Support team: Crew finishes work that will protect Georgia textile mill ruins for decades

Wooden support shortly before it was removed near end of project

Arch now supported by ring of steel plates (Don Scarbrough photos)

Add Tropical Storm Irma to the list of hazards that the remains of the Civil War-era New Manchester textile mill have weathered.

Crews wrapping up a 10-week stabilization of the towering brick ruins at Sweetwater Creek State Park in Douglas County, Ga., were concerned by approaching high winds and the potential for flooding.

“It did fine. The park lost only a few trees,” said park interpretive ranger Don Scarbrough. While Sweetwater Creek rose, water did not flow into the mill’s interior, as it did in 2009.

Contractor Aegis Restauro recently completed a $375,000 stabilization of the New Manchester Manufacturing Co. factory, which at five stories was the tallest building in North Georgia. Thread, yarn and cloth were initially produced when the mill began operations in 1849.

It produced a variety of material for the Confederacy before it was burned in July 1864 by Federal cavalry moving on Atlanta. Nearly 100 New Manchester residents, mostly female workers and their children, were sent north by train to spend the rest of the war. Many took an oath of allegiance to the United States. You can read details of that sorrowful story here.

Graffiti includes Gilbert, a Union soldier part of unit that took mill

“There were some interesting discoveries, like more Civil War graffiti as they cleaned the walls,” Scarbrough said of the project. Some of the initials are believed to have been etched by Federal soldiers, though officials are not certain how many of the new discoveries were made by them.

Workers put in steel rods, applied specialized mortar and installed concrete caps on pillars and around windows, stabilizing the 160-year-old bricks and protecting them from moisture. Some of the bricks are still scorched from the fire that sent tons of machinery crashing to the bottom floor.

Ricky Day, an engineer with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, said the slaved-made bricks were solid, but made of softer material than today’s versions.

Mill now includes capstones on top of brick (Photo by Don Scarbrough)

The project was meant to keep the ruins stable at least for several decades and “to keep it from tilting out,” said Day.

A few years ago, Scarbrough said, a group was paddling near the rapids and took a closer look. A member of the Friends of Sweetwater Creek State Park “thought a column was leaning slightly.” Engineers visited the interior in late 2014 and closed it. This summer’s work is the most significant since about 1990.

The work crew had to contend with loose bricks through the structure, including at the tops of brick columns. They used bricks strewn on the floor to make repairs. The top of the tallest wall lost a little height because the masonry was so deteriorated, Day said.

Photos by Don Scarbrough

Plate used to buttress many remaining windows, openings

For at least three decades, a wooden piece supported the arch connecting the mill race (or stream) and the giant wheel that drove the mill machinery. The piece was finally removed in the renovation, and steel plates are supporting the historic arch, making for a more authentic appearance.

Now that the project is complete, the picturesque mill interior will be available again for guided tours by park staff, weddings, photo sessions and filmmakers – all a source of revenue for the state. The mill is enclosed and locked.

While the interior is accessible to only those with a guide, you can get impressive views of the mill from several angles outside the fence.

Courtesy of Don Scarbrough

Howls of protest: Women mill workers were forced north from Georgia

New Manchester Manufacturing Co.’s mill about 18 miles west of Atlanta was fed by the roiling waters of Sweetwater Creek and bales of cotton brought in by wagon.

The mill, at five stories, was the tallest building in North Georgia. Natural light filled the brick structure, and a massive 25-ton waterwheel powered the machinery that produced cotton yarns and material.

So it was no wonder that the Confederate government in 1861 contracted with the mill’s owners to produce muslin and osnaburg, a fabric lighter than canvas, for its army.

The deal sealed the factory’s fate.

Subsequently viewed as a military target, the mill within three years was torched by Union troops who made Georgia howl during Gen. William T. Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign and subsequent March to the Sea.

Tuesday afternoon, I ventured to Sweetwater Creek State Park to enjoy its natural splendor and gaze at the ruins of the mill, which was built in 1849 and initially dubbed Sweetwater Factory.

The surrounding community – a store, post office, homes and a lumber mill – are long gone, making New Manchester a ghost town.

But if the ghosts are talking, they are likely the spirits of women who worked in the mill during the Civil War while their menfolk were at the front.

After the mill was torched by Union cavalry, nearly 100 New Manchester residents, mostly female workers and their children, were sent north by train, under protest, to spend the rest of the war. Many took an oath of allegiance to the United States.

They were called traitors or “operatives” for their efforts to supply the Confederate military.

“The horror of the Civil War was not confined to the field of battle. It invaded cities, small towns and oft times the hearths and homes of innocent victims, leaving only destruction and despair in its wake,” writes author Mary Deborah Petite. “The little known story of the North Georgia mill workers is just one more heartbreaking example.”

Petite’s book, “The Women Will Howl,” tells of the forced relocation of workers at New Manchester and a much larger group of 500 people at mills in Roswell, a suburb just north of Atlanta.

One of those Roswell mill incidents involved a ruse featuring a French flag that I wrote about in a popular Picket article in October 2010.

On July 5, 1864, Brig. Gen. Kenner Garrard and his Union troopers were battling the home guard for a vital bridge at Roswell, but the Rebels set it afire. Garrard was surprised to see a most unexpected banner above the Ivy Woolen Mill at the river. It was a French national flag.

Garrard rode in to investigate and was met by mill workers claiming to be English or French citizens.

Theophile Roche, a journeyman weaver from Paris who claimed at least part ownership of the mill, had concocted the idea of flying the French flags to show the mill was not part of the Confederacy, therefore not subject to seizure or destruction.

Garrard walked into Ivy Woolen Mill on July 6 to discover bolts of cloth with the letters CSA woven in. He was shown records indicating the material would be used to make uniforms for Confederate troops.

Garrard ordered the mill burned and moved along the river to the Roswell Manufacturing Co., a larger complex that had nothing to do with the French flag incident but did make goods for the South. Federal forces set it afire, too. 

Meanwhile, back at Sweetwater Creek, troopers with the 1^st and 11^th Kentucky Cavalry occupied the town of New Manchester without firing a shot.

Brig. Gen. Garrard

A week later, on July 9, 1864, Northern troops burned the factory buildings and the company store to the ground.

Union troops rounded up 400 of the Ivy Woolen and Roswell mill workers (a contingent that included 87 men -- some soldiers, some deserters), and then added those who worked at the Sweetwater Creek mill, for a total of nearly 600 people. Five hundred were women and children.

From the Northern perspective, the workers were American citizens in open rebellion – a policy that outraged Southerners.

Sherman wrote to Garrard: “I repeat my orders that you arrest all people, male and female, connected with those factories, no matter what the clamor, and let them foot it, under guard, to Marietta, whence I will send them by cars to the North...The poor women will make a howl. Let them take along their children and clothing, providing they have the means of hauling, or you can spare them.”

The prisoners were marched to Marietta for shipment north. They were placed in the Georgia Military Institute while they awaited trains.

Georgia militia uniform

There would be no trials at which they could defend themselves.

The 600 were shipped out July 10 and 11, with stops in Chattanooga and Nashville. Many were sent to Ohio and Indiana after they arrived in Louisville, Ky., where they were initially imprisoned in a hospital. A few died of typhoid, measles and other diseases.

“First housed and fed in a Louisville refugee hospital, the women later took what menial jobs and living arrangements could be found. Those in Indiana struggled to survive, many settling near the river, where eventually mills provided employment,” the New Georgia Encyclopedia says. “Unless husbands had been transported with the women or had been imprisoned nearby, there was little probability of a return to Roswell, so the remaining women began to marry and bear children.”

Very few ever made it back to Georgia. Mills were reopened in Roswell, but not at New Manchester.

Of course, the captured white workers and residents of New Manchester were not alone in an absence of rights.

Slaves, after all, had made the bricks and cut the lumber for construction of the mills, and had performed much of the labor. A millrace (left), a channel into which water is funneled to the factory, was built by slaves at Sweetwater Creek.

The museum at Sweetwater Creek State Park includes exhibits about the mill and affected families, including Synthia Stewart, who was a young girl when the Yankees came to town. Her father served in the Confederate army.

Stewart, while in her 90s, described the privations the family suffered and the burning of the town.

One account is a story of hunger, with Lizzie being Synthia’s mother:

The next day there came a crowd of northern soldiers. Before they came through, Grandma said, “Well, Lizzie, let’s cook the children one more meal of victuals.” We had lots of chickens, but we had nothing else much though to go with them, so they cooked the chickens and fixed dinner. before we could get through, why, the yard was full of men, looked like. They just come on down, and we children walked to the door, and they said, “Well, we’re just in time.” They didn’t ask if they could or not, they just walked in and sat down at the table and ate up all the dinner we had cooked, so we didn’t have anything more left to cook another day.”

These women put their lives on the line

Loreta Janeta Velasquez was a determined woman. Born in Cuba, she enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861 -- without her husband's knowledge.

After being discharged after the Bull Run, Ball's Bluff and Fort Donelson campaigns, she decided to try once again to serve in a male guise. At 20, she was wounded at Shiloh, before being discovered and slipping into the espionage world.

Joyce Henry, an interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, portrayed Velazquez, aka "Lt. Henry Buford", at a talk last week at Shiloh National Military Park.

No one knows for sure how many women served in the ranks. Estimates range from about 250 to more than a 1,000, a tiny percentage of the ranks. It was strictly prohibited -- but that didn't stop women from trying.

"They stepped into a realm we cannot even imagine," said Henry (right). "They merit recognition we give to all veterans."

Their motives were similar to the men with whom they served: A paying job, patriotism and adventure.

Some of the more well-known soldiers are Albert Cashier (Jenny Hodgers), Sarah Edmonds (Franklin T. Thompson) and Frances Clayton. They served along young men or boys, whose voices weren't always much deeper. Women who feared being detected sometimes moved to another unit. Some women wore special corsets. Physical exams at enlistment were cursory, at best.

According to Henry, Americans in the mid-19th century assumed only men who wear pants and dress as a soldier.

"The social and cultural stigma about what women could do blinded them to what was in front of them," said Henry.

The discovery of a woman's true gender almost always came after a wound or death.

These women re-enact as men

Hoop skirts and washboards don't appeal much to Joyce Henry, so she found another way to relive the Civil War — as a man. With her breasts tightly bound, shoulder-length red hair tucked under a shaggy auburn wig and upper lip hidden by a drooping mustache, Henry impersonates Confederate Lt. Harry T. Buford. • Article

"Victorian Secrets": Ladies' undergarments and fashions during the Civil War

Gloria Swift has dressed in woolen tunic and pants while serving on a Civil War artillery demonstration crew.

She’s also worn a chemise, corset, underskirt and other layers to show visitors at Fort Pulaski National Monument near Savannah, Ga., ladies’ fashions during the Civil War.

The coolest get-up during those incredibly hot Savannah days?

Wear the artillery uniform, she advises.

The National Park Service ranger is organizing two programs at the fort this Sunday, March 27, as part of Women’s History Month.

At 11 a.m., a model, in a program called “Victorian Secrets,” will be dressed from the “inside out” to show all the undergarments a woman of means put on “before going to town.”

Unless she had assistance, a woman put on her stockings and shoes on first. Drawers, a chemise, corset, an underskirt, a hoop, an overskirt and the dress followed.

“How lucky we are to have pants these days,” quipped Swift.

A fashion show follows at 1 p.m. A park employee will display a civilian gentleman’s fashions of the day while women showcase everyday and traveling dresses, as well as a ball gown.

The Victorian Era, as we know, was a time of public modesty, but some women knew how “to flash an ankle.”

“Clever women who wanted to be a little seen wore red stockings or red stripes,” Swift told the Picket. “It was scandalous.”

Of course, fashions had much to do with social status and other circumstances. Most women during the war made do with a day dress, bodice and apron.

Union blockades eventually starved the South of war material and clothing.

“In the South, you saw less and less new patterns” as times got lean, Swift said. Women customized the one or two available dress styles.

Soldiers’ wives lived at Pulaski (above) both during and after its fall in 1862. This weekend’s program is a way to let visitors know about the battles and the people back home.

“Let’s tell the other side of the story,” Swift said.

The fee at Fort Pulaski is $5 per person; children ages 15 and under are free. Call the park at (912) 786-5787 for more details.

The remarkable story of the French flag ruse and imprisoned women and children of Roswell

Reflecting on the 14 months since I launched The Civil War Picket has reminded me of just little I know about the Civil War, especially in my own back yard.

Take, for example, the Atlanta History Center’s permanent exhibit, “Turning Point.”

This trove of artifacts that speaks to the humanity of those who fought is powerful. It took only took 20-plus years in metro Atlanta for me to make the discovery.

I got that feeling again recently when I pored through the state of Georgia’s new map of Civil War sites, with vignettes on fascinating people, such as “Blind Tom” Bethune, and places like Stone Mountain Village.

What most intrigued me was the account a curious Frenchman named Theophile Roche and the “Exile of the Roswell Women.”

Thus began my search to learn more about the story, which got little notice from historians, scholars and writers until the 1980s.

Roswell is an old town north of Atlanta. Today it’s associated with suburbia, but back in 1864 it was known for its mill complex that spun clothing and items for the Confederacy. Some say the workers were akin to indentured servants, earning low wages that went back to the mill owners for housing, food and goods.

I contacted Michael D. Hitt, a Roswell police officer, historian and author of a 1991 book, “Charged With Treason,” that details this peculiar footnote of the Atlanta Campaign.

In the spring and summer of 1864, Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s thundering herd was descending on the prize of Atlanta, but first it had to negotiate the Chattahoochee River.

On July 5, 1864, Brig. Gen. Kenner Garrard and his Union troopers were battling the home guard for a vital bridge at Roswell, but the Rebels set it afire.

Garrard was surprised to see a most unexpected banner above the Ivy Woolen Mill at the river.

It was a French national flag. Another French tricolor waved in downtown Roswell above Bulloch Hall, built in 1839.

Garrard rode in to investigate and was met by mill workers claiming to be English or French citizens.

“They were scratching for ideas to save the factory,” said Hitt.

Roche, a journeyman weaver from Paris who claimed at least part ownership of the mill, had concocted the idea of flying the French flags, to show the mill was not part of the Confederacy and subject to seizure or destruction.

“He thought it might work,” Hitt said of Roche. “If it didn’t work, what did they have to lose?”

A lot, apparently.

We’ll get to the rest of the amazing story but for now, here’s how the mill drama went down.

The union cavalry commander (left) walked into Ivy Woolen Mill on July 6 to discover bolts of cloth with the letters CSA woven in. He was shown records indicating the material would be used to make uniforms for Confederate troops.

Game over. Roche’s ruse failed.

The mill workers wouldn’t leave voluntarily, but Garrard forced their exit. Some took mill records to owner James King, who was in the Roswell Battalion, the home guard fighting the Yankee advance.

Garrard ordered the mill burned and moved along the river to the Roswell Manufacturing Co., a larger complex that had nothing to do with the French flag incident but did make goods for the South. It was owned by the absent Barrington King, brother of James.

It, too, went up in flames. Some employees unhappy with wages and other conditions, assisted in its destruction, Hitt said.

Sherman (below) wrote a letter to a superior in Washington, explaining his rationale.

“They [Roswell mills] were very valuable and were burned by my order. They have been engaged almost exclusively in manufacturing cloth for the Confederate Army, and you will observe they were transferred to the English and French flags for safety, but such nonsense cannot deceive me. They were tainted with treason, and such fictitious transfer was an aggravation. I will send all the owners, agents and employees up to Indiana to get rid of them there.”

Union troops rounded up 400 of the Ivy Woolen and Roswell mill workers (a contingent that included 87 men -- some soldiers, some deserters), and then added another batch that worked at a mill at Sweetwater Creek, west of Atlanta, for a total of about 600 people. Five hundred were women and children.

Very few had anything do with the caper at the Ivy mill.

Sherman charged the assembly with treason. That included men, women and their children.

“This was the only time in the Civil War that something like this occurred,” said Hitt. “It was newsworthy at the time.”

At the time, rules of engagement called for treason, which was akin to obstruction if it was a civilian offense.

From the Northern perspective, the workers were American citizens in open rebellion, Hitt said.

Sherman wrote a letter to Garrard, giving him instructions on what to do with Roche and the workers.

"I had no idea that the factories at Roswell remained in operation, but supposed the machinery had all been removed. Their utter destruction is right and meets my entire approval, and to make the matter complete you will arrest the owners and employees and send them, under guard, charged with treason to Marietta, and I will see as to any man in America hoisting the French flag and then devoting his labor and capital in supplying armies in open hostility to the Government and claiming the benefit of his neutral flag. Should you, under the impulse of anger, natural at contemplating such perfidy, hang the wretch, I approve the act beforehand.

“I repeat my orders that you arrest all people, male and female, connected with those factories, no matter what the clamor, and let them foot it, under guard, to Marietta, whence I will send them by cars to the North...The poor women will make a howl. Let them take along their children and clothing, providing they have the means of hauling, or you can spare them.”

The prisoners were marched to nearby Marietta (right) for shipment north. They were placed in the Georgia Military Institute while they awaited trains.

There would be no trials at which they could defend themselves.

The 600 were shipped out July 10 and 11, with stops in Chattanooga and Nashville. Many were sent to Indiana, but most arrived in Louisville, Ky., where they were imprisoned in a hospital. A few died of typhoid, measles and the like.

Many took the oath of allegiance to the United States.

“First housed and fed in a Louisville refugee hospital, the women later took what menial jobs and living arrangements could be found. Those in Indiana struggled to survive, many settling near the river, where eventually mills provided employment,” the New Georgia Encyclopedia says. “Unless husbands had been transported with the women or had been imprisoned nearby, there was little probability of a return to Roswell, so the remaining women began to marry and bear children.

Very few ever made it back to Georgia.

Those who did helped Barrington King (left) get his company back on its feet.

In 2000, the Sons of Confederate Veterans Roswell Mills Camp #1547 erected a monument remembering the troops who fought in Roswell and the mill workers.

The camp cites a Georgia historian who claims the deportation of the women and children was illegal.

I asked Hitt what lesson people may take from the tragedy.

“Don’t mess around with the army in the time of war,” the officer said. “They don’t have time for humor.”

As for the fate of Roche and the two French flags?

Roche jumped the train between Chattanooga and Nashville and eventually fled to France, where he filed a claim against the United States for the Roswell property. The bid failed.

The federal government documented receipt of the flags.

Their whereabouts are unknown.

“Probably up in Washington in a box somewhere,” Hitt said.

Remembering work of Civil War nurses

As people gathered Monday to remember those who died serving their country, Tompkins County (N.Y.) historians hope they will also consider commemorating the contributions of Civil War nurses by helping a local nursing program. Two groups launched a fund in honor of four women who helped change the face of the once male-dominated profession. • Article