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:
“Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)