Lanett: Two Names in One Town

The Alabama city of Lanett carries two names compressed into one: Lafayette Lanier, the mill president, and Theodore Bennett, a Boston textile sales agent, the two textile men behind the cotton mills built on the Chattahoochee River in the eighteen nineties. The town had previously been called Bluffton, named for the bluff above the river where the first settlers arrived in the eighteen forties. In eighteen ninety-five, the community officially rechristened itself Lanett to honor the men who had industrialized it.

The Lanett Cotton Mills opened in eighteen ninety-four and became the anchor of what grew into the West Point Manufacturing Company, an operation that eventually ran five mill villages along the Chattahoochee, straddling the Alabama and Georgia state line. For most of the twentieth century, the mills were the economy here. When global competition shuttered the plants in the later decades of the nineteen hundreds, the Chattahoochee Valley towns faced the same reckoning as mill communities across the South. What remains is a small city whose hybrid name still tells the story of the two men who decided the river was worth building on.