Promo: The Lost Women of Mill Street by Kinley Bryan
Today, I'm delighted to welcome author Kinley Bryan to Ruins & Reading. She's telling us a little about the women featured in her new release, The Lost Women of Mill Street. It makes for fascinating reading. Have a look!
The Lost Women of Mill Street is currently on blog tour with The Coffee Pot Book Club. Check out all the other interesting posts HERE!
Who Were the Women of Mill Street?
In my novel, The Lost Women of Mill Street, the titular women are employed by a textile manufacturing company in a village north of Atlanta, Georgia. The setting is based on the real-life Roswell Manufacturing Company, which began operations in 1839 and became one of the largest textile manufacturers in the South—as well as a casualty of the American Civil War.
The Roswell mills, like other antebellum textile factories in the South, found their workers in the countryside: struggling farming families who needed additional income to make ends meet. Often, a woman’s husband would remain on the farm while she and their children went to work at the factory.
At the cotton and woolen mills, women commonly held the positions of spinner, drawing-in hand, and weaver. Spinners moved up and down a row of spinning frames, repairing breaks and snags as bobbins on the frame filled with thread. Drawing-in hands prepared the yarn for the weaving process by mounting it on a large frame—a coveted job as it took place in a separate room, somewhat removed from the lint-filled and extremely loud spinning and weaving rooms. Lastly, weavers operated the power looms.
Nearly all aspects of the women’s lives were determined by the mill: working 12 hours a day, six days a week; living in company housing (the rent for which was deducted from their pay); spending their wages at the company store—they were paid in scrip, which was useless elsewhere.
My novel’s main characters, Clara and Kitty Douglas, came to the Roswell mills for the same reasons many real-life families did at the time: their own small farm was failing. The sisters arrived at the mill in 1859, two years before Georgia seceded from the United States. After war broke out, the Roswell Manufacturing Company’s two cotton factories and one woolen factory began producing materials for the Confederacy, including cloth for uniforms, tent canvas, sheeting, candlewick, and rope.
Union troops arrived in Roswell in 1864 as General Sherman advanced toward Atlanta. Upon discovering the mills and the materials being produced for the Confederate Army, the Union general ordered them destroyed. In a surprising move, he also arrested the roughly 400 mill workers, most of them women and children, and charged them with treason. The workers were sent to a refugee prison in the North. My novel follows Clara and Kitty on that harrowing journey.
The mills were rebuilt after the war. As for the real-life Roswell women, while a few eventually returned home, most did not. In 2000 a monument was erected in Roswell’s historic district and dedicated to the lost mill workers, whose fates remain a mystery.
Blurb:
1864: As Sherman’s army marches toward Atlanta, a cotton mill commandeered by the Confederacy lies in its path. Inside the mill, Clara Douglas weaves cloth and watches over her sister Kitty, waiting for the day her fiancé returns from the West.
Cut off from all they've ever known, Clara clings to hope while grappling with doubts about her fiancé’s ambitions and the unsettling truths surrounding his absence. As the days pass, the sisters find themselves thrust onto the foreign streets of Cincinnati, a city teeming with uncertainty and hostility. She must summon reserves of courage, ingenuity, and strength she didn’t know she had if they are to survive in an unfamiliar, unwelcoming land.
Inspired by true events of the Civil War, The Lost Women of Mill Street is a vividly drawn novel about the bonds of sisterhood, the strength of women, and the repercussions of war on individual lives.
Buy Link: Universal Buy Link
~~~
About the Author:
Kinley Bryan
Connect with Kinley:
Comments
Post a Comment