At the Weldon terminus of the Roanoke Navigation Canal, between the boat basin and the river, Halifax County's first industrial complex used the canal's constant, regulated flow to power a range of enterprises. Before the American Civil War, the area behind the old power plant contained a sawmill, two grist mills, and an iron foundry, and by the 1880s these had been replaced by two larger grist mills while the first recorded striped bass hatchery in the United States was added. In 1890, the Roanoke Navigation and Water Power Company began building the three-story Weldon Corn Mill and a 50,000-bushel grain storage facility; the mill was powered mechanically by a turbine on the building's eastern side, and historians believe it also housed North Carolina's first hydro-electric power generator. Profitable electric production led to construction of a dedicated power plant behind the main mill in 1900. Soon after the turn of the twentieth century, the Roanoke River Development Company purchased the factory complex and added a large lumber planing mill and a seed oil mill, but the loss of guaranteed water rights in 1912 and the coming of the Great Depression ultimately brought about the complex's demise. In 1938, the Works Project Administration removed all of the outbuildings, converted the corn mill into a community center, and modified the basement of the grain elevator into a public swimming pool. For more than 30 years, the community center was a focal point of Weldon's social life, remembered for dances, parties, and summers spent swimming in the pool. The town of Weldon closed the facility in the late 1960s, after which the buildings slowly decayed, until a local developer bought the property in 2004 and began preserving these historic landmarks.