Atlanta Rolling Mill

The Atlanta Rolling Mill (later the Confederate Rolling Mill) was constructed in 1858 by Lewis Schofield and James Blake and soon after, Schofield and William Markham took it over and transformed it into the South's second most productive rolling mill, after the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia.

Their specialty was re-rolling worn out railroad rails but during the American Civil War it also rolled out cannon, iron rail, and 2-inch-thick (51 mm) sheets of iron to clad the CSS Virginia for the Confederate navy.

It was bought out by Charleston, SC interests in 1863 and became known as the Confederate Rolling Mill when it produced the former products as well as cannon.

On the night of September 1st, 1864, the mill was destroyed in a series of explosions of ammunition trains parked nearby, set off by cavalry under Confederate General J.B. Hood in a successful effort to deny the war materials' capture by the advancing Union Army under General Sherman.

Part what is now Boulevard was named Rolling Mill Street, when the street was extended north of the railroad in the late 1860s, thus commemorating the already destroyed mill. The name was changed to Boulevard around 1880.

It was located on the current site of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill (now residential lofts) in Cabbagetown on the south side of the Georgia Railroad just east of Oakland Cemetery.

Famous quotes containing the words rolling and/or mill:

    The Concord had rarely been a river, or rivus, but barely fluvius, or between fluvius and lacus. This Merrimack was neither rivus nor fluvius nor lacus, but rather amnis here, a gently swelling and stately rolling flood approaching the sea. We could even sympathize with its buoyant tied, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and anticipating the time when “being received within the plain of its freer water,” it should “beat the shore for banks.”
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
    —John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)