The Gaston County Museum of Art and History in Dallas — the county seat that predates Gastonia — focuses on the textile industry that defined this region for nearly a century. The museum documents life in the mill villages that once housed thousands of workers in company-owned houses, schools, and churches in a paternalistic system unique to the Piedmont South. Photographs, machinery, and personal artifacts bring the mills to life in a way that no historic building quite can.
Dallas itself is about 10 km east of Gastonia and worth a quick stop for its well-preserved 19th-century courthouse square. The museum building occupies the old 1850s courthouse — one of the finest antebellum courthouses still standing in North Carolina, with a dignified brick exterior and a cupola visible from the surrounding streets.