Drive down Mill Street this month and you'll see it: the taproom that used to be 13 Stripes Brewery sitting dark, a leasing sign where a beer list used to hang. For anyone who spent a Friday night there over the last several years, that's the kind of detail that makes a place feel like it's slipping. The Mill's original anchor tenant, gone. The taproom that helped put Taylors on the map for people who'd never otherwise drive past the Enoree River, empty.
Read the story that way and you'd be wrong about what's actually happening at Taylors Mill right now.
The space everyone's asking about
13 Stripes opened its first location in an 8,000-square-foot corner of Taylors Mill in May 2017 and grew into one of the Upstate's most recognized craft breweries. Earlier this year, it relocated to Hampton Station, the redeveloped cotton warehouse anchoring Greenville's Water Tower District, taking over space formerly held by Birds Fly South Ale Project and White Duck Taco, right next to The Yard, a family-oriented green space. Abacus Capital, the developer behind Hampton Station, described the move as building on "the spirit of Hampton Station while introducing fresh energy." It's a polished, capital-backed project, and 13 Stripes was a marquee name to land.
By June, the old Taylors Mill taproom was already back on the commercial market, listed as a former brewery and taproom space. In the same announcement covering the move, Taylors Mill owner Caleb Lewis put it plainly: the team is "identifying the right tenant and concept for this space" and had already had "several promising conversations." That's not the language of a landlord bracing for a vacancy problem. It's the language of someone treating one departure as a routine step in a building that's been cycling tenants in and out since it reopened in 2011.
Fewer tenants, fuller building
Here's the number that actually tells you something: in the same release covering the 13 Stripes move, Taylors Mill reported it was over 95% leased with nearly 70 businesses on site. A decade earlier, back in 2016, the Mill had nearly 80 tenants, most of them occupying small, closet-sized studio spaces while the property still had roughly 600,000 square feet of finished space sitting unused.
| 2016 | Today | |
|---|---|---|
| Businesses at the Mill | Nearly 80 | Nearly 70 |
| Commercial space leased | ~200,000 sq ft, with hundreds of thousands still empty | Over 95% leased |
| Typical footprint | Small startup studios, first-step-out-of-the-garage spaces | Larger, established storefronts, taprooms, and production spaces |
Fewer businesses, more of the building filled. That's not a shrinking mill. That's a mill where the tenants who stuck around got bigger. The Mill's own team has described this pattern before: it's not uncommon for a tenant to start in a small space for under $500 a month and expand into a larger one as the business grows, sometimes moving to a different building on the property entirely. 13 Stripes didn't shrink and leave. It grew until Taylors Mill's flexible, low-overhead model did exactly what it was built to do, and the business outgrew the building.
What's actually open right now
None of this means the Mill went quiet while 13 Stripes packed up. If you're routing a Saturday through Taylors Mill this fall, here's what's actually there:
- The Farehouse, serving New York-style pizza, deli sandwiches, and dinner specials out of Dock No. 3
- Defiance BBQ, a food truck parked on site for burgers and barbecue
- Pinky's Revenge, one of the Mill's newer restaurant tenants
- The Model Train Station, a working model railroad display for train enthusiasts of any age
- An arcade and game lounge with more than 60 games, a bar, and live music
- Redemption MMA & Fitness, a veteran-owned gym offering boxing, Muay Thai, and jiu-jitsu
- Companion Skatepark, nearby, open for skate sessions and lessons
That's a full weekend without ever needing the taproom that used to anchor it. The mix has always been the point. Owner Caleb Lewis has talked about wanting to add a general store, more residential tenants, and boutique-style shops to the space that's still unfinished. Whatever eventually replaces 13 Stripes in that 8,000-square-foot footprint, it's landing in a building where empty space has become the exception rather than the norm.
The festival almost nobody outside Taylors knows about
If you want proof that Taylors has more going on than one brewery's exit, look a few minutes down the road from Mill Street. This Saturday, August 29, Blue Oak Horticulture hosts the SC Pawpaw Festival at 198 Fews Bridge Road, the kind of rain-or-shine, afternoon-into-evening event the farm has run for several years now. It's built around the pawpaw, America's largest native fruit and one most people in the Upstate have never tasted, with fruit tastings, a nursery selling pawpaw trees, live music, and food and drink vendors on site.
It's a small, specific, slightly odd event, exactly the kind that doesn't show up on anyone's generic "things to do in Greenville" roundup because it only makes sense if you already live close enough to justify the drive. If you're in Taylors, you are.
Watch what fills the space
The honest read on Taylors Mill this year isn't decline. It's turnover working exactly the way the property's owners designed it to work back when the goal was giving small businesses "a first step out of the home." 13 Stripes took that step, grew past it, and moved to a bigger stage in Greenville. The building it left behind is still more full than it's been in years, still drawing enough demand that an 8,000-square-foot taproom won't sit empty for long, and still generating the kind of local calendar, a pawpaw festival, a model train exhibit, a skatepark nearby, that a shrinking property doesn't bother to keep.
If you've written off that dark taproom window as a bad sign, give it until the leasing sign comes down. That's usually when Taylors Mill tells you what it's actually becoming next.
Mike Dassel keeps an eye on shifts like this because they show up in a neighborhood's character long before they show up in market data. If you're weighing a future move in or around Taylors and want a local read that goes beyond the listing photos, Mike Dassel is a call away. Request a free home valuation whenever you're ready to see what your current home fits into this market.
