Roswell, GA news and local guide

In 1830, on a trip through northern Georgia, Roswell King passed through the area and saw the potential for a cotton mill on Vickery Creek near good plantation land. In the mid-1830s he returned to build Roswell Mill, which became the largest mill in north Georgia, bringing 36 enslaved Africans from his coastal plantation and buying 42 skilled enslaved carpenters in Savannah. The enslaved built the mills, roads, houses, mill workers' apartments and other buildings of the new town, and they brought the Geechee culture, language and religious traditions of the coast to north Georgia. Shortly after 1832 Nathan Crawford Barnett surveyed the area for the state's sixth land lottery, part of the process that culminated in the removal of the Cherokee.

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King invited coastal investors to join him, and his son Barrington King succeeded him in running the company. The planter Archibald Smith also came, bringing enslaved people from the coast. Barrington Hall, the King home, the Smith Plantation and Bulloch Hall, the childhood home of Mittie Bulloch, mother of President Theodore Roosevelt, have been restored and are open to the public. According to the 1850 slave schedules, these three founding families and the next three largest planters together held 192 enslaved people. Roswell, now a suburb of Atlanta and Georgia's ninth-largest city, has a National Register historic district. Sources Wikipedia: Roswell, Georgia