Cabbagetown

The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill Co. (then called Elsas, May and Company) was originally located in the former Atlanta Slave Market House.

In the late 1870s the company began construction of a new complex of buildings on the south side of the Georgia Railroad line, east of downtown Atlanta. The new mill opened in 1881.

The mill recruited workers from the Appala- chain regions of Georgia and North Carolina, and erected housing for these laborers starting in 1881.

The oldest remaining homes in the neighborhood were built by the mill between 1886 and 1892. The majority of these were one and two story shotgun houses. The mill maintained the entire neighborhood and its lawns, and provided garbage, security, medical, dental, library, and nursery services for laborers and their families.

These multi-family homes are located on Carroll Street, you can see the mill in the back- ground.

Cabbagetown was a self-sufficient blue-collar neighborhood even before Inman Park (Atlanta's first suburb) was established. The neighborhood had commercial businesses including grocers, and also had a park with a baseball field.

Although some of the later housing, built further away from the mill, is said to have been built by the homeowners, the majority of housing in the neighborhood was built, owned and maintained by the mill until the mill was sold in 1957. As a condition of the sale, homes were offered for sale to their tenants.

Unlike suburbs such as Inman Park, Cabbagetown was not meant to be a bedroom community for the wealthy, nor was it meant to be an escape from dirty city life into the countryside. It was a working-class neighborhood similar to those described in Harris's "Chicago's Other Suburbs".

The majority of Cabbagetown residents did not move from Atlanta, but relocated from much more rural places. In this respect, it seems more similar to a suburb like Pullman than to a later (post-assembly line) industrial suburb.

Cabbagetown, like many of Chicago's working class suburbs has since been absorbed into the City of Atlanta.