Roswell Town Square

Roswell King patterned his colony after a New England town with wide streets leading from the town square, the square separating the mill village from the homes of the newly arrived aristocracy.

Young men in the Roswell Guards drilled on the town square under the command of Captain Thomas King, grandson of Roswell King. The battlefield was the great leveler. where sons of aristocrats fought side by side with young men from the mills, against their common foe.

During the Federal occupation, Roswell was teeming with horses and wagons and soldiers in blue. Hundreds of tents filled the town square.  In the midst of this chaos, many of the women and children still remained under guard, lining the dusty roads, waiting for wagons to take them to Marietta.

The town square remains the focal center for many social activities.  A memorial to Roswell King was unveiled at the head of the square in October 1939, and the Roswell Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy placed historical markers in the center of the square in 1940 to commemorate the six founding families of Roswell. For many years the only memorials in Roswell were the plaques in the town square that paid tribute to the founders. The mill workers are as much a part of the town’s history as Roswell King, if not more so, yet many of Roswell’s own citizens had never heard their tragic story, until the a monument to the mill workers was erected in 2000. 

The old general store originally built in 1839 and then rebuilt in 1854 still stands on the town square. Here the mill workers made their purchases with company scrip issued by the Roswell Manufacturing Company. The building was converted into a restaurant and operated for almost 20 years as the Public House, but recently closed. The front windows offer a view of the gazebo in the Town Square built for President Theodore Roosevelt when he visited his mother’s girlhood home, Bulloch Hall, in 1905. 

Locals claim that the old store is haunted by star-crossed lovers; Michael, a seventeen-year-old Union soldier, and Katherine, a young girl from Roswell who stole his heart.

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