Antebellum Cotton Mills on Cypress Creek
Alabama
About a mile west of here, on Cypress Creek, stood the Globe Cotton Factory, built in the eighteen forties. Water was the engine of the early industrial South, and three dams on the creek powered a small industrial village. By eighteen fifty-seven the operation had grown to several mills.
By eighteen sixty it employed hundreds of people, many of them women and children, at low wages. The Civil War ended it. Union forces burned the mills in eighteen sixty-three.
One factory, called Cypress Mill, was rebuilt after the war, but it never thrived again. The dams and foundations are about all that remain of what was once a humming little factory town on the water.
