Roswell Mill

In July 1864, during Sherman's Atlanta Campaign, Union troops occupied Roswell and its cotton and woolen mills, which had been producing cloth and uniforms for the Confederacy. Sherman ordered the roughly 400 mill workers, nearly all of them women, arrested and charged with treason; they were marched to Marietta and put on trains north, many separated from their children and homes for good, with little evidence more than a few ever made it back to Georgia. Visitors to the mill ruins today describe a sudden drop in temperature and a gray haze settling over the site even in daylight, and say that at night the cries of the deported women can still be heard.