Exhibit reveals never-before-seen take a look at historical past and tradition of Atlanta’s Cabbagetown neighborhood

Step out of the Krog Street Tunnel simply east of downtown Atlanta, and it might really feel like entering into one other period.

Cabbagetown’s slender streets are lined with bungalows, shotgun homes and storefronts — classic, compact and stuffed with historical past.  Looming over them is what was as soon as one in all Atlanta’s industrial giants: the Fulton Bag & Cotton Mills.

Founded within the 1870’s by German-Jewish immigrant Jacob Elsas, the mill produced feed sacks, cotton luggage and later textiles.  It closed in 1981 and was finally reworked into loft flats, however for greater than a century, the mill formed practically each side of life within the neighborhood round it.

Generations of working-class households — a lot of them Scots-Irish who got here from Appalachia in the hunt for regular work and a future — settled close by. Just about each household had somebody who labored on the mill, and the neighborhood developed right into a close-knit neighborhood of its personal.

Now, a group of images taken as that period was disappearing is bringing a few of these households again into view.

In the late Nineteen Seventies, because the mill was fading and Atlanta was starting a interval of dramatic change and gentrification, University of Georgia pictures professor Barbara McKenzie started photographing the folks of Cabbagetown.

She captured the final era of residents whose lives have been intently tied to the mill — kids on neighborhood streets, staff inside their properties, and households going about their on a regular basis lives.

More than 700 of McKenzie’s negatives remained largely unseen for many years till preservationists Henry Owings and Stephanie Quinn Jackson found them.

Twenty-eight of the images have now been meticulously curated for an exhibition on the Cabbagetown Community Center.

“It felt very sociologically pertinent,” Owings mentioned.

The images are placing for his or her intimacy and ease. The folks in McKenzie’s images seem remarkably snug in entrance of her digicam — non-public moments preserved with out pretense, exhibiting a neighborhood because it really lived.

“It was its own little town,” mentioned Jake Elsas. “People didn’t have to go outside of the neighborhood to get what they wanted.”

Elsas has an unusually private connection to that historical past.  He is the great-great-grandson of Jacob Elsas, who based the mill greater than 150 years in the past.

Jake Elsas and his spouse, Nina, helped make the exhibition doable, hoping the images will introduce guests to the boys, girls and kids who created the neighborhood lengthy earlier than Cabbagetown turned one in all Atlanta’s most recognizable intown neighborhoods.

“The spirit that the original mill era people created has carried forth,” Jake Elsas mentioned.

For years, tales have circulated about how Cabbagetown acquired its uncommon title.  But Jake Elsas mentioned his analysis factors to an origin that’s much less quaint than neighborhood folklore would possibly counsel.

According to Elsas, the title started as a slight — a derisive label utilized by a Northern newspaper reporter to mock the poor Scots-Irish mill staff who lived within the neighborhood throughout a headline-grabbing labor strike.

“It’s not a pleasant story really,” Elsas mentioned. “I think through history, it became a way of referring to poor Irish communities, and that’s what it was for ours.”

Over time, the insult was reclaimed.

What started as a put-down turned an id — one this Atlanta neighborhood now wears with pleasure.

Jacob Elsas’ affect additionally prolonged properly past the mill and Cabbagetown. He helped set up each Georgia Tech and Grady Hospital. One of the unique Fulton Bag & Cotton Mills feed sacks is preserved within the Georgia Tech archives.

The Cabbagetown pictures exhibition runs by means of August on the Cabbagetown Community Center.

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