FULTON COUNTY, GA - ROSWELL MILL WOMEN DEPORTATION ***************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm *********************** This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by: Janet Yancey My GGGrandmother was one of these deported women. On the 1870, Hamilton Co., Ohio, she is in the Hamilton Co. Infirmary - The Poorhouse, with her 2 year old daughter, Flora, b. 1868. The other little girl born, 1864 died in 1868, Ohio. If a veteran or members of the deceased veteran's family wants to request those records be sent to them instead of being destroyed he/she can make a request by mail to: National Personnel Records Center Military Personnel Records 9700 Page Ave. St. Louis, MO 63132-5100 or make the request online at: http://vetrecs.archives.gov/ When you submit your request online, a signature form downloadable from the site can be sent to you for completion and submission. The National Personnel Records Center will then send you an e-mail acknowledging your request. Deportation of Roswell Mill Women http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/ArticlePrintable.jsp?id=h-1086 In July 1864 during the Atlanta campaign General William T. Sherman ordered the approximately 400 Roswell mill workers, mostly women, arrested as traitors and shipped as prisoners to the North with their children. There is little evidence that more than a few of the women ever returned home. On July 5, seeking a way to cross the Chattahoochee River and gain access to Atlanta, Brigadier General Kenner Garrard's cavalry began the Union's twelve- day occupation of Roswell, which was undefended. The next day Garrard reported to Sherman that he had discovered the mills in full operation and had proceeded to destroy them, and that about 400 women had been employed in the mills. On July 7 Sherman replied that the destruction of the mills "meets my entire approval." He ordered that the owners and employees be arrested and charged with treason, elaborating, "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, whence I will send them by [railroad] cars, to the North. . . . Let them [the women] take along their children and clothing, providing they have a means of hauling or you can spare them." The women, their children, and the few men, most either too young or too old to fight, were transported by wagon to Marietta and imprisoned in the Georgia Military Institute, by then abandoned. Then, with several days' rations, they were loaded in boxcars that proceeded through Chattanooga, Tennessee, and after a stopover in Nashville, Tennessee, headed to Louisville, Kentucky, the final destination for many of the mill workers. Others were sent across the Ohio River to Indiana. First housed and fed in a Louisville refugee hospital, the women later took what menial jobs and living arrangements could be found. Those in Indiana struggled to survive, many settling near the river, where eventually mills provided employment. Unless husbands had been transported with the women or had been imprisoned nearby, there was little probability of a return to Roswell, so the remaining women began to marry and bear children. The tragedy, widely publicized at the time, with outrage expressed in northern as well as southern presses, was virtually forgotten over the next century. Only in the 1980s did a few writers begin to research and tell the story. Even then, the individual identities and fates of the women remained unknown. In 1998 the Roswell Mills Camp No. 1547, Sons of the Confederate Veterans, initiated a project to acknowledge and honor the deported mill workers. Through publicity, advertisements, and research, some of the descendants and other relatives were found; most of their deported ancestors had settled in the North. ROSWELL WOMEN EXILED http://www.civilwarnews.com/archive/articles/roswell_kirby.htm By Joe Kirby ROSWELL, Ga. The Civil War equivalents of World War II's "Rosie the Riveters" will be honored here with the dedication of a monument July 8 to the memory of "The Roswell Millworkers." Unlike their World War II counterparts, however, who mostly returned to home and hearth at war's end, Roswell's mill women were deported en masse from their city after it fell to Sherman's army, and after that they disappeared into the mists of history. The story of the Roswell mill women, little known outside Georgia, took place between the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and the battles for Atlanta. The army of Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston had fallen back across the Chattahoochee River, and Sherman was looking for a way to get his army across. He sent the cavalry division of Brig. Gen. Kenner Garrard sweeping eastward back upstream with orders to capture Roswell, which sits on the river's northern bank and was lightly defended by home guardsmen and a few Rebel horsemen. Despite its tiny size, the town - which until the war was known primarily as an upland escape for the aristocracy's elite from coastal Georgia's brutal summers - had become the center of a thriving textile industry during the war. The cotton mill was cranking out up to 191,000 yards of cloth per month and the woolen mill up to 30,000 yards of "Roswell Gray" uniforms. Each of the mills employed hundreds of women. Sherman then ordered Garrard to arrest all employees of the factory and "let them foot it, under guard" the 10 miles or so to Marietta from where he said he would have them sent north via boxcar to Indiana. Added Sherman, "The poor women will make a howl. Let them take along their children and clothing. ." To Gen. Henry Halleck in Washington, Sherman noted that the women were "tainted with treason" and "are as much governed by the rules of war as if in the ranks. . The whole region was devoted to manufacturies, but I will destroy every one of them." He added the next day, "Whenever the people are in the way, ship them to a new country north and west." Within days Garrard had transported as many as 700 people, nearly all of them women and children, by wagon to Marietta. Their arrival there made the front pages of the New York newspapers. By July 15, two whole trainloads of the refugees had been given nine days' rations and sent north. Wayne Bagley of the Roswell Mills Camp is descended from Adeline Bagley Buice, whose husband was in the Rebel army. Though pregnant, she was sent to Chicago and was unable to return to Georgia with her daughter for five years. By that time, her husband, who thought her dead, had remarried. Wayne Shelly of the Nathan B. Forrest Camp in Rome, Ga., is the grandson of a millworker. Her mother and grandmother also worked in the Roswell mill and all three were deported. The woman's mother died aboard a train in Tennessee, and her death was followed shortly by that of the grandmother while the group was being transported via steamship up the Ohio River. The old woman had been so feeble that she was carried on board the boat in a rocking chair, according to the SCV's monument brochure. Interestingly, the female millworkers in the little factory town of New Manchester met a fate similar to that of the Roswell women. New Manchester was on the banks of Sweetwater Creek just across the Chattahoochee due west of Atlanta. But because that town was burned along with the mill and never rebuilt, the tribulations of its women have been generally forgotten. Tax-deductible contributions to the monument can be sent to The Roswell Mills Monument Fund, c/o George Thurmond, 120 Cannonade Dr., Alpharetta, GA 30004-4096. For more information about the event, go to: http://members.aol.com/GrldOhara/RMSCV.html