![]() ![]() The ultimate fates of many of these women are unknown, but the majority who survived settled in the North. Many would die from starvation or exposure until a mill opened in 1865 that provided employment. ![]() They were then left to fend for themselves in Indiana, in towns already overcrowded with refugees. During the week while the women were held in Marietta, several Union soldiers allegedly committed acts of assault against their captives. They spent a week in holding at the Georgia Military Institute before being sent North, many to Indiana, on trains. Īll of the mill workers were charged with treason. The lack of adult male workers in the mill was a result of their fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War at the time the mill was captured. The Union troops took about 400 mill workers, most of them women and children, to Marietta to be sent North on trains. The taking of the mill was not just a capture of infrastructure. Sherman remarked, "I have ordered General Gerrard to arrest for treason all owners and employees, foreign and native, and send them under guard to Marietta, whence I will send them North.The women can find employment in Indiana." The reference to the foreigners were made because the mill owners, apparently in a ploy to safeguard the mills, planted a French flag on the mills and put a French millhand in charge. Two days after the taking of the mill, General William T. Confederate forces burned down the bridge that spanned Vickery Creek before he could get to it. Because it was of great importance to the South's military supply chain, General Gerrard, a Union official working under the purview of General Sherman, seized the mill on July 5, 1864. They made "Roswell Gray" fabric to be sewed into Confederate military uniforms. The Roswell Mills are best known for their role in producing supplies for the Confederacy during the Civil War. A second mill was added in 1853, and in the Antebellum period the mill complex expanded to include six different structures. ![]() The King family built two buildings, known as The Bricks, in which mill employees lived. The Roswell Mill was incorporated in 1839 by the Georgia General Assembly. The first building was four stories high, eighty-eight feet long and forty-eight feet wide, though it was later expanded to 140 by fifty-three feet. Hydropower from Vickery Creek powered the mill, and nearby plantations supplied the raw cotton for processing. An outbreak of the mumps and measles in 1847-8 left "over half the workers stricken and three slaves dead," likely due to the fact that the workers were living in close quarters and dark, cramped conditions. Five families from the Atlantic City of Darien would later move to Roswell, which was incorporated into Fulton County in 1854, eighteen years after the mill's first opening. Barrington King and Ralph King, two of Roswell's sons, moved to the area to help run the fledgling business. Roswell King owned slaves, many of whom had built his home and the original mill however, the number of slaves his family owned decreased once the mill was operating. Construction of the original mill started in 1836. It was this strict recordkeeping that made King especially suited for factory management. He had also worked as the supervisor of Major Pierce Butler's two large plantations, in which office King was noted for his meticulous attention to detail in the day-to-day operations of the plantations. He spent time as a construction manager, local militia officer (his father, Timothy King, was a Revolutionary War veteran), and as a Representative in the Georgia State Legislature. The first mill was founded by Roswell King, a wealthy Connecticut businessman who had previously settled in Darien, Georgia, a small town on the state's Atlantic coast.
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