Narrow streets and small houses mark Cabbagetown, the neighborhood you are walking through, whose identity is inseparable from the industrial history of the building that dominates it. The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill was built here in 1881 and expanded through the turn of the century into one of the largest textile operations in the South. The mill recruited workers directly from Appalachia — families from the mountains of North Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee who came to Atlanta looking for industrial wages and settled in the mill-owned houses that surrounded the factory.
The neighborhood that developed was working class, white, and tightly knit — a company town within the city, with its own social codes and community institutions. The cabbage that gives the neighborhood its name figures in multiple origin stories, most of them involving the smell of cooking cabbage drifting through the streets or the practice of workers growing cabbages in their small yards. The Fulton Cotton Mill closed in 1977, and its massive brick buildings sat through years of vacancy before being converted into artist lofts and apartments in the 1990s — one of Atlanta's earliest industrial conversions.
The neighborhood has gentrified substantially since then, but its narrow streets and small houses retain a character unlike anywhere else in Atlanta.