Garibaldi Station, seventeen mills, and a beautiful mountain that isn't there.

The settlement began as a stop on the Atlanta & Charlotte Air Line Railway called Garibaldi Station, after an engineer on the line. In 1876 Benedictine monks from Pennsylvania established a monastery on farmland nearby — the institution that became Belmont Abbey. At the abbot's request the post office was renamed Belmont in 1886, from the Latin bellus mons, beautiful mountain. The town incorporated in 1895.

Then came cotton. The Stowe and Lineberger families, working with neighbors and in-laws, chartered mill after mill along the rail line and the rivers until Belmont counted more than a dozen — the town eventually advertised itself as the City of Diversified Textiles. Chronicle Mill, chartered in 1901 by Robert Lee Stowe with A.C. Lineberger and S.P. Stowe, was the first inside town limits, and later housed one of the earliest industrial air-conditioning installations in the United States.

Mill villages were built around each plant: small houses on small lots, a store, a church, a ballfield. That pattern is still legible in the map today, and it is why Belmont has walkable older neighborhoods when most Piedmont suburbs of its size do not. When the industry left in the late twentieth century, the buildings stayed — and the second act became adaptive reuse rather than demolition.