Roswell

The town was the idea of Roswell King. In 1830 he passed through northern Georgia and saw that Vickery Creek could power a cotton mill. The land nearby also suited plantations, so he could put cotton processing close to cotton production. Toward the middle of the 1830s he came back and built the mill, which soon became the largest in North Georgia.

King brought 36 enslaved Africans from his own coastal plantation and bought another 42 skilled enslaved carpenters in Savannah. These people built the mills, the roads and utilities, the houses, the mill worker apartments and the supporting buildings. They also brought the Geechee culture, language and religious traditions of the coast into the north Georgia hills. His son Barrington King took over the manufacturing company, and planters such as Archibald Smith moved in with their own enslaved workers.

Three houses from that era have been preserved and restored: Barrington Hall, the home of Barrington King, the Smith Plantation, and Bulloch Hall, where Mittie Bulloch, the mother of President Theodore Roosevelt, spent her childhood. They are open to the public as house museums. By the 1850 slave schedules, the three founding families and the next three largest planters held 192 people, which was 51% of the 378 enslaved people in the Roswell District.

Roswell was first part of Cobb County, and the county seat of Marietta was a four-hour horseback ride away. The residents wanted their own local government, so they sent a city charter to the Georgia General Assembly, and it was approved on February 16, 1854.

By the time of the Civil War the cotton mills employed more than 400 people, mostly women. Union forces under General Kenner Garrard captured the town, and on orders from General Sherman he shipped the mill workers north so they could not go back to work if the mills were rebuilt. The mill was burned and the houses were left standing. The ruins of the mill and its 30-foot dam are still there. After the war Barrington King rebuilt the mills and restarted production. Many freedmen stayed to work for pay, while others moved to Fulton County and Atlanta.

The county lines moved in the Great Depression. Milton County, the neighbor to the north, merged with Fulton County, and to make that work Roswell was ceded from Cobb County to Fulton County. The change took effect on May 9, 1932.

The city maintains more than 900 acres of parkland, as well as the three historic house museums that began as plantations. A branch of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, part of the National Park System, is in Roswell at Vickery Creek. Old Mill Park is free to enter. The Chattahoochee Nature Center is on Willeo Road. Walkers and cyclists can use the Roswell Riverwalk Trail, the Vickery Creek Trail and the Big Creek Greenway, and a trail called PATH400 has been proposed.

The Roswell Cultural Arts Center is on Forrest Street, and the Faces of War Memorial and Teaching Museum North are also in town. Barrington Hall sits just off the square in Historic Roswell, at the corner of Highway 120 and Highway 9.

The festival calendar is full. Roswell holds the largest Memorial Day ceremony in Georgia. February brings Roswell Roots, a festival of Black history and culture, and May has the Roswell Criterium bicycle race. June is the Magnolia Storytelling Festival. The Riverside Sounds concert series runs from May to October, and Alive in Roswell takes over on the third Thursday of each month from April to October. October also has a youth day parade, a duck race and a wine festival, and July 4 has a fireworks show.

The largest employers are Kimberly Clark Corporation, Wellstar North Fulton Hospital, Harry's Farmers Market and the City of Roswell. A stretch of Route 400 between Roswell and Atlanta is called the high tech corridor, where technology firms and Kimberly Clark have offices or factories. The Consulate-General of Honduras in Atlanta is at 600 Houze Way in Roswell.

A 2006 count found that one third of Roswell's registered businesses were home based. The largest industries were retail, technology, food services, wholesale trade and health care. Many residents commute to jobs in Atlanta.

Income is high. A 2022 estimate put the median household income at $130,008 and the per capita income at $65,061.

Roswell Mill is really a cluster of mills beside Vickery Creek. Roswell King began building the first one in 1836, using water power from the creek and cotton from the plantations nearby. The Georgia General Assembly incorporated the Roswell Manufacturing Company in 1839. The first building was four stories tall, 88 feet long and 48 feet wide, and it was later stretched to 140 feet by 53 feet. A second mill followed in 1853, and by the time of the Civil War the complex had six structures. The King family also built two buildings called The Bricks to house mill workers.

About 400 workers, mostly women and children, were taken to Marietta and held for a week at the Georgia Military Institute. They were charged with treason and sent north by train, many of them to Indiana. Towns there were already crowded with refugees, and many of the Roswell women died of hunger or exposure before a mill opened in 1865 and gave some of them work. Only a handful ever came back to Georgia. A sculpture of a crumbling column near the mill, dedicated in 2000, honors them.

After the war one of the cotton mills and the woolen factory were rebuilt, and a second cotton mill went up in 1882. Steam power arrived in 1897. In 1920 a South Carolina company bought the complex for $800,000, when it ran 120 looms and 12,000 spindles. Lightning set the mill on fire in 1926, causing about $400,000 in damage. Southern Mills bought it in 1947, and the mill stopped running in 1975. Today the National Park Service manages the site as part of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. The Machine Shop, built in 1853, is the only original building left from the 1839 company. The mill building that still stands dates to 1882 and is now an office complex.

Bulloch Hall is a Greek Revival mansion built around 1839 and 1840 by enslaved African Americans. Major James Stephens Bulloch, a planter from the Georgia coast, came at the invitation of his friend Roswell King. He received a ten-acre plot and designed the house with a craftsman-architect named Willis Ball. The Bulloch family held people in slavery to work the cotton land and the household, and a list of 33 enslaved people tied to the house still exists. The house joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, and it is also part of the Roswell Historic District, which was listed in 1974.

The house has a famous family connection. Martha Bulloch, known as Mittie, was born on July 8, 1835, and grew up in it. She married Theodore Roosevelt Sr. in the dining room on December 22, 1853. Their son Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th president. A bridesmaid at the wedding, Eva King Baker, later described the day in an interview with Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind, which ran in the Atlanta Journal in 1923. The president visited the house with his wife Edith on October 20, 1905, and Eleanor Roosevelt came several times. Today the city of Roswell owns the house and runs it as a museum.

The Archibald Smith Plantation Home was built in 1845 by Archibald Smith, one of Roswell's founders, and three generations of his family lived there. Arthur and Mary Smith, the third generation, restored it in 1940. The city bought it in 1986, and it opened as a house museum in 1991. Besides the main house, the grounds hold a guest house, slave quarters, a cookhouse, a carriage house, a barn, a spring house and a water well. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.

The Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area is a National Park Service unit that protects sites along a 48-mile stretch of the river between Atlanta and Lake Sidney Lanier. President Jimmy Carter established it on August 15, 1978. It covers about 10,000 acres of land units, though its headquarters is at the Island Ford unit in Sandy Springs. The river itself is a stocked trout stream with 23 species of game fish, and in 2012 the area was named the Chattahoochee River Water Trail, the first river to be called a National Water Trail.

The part that belongs to Roswell is the Vickery Creek unit. It keeps a rugged stretch of Vickery Creek, also called Big Creek, from Grimes Bridge Road down to the creek's mouth at the river. Two historic sites sit inside it. One is the ruin of Ivy Mill, a wool mill that made cloth for Confederate soldiers and was destroyed by the Union Army in 1864. The other is the Allenbrook House, finished in 1857, which was the home and office of the Ivy Mill manager.

The Chattahoochee Nature Center is a private nonprofit environmental education center in Roswell. It sits on 127 acres beside the river and teaches with live plants and animals. A wildlife clinic on the grounds treats reptiles, amphibians and birds of prey for release, and animals that cannot go back to the wild stay on site or move to other places that can use them for teaching.

The main state routes are 9, 92, 120, 140 and 400. Local roads that matter include Pine Grove Road, Riverside Road and Crabapple Road.

Roswell's public schools belong to the Fulton County School System. The middle schools are Crabapple, Elkins Pointe and Holcomb Bridge, and the high schools are Centennial and Roswell, plus an alternative school called Crossroads Second Chance North. Charter schools include Amana Academy and Fulton Academy of Science and Technology, both K-8, and the International Charter School of Atlanta, also K-8. The Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System runs the Roswell Branch and the East Roswell Branch.