With a twist of a key, Bill Cahill unlocks the entrance to a crumbling mill—and a mysterious piece of Georgia history. Located in a remote stretch of Sweetwater State Park, 15 minutes west of Atlanta, the vine-covered ruin was once one of the state’s biggest textile factories. Close to 100 workers toiled there until one summer day in 1864, when New Manchester virtually disappeared. Only jagged ruins and the constant rush of the creek remain.
Cahill, president of Friends of Sweetwater Creek State Park, says it’s “the biggest state-owned ruin still standing from the Battle of Atlanta—almost all other Civil War ruins in the metro area have been covered with concrete or bulldozed for expressways.”
Now Friends, a small-but-determined group of volunteers, have spearheaded an effort to raise $2 million to build a 13,000-square-foot visitors center and museum (see sidebar, page 26), which is a “flagship project for the state parks,” says Cahill, a retired airline mechanic who regularly leads school groups and park visitors through the site. “People want to know what happened here.”
Water from the millrace poured through this arch to power the 45,000-pound water wheel. The massive arch was reinforced in the early 1980s to shore up the brickwork.
Many legends have sprung up about the fates of the workers and their families. Early records show that the mill was built by slave labor between 1845-1847; former Gov. Charles McDonald leased his interest in the property to Col. Arnoldus Brumby, a West Point classmate of Gen. William Sherman’s, and William J. Russell, grandfather of late U.S. Sen. Richard B. Russell.
When the Civil War broke out, the mill’s owners were contracted to provide cloth for the Confederate army. “The mill was known all over the region for its high-quality cotton and thread,” says Cahill, and “was one of Sherman’s primary targets as he swept into Atlanta.” With 40 looms, workers could produce 750 pounds of thread a day. Each of the five floors housed a different operation.
According to letters from the era, townspeople heard reports of Yankee raiders nearby. But when the blue-clad troops entered New Manchester on the morning of July 2, there was little resistance. “None of the workers were armed,” says Cahill. “Not a shot was fired.”
The invaders closed down the factory, stripped the machinery of leather belts and broke into the company safe (which had been cleared out days earlier). The next week, they occupied New Manchester and patrolled Sweetwater Creek. On July 9, eight soldiers doused each floor with kerosene and set the mill, machine shop and company store afire. Then, one by one, they torched the workers’ homes. Following Sherman’s orders, they rounded up and arrested all the men, women and children and transported them 16 miles north to the Georgia Military Institute in Marietta.
The prisoners were segregated by gender, the women paired with women from the Roswell mills, also torched by Union troops in early July. These so-called “Roswell women” were taken by train to Nashville and more than 600 of them transported to Louisville, Ky., where a local newspaper reported their condition as “very destitute.” No one knows what happened to them after the war; most never returned to Georgia.
Today, walking along what was once the main road into New Manchester, Cahill points out the dried-up spring where townspeople collected water and the foundation of the company store once operated by Nathaniel Humphries, a shoemaker and Villa Rica’s first mayor. Gesturing beyond the old road, Cahill says the town cemetery was found on a nearby hill. None of the graves are marked with actual tombstones.
An interior view of the factory, taken through one of the arched entries, shows the crumbling brickwork and bits of whitewash still clinging to the walls.
Under Gov. Jimmy Carter, the ruins and surrounding 2,000 acres became a state park in the 1970s and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) promised to build a visitors center and museum. Enter Cahill’s group in 1994; since then, the Douglasville City Council has pledged $25,000 and the state legislature earmarked $1.5 million. (Former Gov. Roy Barnes grew up in nearby Mableton and played in the mill ruins as a child.)
But “after Sept. 11, we had to start from scratch,” says Cahill, “and raise more than $200,000 from individuals and corporations before we could get any grant money from foundations.”
David Freedman, the DNR’s chief engineer, says Sweetwater’s center “could be the only one in the park system that focuses on nature and interpreting Atlanta’s history before and after the war.” The museum will tell the story of the New Manchester community and house Indian artifacts found in the area. Cahill hopes part of the museum will be set up like a floor of the mill.
Dan Emsweller, DNR regional historian and longtime Friends member, says the group has been in contact with mill families’ descendants, recovering a diary from a soldier who had camped nearby that fateful July and a copy of a bill of sale, signed by Brumby in 1864, for $23,000 in fabric.
The Friends also have several letters. One is from A.J. White, a mill worker who met and married his wife, Margaret, in New Manchester. White left the mill to fight for the Confederate cause in 1862. Another was written by Margaret, also a mill employee, three weeks before the troops arrived. Margaret and A.J. apparently never saw one another again after the war, but their daughter, Sarah Francis White, became the mother of Gen. Lucious Clay and great-grandmother of state Sen. Chuck Clay of Marietta.
Faculty from nearby West Georgia College organized a dig at the mill in 1993. Students and volunteers found soot-blackened thread, bits of fabric, shuttle parts and hundreds of hand-made nails. Cahill wants the state to conduct another dig to unearth shafts, pulleys and other machine parts. “A lot of [it] fell into the building during the fire and was hauled off for scrap during World War II,” he says.
Other sites, including the company store and a spot a mile north of the mill where slaves made bricks, also merit a dig, he says: “Thousands of items are waiting to be discovered and give us another piece of the story.”
The DNR hopes construction of the center will begin soon, but the Friends are still raising money for interior furnishings, equipment and displays. “We don’t want to put up a building and have it stand empty for a year or two,” Cahill says.
Meanwhile, the brickwork continues to deteriorate and the south wall faces possible collapse. Despite being fenced off, the site is threatened by souvenir hunters wielding metal detectors, “home improvers” carting off bricks and chunks of walls, and people who use what’s left of the mill for target practice. “The longer the project takes to fund and complete, the less history we’ll be able to trace,” says Cahill. “Time is taking its toll on the old mill.”
Kristine F. Anderson is a freelance writer in Atlanta who has written for national and international publications. She also teaches at Shorter College in Marietta. | 
