmont’s Elevated Grounds, a coffee and sandwich shop that opened in 2019, and recently began renting bikes and a shuttle service for tired cyclists. 

For those who want to shop, Pinhoti Pizza Company has a 10,000 square foot retail store in the middle of its building. They too rent bikes. And Cunningham has convinced a dozen homeowners to list their properties on Airbnb.

“I think what’s happening in Alabama is so important because it is being led by local residents, local business owners who see the potential,” said Horton. “They’re saying, ‘This is why I think it’s good for us, and here’s how it can be good for you, too,’ and that’s what we have seen across the country.”

Soon Amtrak’s Crescent Line will add a multi-modal railcar to transport bikes, enabling riders to jump off the train and right onto the trail. 

“It’s the biggest thing that hasn’t happened yet,” said Cunningham.

“We can be a destination city. That’s where I want us to go.”

Round out your reading

• All your questions about napping, answered.
• Trump’s $5,000 promise echoes past payouts that never materialized.
• Inside the effort to make data centers pay their share of electricity costs.
• Why did the Feds seize the ’largest Martian meteorite on Earth’?
• Photos and video show exactly where and when Trump visited Ground Zero after 9/11.