The Downtown Gastonia Historic District preserves the commercial core that grew up around Gaston County's cotton mill boom at the turn of the 20th century. The area around the courthouse square on Main Street and West Second Avenue has a coherent collection of early 20th-century bank buildings, commercial blocks, and civic structures — unusual in a region where many downtown cores were gutted by urban renewal or highway construction.
Key buildings include the Gaston County Courthouse (1909), the Third National Bank Building (1923, a handsome Beaux-Arts tower), and the Robinson-Gardner Building with its cast-iron storefront details. Walking the few blocks around the old county square gives a good sense of what a prospering Piedmont mill town looked like in its prime. The district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.