Cabarrus County: Small-town feel, big-city amenities

You don't have to venture far off its five main highways before you'll see enough neighborhoods to get the idea that Cabarrus County is no more than a bedroom community.

But what makes it a great place to live is big-city amenities that co-exist peacefully with small-town atmosphere and old-fashioned neighborliness.

You can live in a modern, upscale subdivision, an elegant Victorian home or a restored mill house. Your children attend good, stable schools in a district that has nearly doubled its classroom space in the past 20 years.

You can get to uptown Charlotte or to Charlotte Douglas International Airport in half an hour, and to UNC Charlotte in even less time.

You can shop at North Carolina's most-visited tourist attraction (Concord Mills mall) or attend a race at a superspeedway that, on race days, makes Concord the state's fourth-largest city (Charlotte Motor Speedway).

Yet without venturing far from developed areas, you'll find picturesque countryside, and you can buy your fruit and vegetables - even your meat and wine - from the people who grew them.

For most of the 20th century, Kannapolis was home to Cannon Mills Co., the world's largest maker of cotton sheets and towels, and county seat Concord hosted several of its plants. As the U.S. textile industry contracted beginning the 1980s, however, employment at Cannon Mills shrank from a peak of nearly 25,000 to fewer than 6,000.

Yet more and more people moved here, creating large bedroom communities outside Charlotte. The county's population more than doubled between 1980 and 2010, to about 175,000.

Opened in 1994, Concord Regional Airport is now the fourth-busiest in North Carolina by number of operations, after only Charlotte Douglas, Piedmont Triad and Raleigh-Durham international airports.

Scientists from all of the state's major universities have been working at the 350-acre North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis since 2008.

Earlier this year, a much-anticipated Hollywood movie began filming at the former Phillip Morris Plant in Concord.

It's a great place to live, and it keeps getting better.