Cabbagetown District

About this property

Cabbagetown () is an intown neighborhood on the east side of Atlanta, Georgia, United States, abutting historic Oakland Cemetery. It includes the Cabbagetown District, a historic district listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. The Atlanta Rolling Mill was destroyed after the Battle of Atlanta and on its site the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill began operations in 1881. Cabbagetown was built as the surrounding mill town and was one of the first textile processing mills built in the south. Its primary product was cotton bags for packaging agricultural products. Built during a period when many industries were relocating to the post-Reconstruction South in search of cheap labor, it opened shortly following the International Cotton Exposition, which was held in Atlanta in an effort to attract investment to the region. The mill was owned and operated by Jacob Elsas, a German Jewish immigrant. Its work force consisted of poor whites recruited from the Appalachian region of north Georgia. Elsas built a small community of one and two-story shotgun houses and cottage-style houses surrounding the mill, originally known as Factory Town or Fulton Mill Village. Like most mill towns, the streets are extremely narrow with short blocks and many intersections. There are a few explanations as to how the neighborhood received its current name. One is that the mostly transplanted poor Appalachian residents, largely of Scots-Irish descent, who worked in the nearby Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill would grow cabbages in the front yards of their houses, so that one could distinctly smell the odor of cooking cabbage coming from the neighborhood. This term was used originally with derision by people outside the neighborhood, but it soon became a label of pride for the people who lived there. A variation of this legend is that a Ford Model T took a sharp turn at one of the main intersections of Cabbagetown, overturned, and spilled its cargo of cabbages on the street. Yet another story involves a neighborhood baseball team. Atlanta History Center documents show references to the name Pearl Park, after the daughter of a developer who built houses directly to the east of the mill houses near modern-day Pearl Street. The mill, at its height, employed 2,600 people. A protracted strike in 1914-15 failed to unionize the factory's workforce. For over half a century, Cabbagetown remained home to a tight-knit, homogenous, and semi-isolated community of people whose lives were anchored by the mill, until it closed in 1977. While the mill itself was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, the surrounding neighborhood went into a steep decline following the mill closure.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Fulton County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Fulton County.

More historic places in Georgia

Browse all historic places in Georgia.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Georgia history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.