When local businessman Bob Adams heard Gainesville was planning to tear down Gainesville Mill - at a cost of about $1 million - he decided it would be the perfect home for Adams Transfer & Storage.

The company, which has been in existence since 1903, moved into the building in 1993 after millions of dollars of renovations.

"It was built in 1897," said Adams, who retired about three years ago. "All the columns in that building are wood, except on the left end of the building. That is solid brick wall, 39 1/2 inches of solid brick."

In 1949, Adams opened the moving and storage company in Gainesville. Which he purchased from his father, who lived in Athens. Later his son Jimmy joined the business and then expanded into data storage.

The mill has original wood floors throughout the building, which is one of Bob's and Jimmy's favorite aspects of the space.

"There is 4-by-6-inch pine (floor boards), which go on a diagonal, and all of those floors are maple all over the building," Bob said.

Jimmy said he's also a fan of the sturdy brick walls.

"I like that it's well built, 39-inch-thick walls, and it's got a lot of character," said Jimmy, who is president of the company. "It's been here for 108, 109 years and we've been in it for 15. We've been in it for about 12 percent of its life, so that's pretty cool."

The facade of the building still holds some original, rounded-topped windows. Outside is a towering smoke stack and concrete anchors for an old water tower.

But it's what lurks below the building that is even more interesting.

"That building is built on water - we pump water out every day," Bob said. "I don't know how they did it. Someone told me that they laid trees across the soft sand and then the structure was built and they tried to pump the water out ... in fact they put a pump in and the walls started to move."

Bob explained that the engineers had to go down about 120 feet to get footing for buttresses to keep the walls stable.

"The building is not suitable for anything other than a mill," he said. "I don't even think it was good architecture ... but I just love the structure and the way it was built."

In 1997, Bob said, the company hosted a 100-year birthday party for the building and invited anyone they could find who had worked at the mill. "And there were some tall tales," he said.

Those tales include stories of ghosts who inhabit the fourth and fifth floors of the 300,000-square-foot building.

"There's definitely a ghost," said Glen Eddins, general manager of Adams Transfer & Storage. "In 1903 there was a tornado that tore and collapsed the roof on the fifth floor; part of the fifth collapsed on the fourth floor. In 1903 this was a full-steam-ahead cotton mill and there was a day care center here and a lot of children were killed in that tornado."

Eddins said he believes there are ghosts on those two floors of the mill because of the eerie feeling he gets sometimes.

"You get a kind of a chill of being watched and the hair stands up on the back of your neck," he said.

Bob said the ghost stories from the mill are always popular.

"Well, it's always a story about the ghost. You can hear all kinds of things in that mill," he said. "I've witnessed some of that, particularly it was in the new part of the mill."

The Gainesville Mill operated as a cotton mill until 1989 and now two Adams companies occupy the space, along with a couple other businesses that lease space.

"There are two different entities of the Adams companies that are here in this building," Eddins said. "One is Adams Data Management and one is Adams Transfer & Storage. Each company occupies about half of the building. The fifth floor and the fourth floor are completely occupied by data management, record storage."

Eddins said most of the building is original except for the cooling towers on the back side of the building.

"There is an old boiler room, old elevators where the cage comes down and the two doors come down in front of it," he said. "Then there are old motors and metal equipment that have been collected over the years."

Some of the more interesting items now in storage in the mill is a collection of fire-damaged antiques. Also, the Girl Scouts use the facility for storage during their annual cookie sale and nonprofit groups use storage space.

"I think the most interesting thing we have in the building is the ghost, I guess," Eddins said.