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An old road that mill workers traveled before it disappeared long ago will soon carry traffic again.

The 350-foot-long street, bordering North Buffalo Creek, will become the primary entrance to Revolution Mill Studios, a complex of shops, businesses, artists’ studios and banquet space in an old cotton factory that’s an outstanding example of Southern textile mill architecture of 100 years ago.

The street will pass under arguably Greensboro’s most imposing bridge. It is a railroad trestle, over North Buffalo Creek, behind and next to the Greensboro Fire Training Center. The trestle was built in about 1904, with three arched portals, resembling a Roman viaduct.

Traffic will go through the north portal and emerge at the rear of Cone Mills’ former Revolution Mill, which opened in the late 1890s and operated until 1982. The rear of the building already has been beautified to become the main entrance.

Motorists will hear a rumble from above. Norfolk Southern freight trains, some with four or more locomotives, streak across more than 20 times a day at 59 mph.

The street will connect with the existing Revolution Mill Drive, which starts at Yanceyville Street, formerly Vine Street, and runs the length of the mill building’s north side.

In addition, the new street will veer off at the rear, cross North Buffalo on an existing bridge and connect to Cone Mills’ former Olympic Mills complex.

Jim Peeples, one of Revolution Mill Studios’ investors, says his group intends to have medical offices within the walls of the now-empty Olympic, which opened in 1947 and closed in the 1980s.

The street will then return to the south side of the Revolution complex, where a former warehouse will become condominiums.

Adam Fischer, the city’s director of transportation, says his department has blessed the new 20-foot-wide street from Church to the trestle, provided it’s one way. Traffic entering Revolution on the new street would exit on the Yanceyville side.

“It would be too narrow for two-way traffic,’' he says of the new street. “Besides, you wouldn’t want traffic exiting onto North Church.”

He says the state, which maintains North Church, has approved the new street. So has Norfolk Southern Railroad. The railroad still must approve the designs for a retaining wall below the trestle and devices to prevent objects from flying off railcars onto the new street below.

Revolution Mill Studios essentially will restore what retired mill workers remember as Eighth Street, which became Ninth Street after it passed through the trestle and behind the mill.

It started in McAdoo Heights, home of many mill workers and now the State Street shopping area. The portion of the street that went through the trestle’s north portal was eliminated in the early 1950s. Peeples says that if you stab a shovel in the weeds next to the creek, “you’ll hit the old roadbed.”

He says investors also hope to make shiny again the rusty, unused railroad spur from Revolution to Cone Mills’ former Proximity Prints Work complex, now empty and a block east on Fairview Street.

The goal is for Print Works to become offices, shops and residential space. The rail spur would make an ideal tram, Peeples says, connecting Revolution-Olympic to Print Works.

When done over a period of years, the complete development will cost about $250 million, Peeples says. The work on the new street from Church to the trestle will start right away and should be completed by fall, he says.

It will offer close-up views of the creek, with its mallard ducks and other wildlife, and of the trestle that has been part of Greensboro’s transportation history for more than 100 years.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net