ROOTED HERE
The history of Roswell
Roswell brings together Vickery Creek, the historic Roswell Mill area and preserved houses such as Barrington Hall and Bulloch Hall. Explore the city’s independent businesses alongside its layered history.
People who shaped Roswell
These milestones are an introduction, not a complete local history. Follow the linked city and museum sources to explore the people and places behind them.Read the local historical account.
Watch the city’s history
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Roswell History Museum Opens to the Public
The City of Roswell introduces its history museum and the local stories preserved there.
Watch on YouTube ↗- Before the mill town
Cherokee homelands
The area around today's Roswell lay within Cherokee homelands. Forced removal in the nineteenth century displaced Native communities as European-American settlement expanded across north Georgia.
Roswell Convention & Visitors Bureau ↗ - 1830s–1839
A mill on Vickery Creek
Roswell King and his son Barrington developed a textile enterprise using the creek's power. By 1839, a working mill and its village had become the center of the new community.
Roswell Convention & Visitors Bureau ↗ - 1864
War and the displaced mill workers
Union forces captured Roswell in July and burned the mills. More than four hundred workers, mainly women and children, were arrested and sent north; many did not return.
Roswell Convention & Visitors Bureau ↗ - After the Civil War
Rebuilding the mill community
Textile production resumed after the war. Roswell grew gradually through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, retaining its relationship to the mills and surrounding river landscape.
Roswell Convention & Visitors Bureau ↗ - After World War II
A growing suburb with historic landmarks
Atlanta's expansion, new highways and housing development transformed Roswell. Preserved houses and mill remains now provide places to examine both the prosperity and the slavery that shaped the earlier town.
Roswell Convention & Visitors Bureau ↗
See the history for yourself.
Check current opening hours and visitor information before you go: the City of Roswell.
For local services and public information, the local government website is a starting point. For historical research, consult local libraries, archives and museums and check collection-specific image permissions.
Selected milestones from the linked historical sources. This is an introduction, not a complete account of the city’s history.