PROVIDENCE — The historic Grant Mill building, near downtown, has been sold by The Brooks Co., a Boston-based real-estate firm, to a joint venture of Starr Development of Massachusetts and Brady Sullivan Properties of New Hampshire.

The purchase price was $2.4 million

The four-story brick building, at 295 Carpenter St., was built in the early 1900s by the cotton manufacturing firm of B.B. & R. Knight, best known for its Fruit of the Loom products.

“The sale is in keeping with our strategy of adding value to properties through aggressive repositioning and the permitting process,” Jeffrey Brooks, president of Brooks, said in a statement.

“In this case, we took a functionally obsolete industrial mill building and added value by converting the property to residential apartments and obtaining federal and historic state tax credits through our professional, well-tested management program,” he said.

Built around an existing stone structure, the building, with flat roof and segmented arch windows, was one of two Providence mills owned by Knight, which began the manufacture of cotton cloth in 1852, and adopted its Fruit of the Loom name in 1856. By the early 20th century, the textile company owned 22 mills in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.