On any given workday, the stretch of Georgia 9 that cuts north-south through Roswell is a four-lane wall of cars. Almost as old as the city itself, the thoroughfare was once little more than a dirt wagon path called the Atlanta Road, connecting this mill town to the burgeoning railroad hub some twenty miles south.

The road also serves as a dividing line. To its west sits the tree-canopied town square, its centerpiece an obelisk water fountain bearing the names of Roswell’s founding families. Repeated on nearby street signs—Bulloch, Pratt, King—these are the surnames of wealthy planters and industrialists who, in the 1830s, moved inland to escape Georgia’s muggy, mosquito-infested coast. At the southern end of the square, a squat stone monument commemorates their leader, Roswell King, a banker, politician, surveyor, and plantation manager, “a man of great energy, industry, and perseverance: of rigid integrity, truth, and justice.” And on the hilltop beyond looms Barrington Hall, a columned, whitewashed mansion built for Barrington King, Roswell King’s eldest heir. The antebellum manor, like Bulloch Hall due west, has been restored as a museum, a memorial to the romantic affluence that for some is synonymous with the Old South.

On the east side of Georgia 9, as the hill drops toward the creek bottom, the architecture changes. The structures are smaller and more tightly packed together. One storefront with broad single-pane windows is dated 1854; it provided goods for employees of the Roswell Manufacturing Company, the King family’s cotton mills that once drew power from Vickery Creek and the labor of hundreds of women, children, and men to make cloth and thread and candlewicks. Farther downhill, you will find a cluster of brick row homes that housed the millworkers. These buildings line places with no-nonsense names like Factory Hill and Mill Street, but they once were home to the Woods, Sumners, Kendleys—and countless other families whose names have since been lost to history.

For decades, the two halves of Roswell coexisted in relative harmony. Then, in the summer of 1864, war came, exposing a divide almost as deep as any clash between North and South and setting the families of Roswell on divergent paths.

The Kendley family story starts with a bit of luck.

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