Acworth's Mill Village

In the late 1910s to early 1920s the city of Acworth, located about 30 miles northwest of Atlanta, was “aggressively pursuing industrial growth.” This was an attempt to move away from the cotton economy that had previously flourished but, with the challenges of bad weather and the boll weevil, was on a serve decline.
By the late 1920s, Acworth had three textile mills that employed hundreds and produced tapestries, course cloths, and hosiery. The mill, shown here, employed 200 people and provided a village that included homes, a company store, a church, a school, and a baseball field and a team. The mill began in 1905, founded by Orlando Awtrey, under the name Acworth Cotton Manufacturing Company and originally produced cotton yarns. In the 1920s, two sisters from Connecticut bought the mill, renaming it the Acworth Mills, and produced coarse sheetings for tobacco shadecloth, osnaburg, and sacks. The mill’s peak came in 1947 when the Clark Thread Company (later Coats and Clark) bought the mill and employed as many as 300 people. The mill closed in the 1980s but continues to be used today by the Seiz Printing Company.
The mill’s village comprised of 55 homes on 54 acres just outside downtown Acworth. In the 1920s a mill home was rented for 50 cents a week and included water, sewer, and garbage service. The most common type of house in the mill village was the pyramid cottage, pictured, with the side-gabled, gabled-ell and shotgun house types being less common. The houses were originally constructed with a brick pier foundation, wood siding, and metal roofs. However a 1940s renovation by Coats and Clark filled in the foundations with concrete blocks, put up asbestos siding and converted the roof materials to asphalt shingles. The form of the houses, like those I have pictured, remain unchanged today. The mill homes were sold to private owners in the late 1960s.

Source: Images of America: Acworth. Published by Arcadia.

(As a side note, I apologize for being late with my post. Today was the first time I could get out during daylight to take pictures.)

I planned on discussing the history of Cabbagetown but it has been described quite well by others on here. As it exists today, the neighborhood appears to be transitioning slowly from working class poor to a middle class population. Several houses obviously have been renovated in recent years and are well maintained, compared to the more dilapidated properties. You can see the houses were built in the same style and probably by the same builder in the group house photo to the left. The lawn areas are small for most of the houses yet they are often decorated with unique items I would call trash but some might call “modern art”. The streets in the residential area are obviously not constructed for automotive use. On some roads I would guess the streets are about 16 feet in width. The narrowness complicates driving since most of the properties were not designed to accommodate driveways and thus the on street parking shrinks the amount of space available for driving. I will end this blog with the last little thing that has been rambling through my head since I visited Cabbagetown.

"Oh but ain't that America for you and me

Ain't that America somethin' to see baby

Ain't that America home of the free

Little pink houses for you and me"

-Pink Houses by John Mellencamp

I felt that was somewhat fitting.

Okay so the color in the photo isn't that great but the house is nearly an exact match of Peptol-Bismol pink.

According to Stilgoe, Susan Cooper's witch hazel represents the power to and the act of reorienting values. The lure of the borderlands and the suburbs was due in part to a shift in the values of certain populations, especially those near large cities. After so much mention of witch hazel, I though we should all know what it looks like!

In reading the chapter "Coast" I immediately thought of my trip to Phoenix, AZ and Taliesin West. It is true "borderland," even now. I remember the view, looking back towards Phoenix. It reminds me of the heights discussed in the early part of the book. Indeed it is illustrative of the fact that people who settled suburbs out West tended to move further out than those in the East.

Scottdale

For some variety I went to Scottdale, which is on Ponce de Leon, about 8 and a half miles east of Atlanta, between Decatur and Clarkston. I don't know too much about Scottdale, except that it was a company town built around 1900 and that the mill has since been torn down. The first two pictures show single family mill houses with fairly large lot sizes and mature trees. The large plot of grass in front of the homes in the third photo was probably left undeveloped to be used as a park. The last two pictures show that Scottdale is still an industrial area.

Crown Cotton Mill

The Crown Cotton Mill was built in Dalton in 1884, predating the carpet industry that makes Dalton famous. The mill aided in the chenille cloth industry that prospered in Dalton at the turn of the century. The mill was the initial industrial employer in the area employing originally from women and children of nearby farms. However, in the 1920s the mill needed a larger labor force and drew upon whole families for work. A mill village was built to accomodate these workers. The houses are single family homes built on small lots, terraced on straight roads facing the mill. The company also provided a general store for the workers. The workers formed an isolated community where the mill acted as a paternalistic figure taking care of its workers in return for their hard work. But, with the Depression, unions began to form among the workers to protect themselves from the mill's actions and responses to the economy. The houses were sold to the occupants in 1953, and the mill closed in 1969 due for the most part because of the change of industry in the area to carpet production.

The Crown Cotton Mill has been renovated into loft apartments, and a good number of the houses remain intact. The store also still stands. The mill and mill village are on the outskirts of town, and from the looks of it are in the run-down and poor area of Dalton. The houses are occupied, but for the most part are shabby looking and falling apart. Some people have attempted to add on porches or paint the houses bright colors, but the houses are still in bad shape. A train passes right behind the mill apartments and is extremely loud, which I imagine would be a large deterrent for people thinking about moving into them. It still looks like a mill and there is very little landscaping or anything that would distinguish it differently except a sign advertising the lofts on the side of the building. The mill village and the relationship to the mill is a prime example of the effects of industrializion in rural areas.

Cabbagetown

What struck me most about Stilgoe's treatment of company towns was the seeming expectation of industrialists and professional neighborhood designers, which Stilgoe doesn't really challenge, that "Harmonious, sanitary, affordable housing and surroundings did not necessarily make for contented workers" (p. 252). On the one hand, like I mentioned last week in class, this smacks of an essentialized understanding of ideas like "comfort" and "cleanliness." Does comfort in the minds of industrialists and professional neighborhood designers equal comfort in the minds of workers? The same questions can be asked of cleanliness, affordable housing, and harmony.




Another assumption seems to be that workers would "naturally" express rebelliousness as well as solidarity with one another in opposition to management. Thus the creation of the mill villages was a paternalistic attempt attempt to link workers on an individual basis to management by providing them with comfortable and clean, not to mention convenient, housing (See for instance Douglas Flamming, Creating the Modern South [Chapel Hill, 1992]). Stilgoe seems to take for granted that the propensity of mill village inhabitants to strike bears witness to the limits of industrial paternalism. In his words, strikes in places like Pullman demonstrated "the dismal shortcomings of environmental determinism" (p. 252). But perhaps here he misses an opportunity to argue that the built environment of company towns actually created many of the conditions which produced the strikes. In the case of Cabbagetown, workers were recruited from the Appalachian Mountains, which had a long history of individualism, and placed in close proximity to one another. Not only did they live in very compact row housing, they shared schools, churches, commissaries and social events. Being placed in a physically tight-knit community and given common cause as poorly treated, low-paid factory workers, the high number of strikes doesn't seem mysterious at all.

Roswell

In 1836, Roswell King settled in the area which would later bear his name just north of the Chattahoochee River. What began as a thirty-foot dam constructed for the purpose of a sawmill would become a cotton mill complex just three years later. The new village of Roswell was populated originally by coastal families looking for a summer resort but quickly became a manufacturing center due to the success of the King’s Roswell Manufacturing Company.

The cotton mill and village required a significant amount of laborers and Roswell’s company town plan was quickly implemented during the 1840’s and 50’s to provide housing, education and structure for mill workers. The mill village in Roswell is both typical and unique to Southern mills. Homes were wood frame saddlebag, shotgun and Georgian cottages. The progression of the factory technology typifies the development of a mill in the South but elements of its plan and design are characteristic of a New England company town. King’s plan called for curvilinear streets and the development of houses respective of the topography. New England influence can be seen in the construction of saltbox houses and apartment buildings to house mill operatives. Roswell’s “Old Bricks” apartment buildings were more typical to Waltham System villages of the northeast and rare in the Southern mill villages. They are thought to be one of the first apartment buildings in the United States.

Roswell’s plan for his company town included encouraging morality amongst his employees. Hard work was encouraged, drinking was prohibited, and the mill families were provided with locations for worship and education. Regulations emphasized proper maintenance of the environment thus limiting social disorder. Roswell’s elite lived in much higher style, architect designed homes but its mill workers lived in understated cottages. Controls placed on mill workers were social in nature not as those architectural standards in Shaker Heights. It is interesting to note that while architectural control may not have a crucial element in the construction of standardized mill housing in the Atlanta area during the mid-1800s, most of the Atlanta mill villages that I can think of now are very heavily regulated by Historic Preservation Ordinances including Roswell, Cabbagetown, and Whittier Mill.

Shotgun Houses

The above picture is of shotgun houses located along Auburn Avenue in the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic District. They were built in the early 1900's and financed by the Empire Textile Company. The company had built the double shotgun houses for their employees to live in affordable housing near work. A brief history of these houses are provided on the plaque erected within the historic district.

Cabbagetown Field Trip

According the GSU Department of Anthropology and Geography (http://mapwing.gsu.edu/projects/cabbagetown/index.htm), Cabbagetown was constructed in 1881 for cotton mill workers, who primarily migrated from rural areas. Cabbagetown was one of the first industrial settlements in Georgia. Frederick L. Olmsted, Jr., one of the two designers of the historic industrial settlement, Forest Hills Garden in New York, explained "three important principals of city planning" (Stilgoe, 226). Cabbagetown was undoubtedly influenced by the same ergonomic philosophy upon which Olmsted based his principals, because all three appear in the Cabbagetown landscape. Olmsted's first rule for building a city is to establish main thoroughfares, which are to be direct, large enough to allow fluidity of transportation, and convenient to all in the community.

Boulevard NE and Memorial Drive allow easy flow of traffic in the Cabbagetown area. This picture of Boulevard NE provides an example of this first principal; the road allows a straight path form Cabbagetown to the nearby railroad tracks and downtown Atlanta. Olmsted's second element of of city planning stated that the designer must provide a contrast to these busy thoroughfares. According to Olmsted, residential roads should be quiet, attractive, and narrow to discourage traffic. Gaskill Street, just right of Boulevard NE, displays the narrowness of the interior of Cabbagetown. I immediately noticed that cars line the street in the residential areas. Driveways are short, leaving enough room for one car at most, and the homes do not include garages or carports. Cabbagetown may have utilized the beneficial ideas of wide, direct thoroughfares and small, intimate residential streets, but the designers of this industrial settlement made the same crucial error as Olmsted in that they "scarcely provided for automobile parking within the development" (Stilgoe, 236). To be fair, Cabbagetown was constructed before the advent and mass production of the automobile. It is clear that the designers of Cabbagetown planned to provide all that a mill worker and his or her family may need within the confines of the settlement and did not take into consideration workers' needs for short-distance transportation.

Olmsted's third element of city planning promoted the "necessity of parkland" (Stilgoe, 227). Cabbagetown is home to Oakland Cemetery. A cemetery is neither an ideal location for small children to play nor does it provide a social venue for adults, but this historic Atlanta landmark (http://www.oaklandcemetery.com/) did provide the residents with green space, serenity, and Victorian opulent architecture which marks its landscape. Cabbagetown also includes Esther Peachy Lefever Park, a more apt semi-private area.

In the book, Crabgrass Frontier, author Kenneth Jackson states the theory that suburbs owe their existence to and form geographically close to mass transportation. Jackson discusses initial forms of mass transit, e.g. the omnibus, and then follows the evolution of transportation technology through ferries and trains. The application of steam-power to these modes of transportation gave birth to viable commuting capabilities. Unlike its European counterparts (excluding England), the industrial areas in the United States formed within the city and in turn drove the affluent to flee the pollution and high density of lower class workers that factories produced.

The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, the heart of Cabbagetown, was owned and operated by Jacob Elsas. Elsas would recruit workers from impoverished Georgian rural areas, in particular the Appalachian foothills. The Mill's close proximity to downtown Atlanta and its abundance of working class citizens fill the description of Jackson's American city.

An important aspect of Elsas' choice of location for Cabbagetown was no doubt driven by the proximity of nearby railways, which led to the easy transport of the Mill's products.
The transportation mecca pictured here, bustling with trains, trucks, and MARTA, is within walking distance of the Mill and Cabbagetown. Now that the Mill is closed (It shut down in the 1970's due to international competition, and is now a gated apartment building which boasts, "New York Style Lofts" called the Stacks.), and the residents are close to downtown it would seem that the residents of Cabbagetown would be disconnected from need and concern for mass transit. That does not appear to be the case. I spotted the following sign in the front yard of a Cabbagetown residence.

According to the official BeltLine website, "The BeltLine will connect Atlanta by creating green space, trails, transit, and new development along 22 miles of historic rail segments that encircle the city's urban core" (http://www.beltline.org/Home/tabid/1672/Default.aspx). It appears that at least one Cabbagetown resident believes that you do not need to have an abundance of green space in your yard, if you can easily travel to it instead.

Company Towns/ Regulated Design Communites

Typical street scape of single family homes in Cabbagetown.

The constant fight to keep out unwanted, uneducated and uncivilized (read lower class, immigrant, urban) design flaws from the borderland built environment is manifest in the covenants of early regulated neighborhoods like Shaker Heights and Forest Hills described by Stilgoe. The reaction to Forest Hills, a concept by Olmstead, Jr. and architect Grosvenor Atterbury, feel far short of the expectation of the residents and potential buyers in offering a picturesque escape from urban pace. As Queens developed in realtion to its close proximity to New York City, the restrictive covenants of Forest Hills proved unadaptable to changing transportation methods. Moreover, the house design and lot placement did not encourage privacy outdoors. The eventual critique of the residential community sited that the perceived similarites of Forest Hills with the "beautiful but wholly static" characteristics of company towns was a consequence of relying on "German town planning and its 'scientific principles'" rather than designs like Shaker Heights, which proved more "in touch with American individualism." (Silgoe, pg. 238) The notion of home seems greatly dependent on the surrounding area not just the house itself or the internal spaces. In company towns, manufacturing owners tried to create an ideal living space with close proximity to the workplace, but their paternalistic endeavors seemed more patrionizing to workers than nurturing. This degrading policy of building cookie-cutter employee housing potentially caused many of the strikes and other aggressive actions against the self-acclaimed benevolent employer. Silgoe points out the successes of the Cheney brothers in buildig workers' housing that resembled traditional American dwellings that their owners occupied.

Cabbagetown evidences some similarites of the experience of fringe urban residental communities, the onslaught of urban development and the philosophy determining company town planning. In 1868, Atlanta began to lay out streets in a grid pattern and the first residents built small wood frame houses in what is now Cabbagetown. The area was attractive to residents and developers because “property values were lower than the cost of land in the city’s downtown area; it was conveniently located adjacent to downtown; obvious boundaries gave the area a sense of unity; and…the Atlanta Street Railroad Company had extended a line to within a quarter mile of the neighborhood by 1872.”[1] Between 1889 and 1892, the Fulton Cotton Spinning Company experienced exponential success and growth, so Elsas decided to construct mill housing for the workers in areas near the mill called “Factory Lot” and “Mill Village.”[2] The dwellings in this area are characterized by two-story duplexes that make the most efficient use of land area and housing capacity. Shortly after the construction of these duplexes, single-family houses were built on Pearl Street near the streetcar stop. By 1900, mill workers had displaced the original residents to the area and many independent retail businesses sprang up to serve the growing community.[3] Like other mill-town communities, mill management took care of the neighborhood and lawns and provided community services such as garbage, security, medical, dental, library and daycare.

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[1] Georgia State University Heritage Preservation Program Preservation Planning 2005, “Cabbagetown Design Guidelines,” (Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University, History Department, 2005, photocopied), pg 18.

[2] Ibid, pg 18.

[3] Ibid, pg 19.

Typical single family home in Cabbagetown.

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Cabbagetown

According to GSU's Department of Anthropology and Geography the neighborhood was developed around the Fulton Cotton and Bag Mill, which was located south of Inman Park and about a mile east of the downtown business district (http://mapwing.gsu.edu/projects/cabbagetown/index.htm). Cabbagetown was the site of the 1914-1915 strike (See Chapter 2 and 3 in Cliff Kuhn's Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta's Fulton Cotton and Bag Mill to examine the role of neighborhood and community in the strike). In the late 1990s the former mill was converted into lofts. As I passed the mill and turned left off of Boulevard I noticed that the streets became extremely narrow. Blocks were shorter and the lots smaller than streetcar suburbs, like Inman Park. The houses range from one and two-story shotgun houses to bungalows with signs of Victorian molding on doorways and windows. Gentrification, which began in the 1990s, has resulted in the renovation of a number of these former mill houses and the emergence of a number of small restaurants and stores. Reading through Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier I was struck by his treatment of suburbanization as an elite and middle-class movement. LeeAnn Bishops Lands' 2002 article, which appeared in the Journal of Urban History, "Spectators Attention! Workers and Rental Housing Development in Atlanta, 1880-1910" challenges historians and preservationists to look at the place of textile and working-class communities in the history of suburbanization...the technology that changed the residential hierarchy of space and made middle-class, commuter suburbs possible, as described by Jackson, simultaneously saw the development of communities like Cabbagetown. What did home and yard mean to working-class families?

This is an image of the secret town of Happy Valley, Tennessee. Prior to the 1940s this landscape was distinctly rural, serving as Wheaton Farms. Between 1942 and 1947, Happy Valley was constructed to house workers at the top secret Oakridge Nuclear Facility during WWII. The houses were constructed on piers and comprised primarily of plywood, featuring running water and sewage service. Was Happy Valley a government-constructed harbinger of the pattern of residential development to come, or was it the result of design techniques established by prior suburban growth?