Walk into the space at The Mill on Etowah that used to hold Community Burger and you will not find Community Burger. You will find Bully Run, a smash-burger counter that opened there on March 16, 2026, run by Andy and Amber Palermo, the same family behind POPS Canton down the street. The building did not move. The river out back is still the Etowah. What changed is who is cooking.

That is the thing about the Mill that a single visit will not tell you. The structure is a fixed, 250,000-square-foot shell on Reformation Parkway. What operates inside it is not fixed at all. If your mental picture of the place is a year or two old, you are picturing a different set of businesses than the ones actually there right now.

What replaced what

Bully Run's menu runs smash burgers, grilled hot dogs, loaded fries, gourmet chicken strips, deli sandwiches, and milkshakes, served with outdoor patio seating. It is the kind of concept built for a family stop after a Saturday spent walking the events green, not a special-occasion drive. That matters less for the food itself than for what it says about how the Palermos are betting on the Mill: they already run a restaurant in downtown Canton, and instead of opening somewhere new, they took over a storefront that had already turned over once inside the same building. That is not a chain filling vacant square footage. That is a local operator expanding into a space they had already watched someone else try and leave.

This is not an isolated swap, either. It is a pattern the Mill has run since it opened, and it is worth knowing the current lineup rather than the one you remember.

What is actually there right now

As of this year, the Mill on Etowah holds:

• Bully Run, the Palermos' smash-burger concept, in the storefront that used to be Community Burger
• Reformation Brewery's taproom and production space, the anchor tenant that first committed to the building back when the developers announced their plans for it
• Cotton Mill Exchange, a retail marketplace built into the old mill floor with multiple independent vendors under one roof
• A co-working environment for people who want a change of scenery from a home office
• An events green with a stage and a screen, used for live music, movies, and the occasional sporting event on the lawn

That list is not decoration. It is the actual current state of a building that has already proven it will swap out a restaurant concept without warning if a better local fit comes along.

Why the building tolerates this

The Mill on Etowah is not a single restaurant with a parking lot. It is a 120-year-old former textile mill, built around 1900 as part of the Canton Cotton Mills operation, that produced denim until the plant closed in the early 1980s. It sat as industrial space for decades before local developers bought it in 2018 with the intent of keeping the structure and repurposing what happened inside it. Reformation Brewery signed on early, moving production and a taproom into the building as its anchor tenant and giving the project a reason to exist as a destination rather than just a renovated warehouse.

That history explains the churn better than any marketing copy could. A quarter-million square feet of adaptive reuse space was never going to hold one restaurant and one brewery and stop there. It was built to subdivide into storefronts the way the original mill floor subdivided into work stations, and storefronts change tenants the way work stations changed shifts. The building's job is to stay put. The businesses inside it are not making the same promise.

What this means if you have not been back in a while

If the last thing you remember eating at the Mill was Community Burger, that specific meal is gone, but the corner it occupied is not. Reformation's taproom is still the anchor. Cotton Mill Exchange still has its vendors under one roof. The events green still hosts whatever is scheduled that weekend. What is worth checking before you go is not whether the Mill is still there. It obviously is. What is worth checking is who is currently behind the counter in that one storefront that has already turned over at least once.

That is a small thing to track, but it is the difference between describing Canton's downtown as it exists on paper and describing it as it exists this month. The Cherokee County Chamber of Commerce has the original announcement of Bully Run's lease, and the Tribune Ledger News covered the actual opening in March, if you want to see how the plan matched what showed up. The Mill's own site at etowahmill.com keeps current hours for whoever is in the building this week, which given the history, is worth checking before you make the drive.

The mill floor that used to weave denim now serves burgers to families sitting on a patio that did not exist a decade ago. The building kept its bones. Everything else is up for grabs.

If you are the kind of person who tracks these swaps because you actually live near downtown Canton, Heather Ann Edwards hears about most of them before they hit the local news, simply from being in this part of Cherokee County often enough to notice. Reach out if you want the current rundown before your next trip to the Mill.