Roswell Mill Ruins

In July 1864, General Sherman ordered roughly 400 women and children deported from Roswell's cotton mills, charged with treason for producing Confederate uniform fabric. Most were shipped north in boxcars and never returned. The mill ruins along Vickery Creek now echo with the sounds of phantom machinery and screams, and visitors see women and children near the creek who vanish when approached, including a figure known as the Weeping Woman of Vickery Creek.

General Sherman called them traitors. Their crime was making cloth.

On July 7, 1864, Sherman wrote orders regarding the Roswell Mill workers: "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, which I will send them by cars to the North. The poor women will make a howl."

They did. Roughly 400 women and children were rounded up on the Roswell town square, marched to the Georgia Military Institute in Marietta, loaded into boxcars, and shipped north through Chattanooga and Nashville to Louisville, Kentucky. Some were sent further, across the Ohio River into Indiana. Most never came home.

The women had been running the cotton and woolen mills while their husbands fought for the Confederacy. They brought their children to work because there was no one else to watch them. When Union cavalry under Brigadier General Kenner Garrard rode into Roswell on July 5, 1864, they found the mills still producing "Roswell Gray" fabric for Confederate uniforms at full capacity. A Frenchman named Theophile Roche had been given temporary ownership of the factory days earlier, with a desperate plan: fly a French flag over the woolen mill and claim neutrality. It might have worked if Union soldiers had not found cloth stamped "CSA" rolling off the production line.

The aftermath was bleak. Some of the deported women froze on the banks of the Ohio River. Others gave up children for adoption to keep them from starving. Requests to the federal government for assistance were denied. Requests for seed so the women could plant gardens were denied. Their names were lost for over a century. It took until 1998, when Roswell Mills Camp No. 1547 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans launched a research project, to begin identifying individual victims and tracking down descendants. Most were found living in the North, families whose great-grandmothers had been shipped out of Georgia in boxcars and never made it back. Mary Deborah Petite documented the full scope in her book "The Women Will Howl."

In July 2000, the city of Roswell erected a ten-foot Corinthian column in Old Mill Park, its top deliberately shattered to symbolize the lives torn apart. The monument was dedicated on July 8, 136 years to the day after the deportation.

The mill ruins sit along Vickery Creek, connected to trails winding through the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. Crumbling stone walls, old foundations, a waterfall. It's a beautiful spot. Peaceful, even. Until you hear something you shouldn't.

Residents near the ruins have described the sound of metal clanking against metal, like mill machinery grinding back to life. Screams echo from the area when nobody is around, described by multiple witnesses as blood-curdling. The old machine shop, now boarded up, draws the most reports. Visitors along the waterfront trails have seen women and children near the creek, figures that don't respond when spoken to and vanish when you look again. Local lore has given one of them a name: the Weeping Woman of Vickery Creek, identified as one of the deportees, forever searching for the children torn from her arms on that July day in 1864.

Four hundred women were charged with treason for doing their jobs, shipped north in boxcars, separated from everything they knew. The ruins are open to the public and free to visit. The trails are well-maintained, the waterfall is photogenic, and the remnants of the old mill give you a real sense of scale. Go during the week if you can. Weekends get crowded with hikers who may not know they're walking through one of the Civil War's strangest and cruelest chapters.