NORTH SMITHFIELD – A blighted former mill in Branch Village could see new life as a housing complex following its purchase this week by a partnership that includes the same developer currently building apartments on Pound Hill Road.
RBA Holdings, LLC purchased 761 and 765 Great Road for $1,350,000 from Neighborworks Blackstone River Valley, according to a deed filed this week in the town clerk’s office.
Incorporated last month with the Secretary of State, RBA is a partnership that includes investor Richard Albanese, who purchased the property in town that once held The Pines Restaurant last year.
RBA was represented by Realtor Mandy Loux of Gold Door Realty in the transaction, and now owns a 32-acre Great Road lot featuring a 79,000-square-foot structure built in 1918. The single-story building once held the Andrews Mills Company Plant. The Tupper Corporation added modernizations in the 1960s, including the metal panels that now cover the front facade.
In more recent years, the lot was owned by trash hauler Coastal Recycling, a business the went bankrupt in 2014 and left the property abandoned, with dozens of overflowing dumpsters and massive piles of rubbish.
It has sat vacant in the years since, and Neighborworks, a Woonsocket-based non-profit that helps families attain home ownership, bought it for $300,000 in 2018. NeighborWorks remediated the property, and had discussed the potential to build new housing in the village with town officials.
Now, it seems private developers will instead dictate the land’s future.
It’s one more major land development project underway for Albanese, who also bought the former Father Holland School in Burrillville last month.
His adaptive reuse of the former North Smithfeld restaurant, meanwhile, is already well underway, with 20 units under construction at 1204 Pound Hill Road. In June, he received a $75,000 grant through the Rhode Island Commerce Site Readiness Program for site planning and other pre-development activities at “Pound Hill Estates,” for construction of a second structure on that 7.5 acre lot, slated to hold another 18 units.
The main building on his new property at 761 Great Road features a unique sawtooth roof, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. The property also holds a boiler house, machine house boiler room, gate structure, water tower and pump house.
The sale this week included a vacant 1.38 acre lot situated across the street from the former mill at 765 Great Road, also previously owned by NeighborWorks.
