Entrance to Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills: New South Industry exhibit at the Georgia Tech Library
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Kirk Henderson, Exhibitions Program Manager with Georgia Tech Archives, to talk about the newest exhibit in their library gallery space: Fulton Bag & Cotton Mill: New South Industry. Here’s a transcript of our conversation:
SF: So, first question – just a little back history about Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill.
KH: The collection came to Georgia Tech in 1985 [but] the story starts in 1881. Jacob Elsas was a German-Jewish immigrant in the Union army and had been in the south during the Civil War; decided to stay around, founded a business earlier in Cartersville, eventually migrated to Atlanta where he began a business and saw the need to actually create packaging for all the goods. This kind of packaging was basically cotton sacks, these bags, so — Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill.
One crucial event which we look at in the exhibit is that there was a pretty big strike there in 1914 – a significant labor organizing effort. One of the first ones in the south. Ultimately, the strike was not successful, but there was a walkout that took place over the course of the year. [As] the story goes forward, it becomes one of the largest employers in Atlanta. The total employment around 1950-60 would have been around 2600 people.
And what we are doing with our exhibit is trying to leverage the fact that we have this type of collection and sort of showcase a least some parts of that story. It’s such a large and complex story that we don’t capture it all in our exhibit.
SF: How did Georgia Tech come by acquiring this collection?
KH: Well, our collections are kind of focused on things that happen in Georgia Tech – so, certainly, lots of history of Georgia Tech. But the other areas of interest that we delve into are areas of study at Georgia Tech. In this case, it’s the textile industry and how that became part of the early curriculum at Georgia Tech. [Georgia Tech was] seen as a means to help educate a future class of engineers who would help run these new factories, these new textile mills of the south.
The mill closed in 1974 effectively. It sat vacant for a number of years. But all that time – the records, the things that are part of our collection, were in that building. In 1985, one of the [Elsas] family members invited a professor here at Georgia Tech, Robert McMath, and brought along the Georgia Tech archives crew to collect the materials that were there. It was kind of like “We’ve got some stuff in filing cabinets, do you want to come get that?” And then [the crew] started to ask some more questions about “Where’s the other stuff? Is there any sort of correspondence? Are there anything else?”. Ultimately, this leads to a treasure trove where there are hundreds of architectural drawings of the mill, the mill housing in the village adjacent to it, all the machinery that goes into the building. There are scrapbooks that were part of the company’s collection. A lot of correspondence from management, a lot of correspondence that documents the activities in great detail of the strike of 1914 and just a lot of other business records, including some visual materials, some photographs and glass plate negatives, that forms a really interesting picture of the documentary record of the Mill in the late 19th early 20th century here in Atlanta. I think in some ways, folks got more than they bargained for when they went hunting for this stuff.
Recently, we renovated our [library] buildings and in the process of doing that, we create an exhibits gallery. One of its functions is to let us showcase these kinds of collections and these stories to get more visibility to what the archives has. And the collections are open for research by members of the public as well as by faculty and staff here at Georgia Tech.
SF: I do love that it’s available for pretty much anybody to come and have access to the exhibit. I think that people don’t necessarily associate Georgia Tech with textiles, but there used to be a School of Textiles, right? It’s since turned into the School of Material Science and Engineering. Can you talk a little about what that looks like at Georgia Tech now?
KH: One of the ideas we try to bring out in the exhibit is that there was this connection between the Mill and Georgia Tech. [Jacob Elsas] was a strong advocate for building a technical institute that would provide training, especially for textile engineering. This quote from Jacob Elsas says, “We are selling our old raw materials at $5 a ton to states who have trained engineers who fabricate it and sell it back to us at $75-$100 a ton.” So, textile engineering was a big part of the early curriculum at Georgia Tech – even to the extent where Jacob’s son Oscar, who later became the head of the Mill, went to MIT until they had Georgia Tech and he came back and graduated in the first graduating class at Georgia Tech.
But also, Lyman Hall, who was the president of Georgia Tech at that time, is conversing with different business men, including Jacob Elsas, for advice about what equipment we need. Basically, [Elsas is] looking to this program as a feeder for the types of engineers and managers that he will need in his new south industry. So that’s where that connection comes in again as sort of like textile engineering has evolved into a material science program here at Tech.
Interior view of the Georgia Tech Library exhibit on Atlanta’s Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill.
SF: Yeah, I didn’t know that – about the really strong connection with the early days of Georgia Tech and the founding of the Mill. When you started putting this exhibit together, what were some of your main goals for displaying collection? What did you really want to convey here?
KH: This being an exhibit, you have to sort of simplify the story. We have about 1300 square feet and we have a lot more stuff than we can display in that. So, what [we’re] doing is sort of refining “What is the story that we can tell” that will be digestible in the amount of space that we have and people are going to walk through in 15-30 minutes. There are two book length studies of the Mill and the strike of 1914, which are excellent and which were sort of core to our understanding of the story to be told. We simplified the story into essentially five chapters plus another “chapter” that is a timeline. The narrative is organized around those chapters and it’s situated in the gallery to kind of let you sort of explore and hit those high points. And in those “chapters” we [start to] introduce the idea of Georgia Tech and the Mill having sort of grown up together and they have some connections. Chapter 2 basically gives you the idea that Atlanta in the post-Civil War era, going into the late 19th and early 20th century, becomes kind of a boom town. The population goes from about 20,000 to 200,000 more or less by 1920. The next chapter is to address what working life like for the people in the Mill. The next chapter is strike, which covers that 1914 strike which was crucial to labor interests in the south and the renegotiation – or at least, the start of the renegotiation – of the social contract between workers and management. And the last chapter is entitled History by a Graveyard. And that’s where we kind of bring out this story that I referenced earlier about Bob McMath and folks from Georgia Tech going and finding the contents of the Mill. The title “By a Graveyard”, if you don’t know this: in terms of placement, the Mill and the mill village are adjacent to Oakland Cemetery. We make this point in the exhibit – Oakland Cemetery is where Jacob Elsas and other members of the family were buried. So, there was this factory, this large industrial complex, adjacent to the graveyard where many prominent Atlantans were buried.
And then, the function of the timeline is to basically do a summary along one wall of the gallery that gives everybody a reference point. You can turn around at any time in the gallery and look at that wall and get a set of dates of like: 1881: the Mill starts. 1885: Georgia Tech. 1914: the strike. 1932: Jacob Elsas dies. And so that timeline tracks everything all the way forward to 2023, the present day, where the Mill is a designated historic site and has been transitioned into a residential loft. And the adjacent Mill Village is also real estate – much more valuable than it was in 1914, I’d say.
SF: Definitely, yes.
KH: In terms of constructing the narrative of the exhibit, [we gave] it these five building blocks plus a timeline that you could always look over and see. Historians have worked with this material in the past and if you want to delve into this story yourself, you’re welcome to use our collection.
SF: When you were putting this together, were there any surprises that you weren’t expecting?
KH: A couple of the feature items that we have that are sort of showcased up front are examples of the cotton bags that were produced. One of the things we explored in that context – a lot of companies that produced these types of materials, they were printed with various floral patterns. In some cases, there would be a print of a small horse or a doll so the end user could reuse that patterned fabric to make clothing, hand towels, and other items. The ones that had little cutouts of dolls or stuffed animals, you could cut them out and stuff them, I think partly as a branding effort to set [their] product off. It also makes the end result reusable.
Jim Dandy Scratch Feed sack features a removable paper label, making the printed fabric reusable.
We [also] have the last bag that was printed on the press run at the Mill in our collection. [It’s got] pencil on the interior of the bag – it was never sewn together actually – and it says “this is the last bag” and it’s dated … 1958 because I think at that point, they’re really transitioning from making these bags to produce textiles for other purposes.
The last bag printed by the Fulton Mill press room in 1958. The company shifted production to other textile products before ultimately closing in 1974.
SF: What are some of the concepts that you’re really hoping to highlight with this exhibit for Georgia Tech students today?
KH: We’re having a few [student] tours go through the exhibit. History courses, some of the courses taught in literature, media, and communication, so [focusing on] our English and history curriculum. And we’re hoping that this provides an introduction for those students to the story. Because [we] didn’t display everything by any means – of how much stuff there is to delve into, to explore, like those issues around industry, technology, culture, and social environment conflicts – our collection is going to be an interesting tool to facilitate that.
SF: How long is this exhibit running?
KH: This exhibit will run through March 2024.
SF: Okay great! What are y’all planning next?
KH: We’re kind of shifting gears next. The function of our exhibit space is to showcase special collections materials but we’ve also partnered with other campus folks. Next, we’re working with a partner in the School of Interactive Computing to prototype some different examples of installations that would let you interact with data sets. So, it’s like taking public data sets and in part visualizing them, but also sort of making them interactive. We’re hoping that would open in the spring or summer and run through the fall of next year. *
If you’re interested in viewing the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill exhibit, check out Price Gilbert Memorial Library Exhibits Gallery from 7 am to 6 pm any day of the week. If you can’t physically get to the exhibit, you can look at the digitized parts of the collection here.
For collection development, check out these studies that Krik mentioned in our talk:
Contesting the New south Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills. Clifford M. Khun. UNC Press, 2001.
The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914-1915: Espionage, Labor Conflict, and New South Industrial Relations. Gary Fink. IRL Press, 1993.
Fashion, Textile & Costume Librarians 