Phase I of the Green Building Adventure is mostly complete, though there are still plenty of projects!

We have secured lumber from a 100 year old hay barn that was located in Cave Springs, GA and lumber from a 100 year old cottage from Cabbagetown in Atlanta. Click these links to learn more about the history of these materials.

Cave Springs Barn
Cabbagetown Cottage

Cave Springs Hay Barn circa 1900

Cave Springs is located Floyd County. Nestled in scenic Vann’s Valley, named for a Cherokee chieftain, the City of Cave Spring was established in 1832 by settlers of English and Scotch-Irish ancestry. The town was named for the limestone spring which produces 2 million gallons of water daily inside a cave in the center of the village.
Churches were begun as soon as houses were built, and in 1838 the Cave Spring Baptist Church appointed an education committee with the purpose of establishing a permanent school.

The American Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath were major turning points in the economic and social life of Georgia. The state was devastated during the war, and after the abolition of slavery the plantation system was replaced by tenant farming, which still focused on traditional agricultural products such as cotton, tobacco, peanuts, and grain crops. The state remained poor, and during the Great Depression of the 1930s it was particularly devastated as the boll weevil decimated the cotton economy. Migration to other states seemed to be one of the few ways of overcoming poverty. The state remained primarily agricultural in nature until the early 1950s, when the development of industry began to accelerate.

Cabbagetown Cottage circa 1900

In the Battle of Atlanta, The Atlanta Rolling Mill was a primary target of Sherman as it was one of the South's largest producers of rail track, cannons and two inch sheets of steel. The Atlanta Rolling Mill was destroyed after the Battle of Atlanta and on its site the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill began operations in 1881. Cabbagetown was built as the surrounding mill town and was one of the first textile processing mills built in the south. Its primary product was cotton bags for packaging agricultural products.

Built during a period when many industries were relocating to the post-Reconstruction South in search of cheap labor, it opened shortly following the International Cotton Exposition, which was held in Atlanta in an effort to attract investment to the region. The mill was owned and operated by Jacob Elsas, a German Jewish immigrant. Its work force consisted of poor whites recruited from the Appalachian region of north Georgia.

Elsas built a small community of one and two-story shotgun houses and cottage-style houses surrounding the mill. Like most mill towns, the streets are extremely narrow with short blocks and lots of intersections. At its height the mill employed 2,600 people; a protracted strike in 1914-15 failed to unionize the factory's workforce. For over half a century Cabbagetown remained home to a tight-knit, homogenous, and semi-isolated community of people whose lives were anchored by the mill, until it closed in 1977.

Afterwards, the neighborhood went into a steep decline which didn't end until Atlanta's intown renaissance of the mid-1990s. The mill itself was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

See You Soon!