Spindale developed as a North Carolina manufacturing hub of mills and factories in the 1900s, with a name that reflected its well-known role in the textile industry. Its small-town Main Street, lined with eclectic shops, restaurants, and long-standing brick buildings, preserves that history, while bricks from Stonecutter, once the town's largest mill, remain as part of that legacy. Today Spindale is also known for WNCW 88.7 FM radio, a leading public radio station in Western North Carolina, its “Spindale Cycle™” radio show, and a growing music scene centered on Main Street and Isothermal Community College's Foundation Performing Arts Center. The town is also home to The American Dairy Goat Association, begun in 1904 and the largest dairy goat registry in the United States with over two million animals registered. The last operating mill in Spindale still stands, and the rail lines once built to serve the textile industry have been transformed into the Thermal Belt Rail Trail, a 13.58 mile walking, running, and biking trail that continues the legacy of the town's formative industrial era. The Spindale House, regarded by generations as the symbolic heart of the town, began as a private home built between 1849-1851 for Francis Sidney Coxe, son of Tench Coxe Sr., who served as assistant secretary of the United States Treasury from 1789-1799. It was later the boyhood home of Col. Franklin Coxe, who built Asheville's Battery Park Hotel in the late 1800s and owned Green River Plantation in Polk County, before the property was sold to Simpson Bobo Tanner, Sr. in 1916 and donated by Tanner's heirs to the town in 1924 for recreation and community use.