Researching the Lost Mill Women of Roswell, Georgia
By Kinley Bryan
I love writing stories with themes that resonate with me, and I especially love setting them in the past so I can explore those themes in ways not possible in my own life. At its heart, The Lost Women of Mill Street is the story of a young woman beginning to learn what she is capable of. On the surface, however, it’s a refugee story—about the arrest and deportation of hundreds of Georgia mill workers during the final year of the American Civil War.
The story begins in Roswell, Georgia, a picturesque town overlooking the Chattahoochee River about twenty miles north of Atlanta. Established as a textile manufacturing village in 1839, Roswell was home to prominent families living in stately mansions on one side of the town square, and mill workers in small cottages on the other. I used to live in Roswell, and so I’ve been to the place where the mills stood, and I’ve seen the waterfall where Vickery Creek was dammed to provide waterpower for them. Being in that physical space and thinking about the women who worked at the mills is what inspired me to write a novel about them.
There’s plenty of information on the owners of the Roswell Manufacturing Company and what they did before, during, and after Federal troops burned the mills. And while a few of the mill workers returned to Roswell, most did not: their fates remain a mystery. This left me free to imagine what might become of Clara and Kitty Douglas, my fictional sisters who worked in the weave room the day the mills burned. Though they are fictional, I needed their fates to be within the realm of what was possible, and that meant researching all kinds of interesting things, such as:
What was Louisville, Kentucky like in 1864?
When the mill workers were deported from Georgia, they were sent to a refugee prison hospital in Louisville. To render those scenes, I consulted old maps online and found a military map depicting the railroad my characters would have traveled, and the refugee prison hospital where they would have stayed. I even found online a graduate student’s 1938 master’s thesis on the social and economic history of Louisville during the Civil War years, 1860-1865. It provided some great details.
What was it like to travel by steamboat on the Ohio River?
A fascinating history of steamboating on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Come Hell or High Water by Michael Gillespie helped me understand what it was like to travel by steamboat (on a low budget). For example, when a steamboat stopped at a woodyard for wood to fuel the engine, deck passengers, who had purchased their ride for reduced fare, helped load the wood by hand. The book contained first-hand accounts that helped me understand how my characters might react to something, like one passenger’s description of a steamboat engine’s sound: “like the grunt of a sleeping pig that is dreaming.”
What was it like to live in Cincinnati during the Civil War?
The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border by Christopher Phillips taught me how deep the political division ran among the white citizenry in border cities like Cincinnati, so much so that at one point the Cincinnati mayor issued a proclamation requesting residents to refrain from the discussion of “exciting topics” in public and to discourage all congregation of crowds in the streets.
How did American milliners operate their businesses?
Millinery plays an important role in the story, and an invaluable resource on the subject was The Female Economy by Wendy Gamber, which covered both the millinery and dressmaking trades from 1860-1930 in the United States. The Hand-Book of Millinery, published in 1847, was an excellent primer on mid-1800s millinery.
These are just four of the countless questions that arose while I was writing The Lost Women of Mill Street. Of course, most of what I learned didn’t make it into the novel—the best facts that didn’t suit the story I shared with my
The Lost Women of Mill Street
By Kinley Bryan
By Kinley Bryan
Publication Date: 7th May 2024
Publisher: Blue Mug Press
Page Count: 300 Pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
1864: As Sherman’s army marches toward Atlanta, a cotton mill commandeered by the Confederacy lies in its path. Inside the mill, Clara Douglas weaves cloth and watches over her sister Kitty, waiting for the day her fiancé returns from the West.
When Sherman’s troops destroy the mill, Clara’s plans to start a new life in Nebraska are threatened. Branded as traitors by the Federals, Clara, Kitty, and countless others are exiled to a desolate refugee prison hundreds of miles from home.
Cut off from all they've ever known, Clara clings to hope while grappling with doubts about her fiancé’s ambitions and the unsettling truths surrounding his absence. As the days pass, the sisters find themselves thrust onto the foreign streets of Cincinnati, a city teeming with uncertainty and hostility. She must summon reserves of courage, ingenuity, and strength she didn’t know she had if they are to survive in an unfamiliar, unwelcoming land.
Inspired by true events of the Civil War, The Lost Women of Mill Street is a vividly drawn novel about the bonds of sisterhood, the strength of women, and the repercussions of war on individual lives.
Kinley Bryan
Kinley Bryan's debut novel, Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury, inspired by the Great Lakes Storm of 1913 and her own family history, won the 2022 Publishers Weekly Selfies Award for adult fiction. An Ohio native, she lives in South Carolina with her husband and three children. The Lost Women of Mill Street is her second novel.
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