Roswell Historic District

Roswell's historic core, about 120 acres north of Atlanta, began as a planned mill village. Roswell King and his son Barrington King, with six other families from coastal Georgia, founded it in the late 1830s as Native Americans were removed from the area. Big Creek powered a cotton factory and a woolen mill. Around a town square the settlers placed houses, a store, a Presbyterian church, an academy and cemeteries. Builder Willis Ball, from Connecticut, produced several Greek Revival temple-form houses, including Barrington Hall, Bulloch Hall and the church. Mill workers lived in brick apartments known as the Old Bricks and in modest Factory Hill houses. Though the mill burned in 1864 and again in 1929, most other buildings remain much as built. The district was listed because sixteen surviving elements, along with the original street plan and topography, preserve a distinctive antebellum planned manufacturing community with a New England character in the South.