Holly Hill Mall is a one-level enclosed mall on Huffman Mill Road in west Burlington, North Carolina. It opened in 1969 with Belk, Sears, and Woolworth inside it, and none of the three is there now.
Belk and JCPenney moved to a newer center two miles west in 2007, and the mall was in foreclosure by the next summer. A group of local businessmen bought it out of a bank and put the Holly Hill name back up.
Sears stayed the longest. The mall sold that end of the property in 2019, and the store came down the year after. A supermarket was built on the cleared land.
The mall runs on 302,300 square feet today, with no department store in any of it. About 90,000 square feet of the building is on the market.
A $5.5 million cap and a side letter
Holly Hill Mall opened in 1969 on Huffman Mill Road in west Burlington, and the contract that built it had been signed twice.
The first version went through on May 16, 1968.
Holly Hill Mall Realty and T. A. Loving Company agreed on cost-plus terms: the contractor would collect what the job cost plus a fixed fee of $350,000, and nothing in the document capped the construction price.
That was a problem for the $6.5 million construction loan Wachovia Bank and Trust Company had committed to the project, because the bank wanted a ceiling.
So the two sides executed the contract again with a maximum cost of $5.5 million, and the owners got their financing.
Then the owners handed the contractor a second document, separate from the first.
The cap wouldn't bind T. A. Loving as between the two of them, and the owners would cover whatever the job ran over the stated maximum.
Wachovia never received it. Neither did Aetna Casualty and Surety, which bonded the work for $5.5 million that August.
T. A. Loving finished the mall in July 1970, above the cap.
The contractor sued in January 1971 for $1.6 million out of a total it put at $7.1 million, and in 1974 the North Carolina Court of Appeals declined to treat the side agreement as void merely because the lender and the surety had been kept out of it.
The private promise stood against the owners.
A night depository and an antitrust suit
Wachovia took something inside the building too. Around July 11, 1969, Holly Hill Realty let the bank put a night depository inside the enclosed mall.
The setup paired a drop box with a vault, giving merchants a place to leave deposits after hours without going outside.
The lease also kept certain rival banks from installing the same kind of facility.
By 1971 more than 50 tenants were doing business there, and the Justice Department described Holly Hill as the Burlington area's only regional shopping center with an enclosed, air-conditioned mall.
Two years after the depository went in, the arrangement reached federal court.
The United States Department of Justice sued Wachovia on June 22, 1971 over the restriction on competing banks.
Wachovia released Holly Hill Realty from the restriction on July 8, and a final judgment in 1972 barred the bank from using shopping-center contracts to control where or whether rival banks could operate branches, night depositories, or other banking facilities.
The depository stayed in the corridor, and the exclusivity around it was gone.
Holly Hill gets a food court
By 1991 the mall ran to about 400,000 square feet with about 15 percent of it empty, and Steven D. Bell & Co. bought it in that condition for $14 million.
The purchase came with a spend.
About $2 million went into the property, and two of the results were things a shopper could walk into: a food court, and Goody's, which moved into space Woolworth had held since the mall opened.
Bell sold six years later. Colonial Properties took over in 1997, and by 1999 the mall was trading as Colonial Mall Burlington.
Two anchors out, local owners in
On the last day of 2004 the mall was 94.3 percent occupied, with 42 stores in 415,200 square feet.
Colonial sold it the following July for $32.5 million, and the name outside changed again, to Burlington Square Mall.
Alamance Crossing opened its first phase on August 1, 2007, less than two miles west, out near the interstate.
It was much larger, it was open-air, and Belk and JCPenney both moved into new buildings there. Belk had announced its move in 2006.
Both stores were out of Burlington Square by that September, and the anchor traffic that had organized the mall's layout went with them.
The building showed it inside a few months. By February 2008 the old Belk entrance had become a mural.
Chick-fil-A was carrying the food court, and a prefabricated shop sat out in the parking lot.
Foreclosure proceedings were announced that July, three and a half years after the mall had been 94.3 percent full.
Goody's announced its Burlington Square closing later that year, which left Sears as the last traditional department store in the building, and Books-A-Million closed in October 2009.
A group of 10 Burlington-area businessmen bought the mall from a bank in spring 2010.
They put the Holly Hill name back up, added "Business Center" to it, and on July 20 went to the City Council with an amendment to the property's conditional zoning.
It cut the required parking to one space per 250 square feet and allowed outparcels.
The council approved it unanimously, and the parking field around the mall became something that could be cut into pieces.
The big spaces filled with other kinds of tenants.
Hamrick's took about 40,000 square feet of the former JCPenney in 2011 and didn't renew in 2014. Dave's Furniture moved into the former Goody's.
Dunham's Sports, in negotiation with the mall since November 2010, signed on January 13, 2012 and opened in the former Belk, on a lease that tied full rent to two things: Sears staying in business or being replaced by a same-size retailer within 180 days, and at least half the mall's small-shop space staying occupied.
Publix next door, not inside Holly Hill
On February 11, 2019, Holly Hill gave up its Sears end for $4.5 million.
Church Street Commons Realty bought 9.6 acres that included Sears and Prego's.
Sears stopped operating on January 15, 2020, vacated in February, and the building came down later that year.
By August Dunham's was using the co-tenancy formula to pay less.
The parties had already rewritten the lease the previous September: lower gross rent in the option periods, with Holly Hill taking full responsibility for HVAC maintenance.
What replaced Sears was not another mall box. The old store had about 65,000 square feet; Publix opened December 8, 2021 with 49,100.
Its building is across a receiving alley and parking from Holly Hill, in Church Street Commons.
From the corridor, the effect is almost an anchor: a large Publix sign sits above Holly Hill's northern exit even though the supermarket itself is across the gap.
That sign mattered because Holly Hill wanted Publix to count as Sears's replacement under Dunham's co-tenancy clause.
Dunham's said no and kept the lower payment. Holly Hill sued in 2023. The fight reached a bench trial on June 3, 2025, and a ruling on July 11.
The judge sided with Dunham's: a smaller supermarket across the alley was not a Sears replacement inside the shopping center.
The court also pointed out that Holly Hill had chosen to sell the old anchor parcel instead of finding a tenant there that met the lease.
The mall lost both its claim for full rent and its bid to eject Dunham's.
The reduced-rent formula remains in force while the co-tenancy condition remains uncured.
Holly Hill Mall & Business Center sits at 309 Huffman Mill Road in Burlington, North Carolina.
It opened in 1969 as Holly Hill Mall, Alamance County's first enclosed, air-conditioned mall, later traded as Colonial Mall Burlington and then Burlington Square Mall, and today is a one-level enclosed center of 302,300 square feet under local ownership, with Dunham's Sports and Dave's Furniture as its largest retail tenants.
The rest of it is being repositioned in pieces.
PRA Group put a call center with about 500 cubicles into roughly 43,000 square feet of the old Hamrick's space in March 2018.
That suite is empty now, 42,600 square feet with an 800-amp generator, and it's offered for lease.
About 90,000 square feet of the building and 7.5 acres with it are offered for sale.
Walkers get in at 9 a.m., an hour before the stores open, and they pass under the Publix sign on their way out of a mall Publix doesn't anchor.
Independent Publisher Notice
BestAttractions is an independent editorial publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any location, business, property owner, manager, government agency, or organization described in this article.
Comments posted on this page are not forwarded to, reviewed by, or acted upon by any entity mentioned in the article.
For official inquiries, complaints, applications, bookings, or other requests, please contact the relevant entity directly through its official website or other verified channels.