Cabbagetown: Atlanta's Mill Village

After the Battle of Atlanta burned the Atlanta Rolling Mill in eighteen sixty-four, a German Jewish immigrant named Jacob Elsas built the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill on the same ground in eighteen eighty-one. To staff it, he recruited poor Appalachian families from the north Georgia mountains, building shotgun houses, a school, and a church right alongside the machinery. The workers planted cabbages in their front yards, and the smell of the boiling vegetable drifted through the neighborhood so consistently that the name simply stuck.

Cabbagetown became one of Atlanta's most self-contained company towns, its residents shaped almost entirely by the rhythms of the mill. The factory closed in nineteen seventy-seven and was converted into loft apartments, with work beginning in the late nineteen nineties. The bungalows remain, and the neighborhood holds some of the most intact working-class architecture in Atlanta.