LaGrange: The Callaway Kingdom and Its Reckoning

LaGrange, Georgia, was founded in eighteen twenty-eight on Creek land ceded under the Treaty of Indian Springs, and named, optimistically, after the French estate of the Marquis de Lafayette, who had toured the American South just three years earlier. For its first several decades it was a standard Georgia county seat: cotton, courthouse, churches.

Then came the Callaways.

Fuller Earle Callaway established the Callaway Manufacturing Company in eighteen ninety-five, and over the following decades built a textile empire that came to define every dimension of life in Troup County. By nineteen twenty, the mills had more than one hundred thousand spindles running. The company built worker housing, company stores, and schools. LaGrange was not merely a company town. It was a Callaway principality, its economic, political, and social life shaped by one family's decisions.

The mills brought wealth to some and controlled everything for others. The racial order was explicit and enforced. In nineteen forty, a young Black man named Austin Callaway, no relation to the mill family, was taken from the LaGrange jail by armed men, shot repeatedly, and left to die on a rural road. The Black community's response was to organize. At Warren Temple United Methodist Church they founded the first chapter of the NAACP in LaGrange. From that meeting, Black LaGrange built the institutions and networks that would carry it through the civil rights decades to come.

The desegregation of Troup County schools followed the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four slowly and incompletely, with a federal court decree finally requiring full integration in nineteen seventy. The Callaway Mills themselves survived the twentieth century only partially: the industry left, as it left everywhere in the South, taking the jobs with it.

What remained was a city with a complicated inheritance: the courthouse square, the mill buildings, the NAACP chapter that has met without interruption since nineteen forty, and the question every old mill town faces about what its next chapter looks like.