Category: Hometown History

Author: Jamie Bynum

The large, currently yellow and purple, Victorian-style historic home that stands in Carrollton, Georgia is known as the Mandeville Mansion or the Maple Street Mansion. This home was built around 1890 for the family of Leroy Clifton Mandeville, who was born in 1851. He and his wife, Carrie Richardson Mandeville, had five children: Leroy Clifton Jr., Eleanor, Eugenia, John, and Camilla. If you already know about Carrollton’s textile industry, the Mandeville name will be familiar to you: Mandeville Cotton Mills was arguably the most prominent textile mill within the Carrollton city boundaries. It was organized by Joseph Aycock, Henry Lovvorn, and Leroy Clifton Mandeville in 1902 as the combination of Carrollton Oil Mill and Mandeville Cotton Mill. As for the name of the street, it is said that Leroy’s father, Appleton Mandeville, planted maple trees for his wife from Vermont on the lot before the mansion was constructed. This house was the first in the area to have indoor plumbing and electricity.

This location served as a home until its conversion to commercial use in the 1960s. One of the most notable names from this building was the restaurant known as The Maple Street Mansion which catered to both Carrollton residents and students from the University of West Georgia. During its commercial usage, the house was expanded to include an event space, meeting room, and a sports bar inside of a 19th-century train car. In March of 2014, Mandeville Mansion was in danger of being torn down. Though the house had been purchased by a private individual in an attempt to save it, renovation funds were lacking and the owner feared that, without a thorough rehabilitation, the historic home would have to be razed. Many citizens of Carrollton were invested in trying to keep the mansion as a tangible part of Carrollton’s history and began raising money for the necessary renovations on the 123-year-old mansion. Since then, it has served as a few different restaurants, the most recent being 4 am Coffee Roasters Cafe and Bar. 

With the popularity of the building, rumors have spread about its potential “resident ghost”. Eugenia, one of the daughters of Leroy and Carrie Mandeville, is rumored to have lept from a third-story window at the age of 18 and many claim she still roams the halls of the building. Her headstone in the Carrollton City Cemetery tells a different story: it puts her birth in 1878 and her death in 1915, meaning she would have been 37 years old at the time of her death.

The Mandeville Mansion, the Maple Street Mansion, or “the large purple and yellow building” has been in Carrollton for over 130 years and is beloved by the residents of the community. It has a long history of initially serving the family of a textile mogul, then all of the citizens of Carrollton. 

The Textile industry continued to dominate Carroll County’s economy after the Second World War. In 1952, over half of Carrollton’s industrial employees worked in eleven textile plants, earning recognition by the Cotton Manufacturers Association of Georgia as “A Pattern City for Progressive Georgia.”
While more traditional cotton mills like Mandeville and Banning Mills eventually declined and closed, entrepreneurs opened new types of textile industries to serve more specialized markets.

In 1954, Printed Fabrics Corporation, a New York company, purchased Mandeville Mill #1 and moved its manufacturing from Pennsylvania to Carrollton to avoid unions and find cheaper labor. Printed Fabrics was one of several local businesses that screened prints onto fabric. The company eventually acquired the second Mandeville Mill building and utilized one for printing, constructing a new addition to accommodate its larger equipment and the other mill for a warehouse. At its peak, Printed Fabrics employed over three hundred workers. It closed in 2002.

The last president of Mandeville Mill, J.R Newell Sr., launched his own company in 1954 on Lovvorn Road The mill manufactured cotton rope, decorative twisted yarns for upholstery, automobile seat covers, and knitted outerwear. Carroll Mills, established in 1924 on Bradley Street in Carrollton, made yarn braids and knitted tubing for the meat industry. In Villa Rica, Mary Ann Industries, established in 1981, produces carpet padding which is distributed throughout the United States.

In the early twentieth century, hosiery mills began to sprout up in communities throughout the west Georgia piedmont, especially in towns located along the railroad lines. With good access to freight trains, Carroll County had the largest number of hosiery mills in Georgia in 1935, including three in Villa Rica and three in Carrollton. Hosiery production was initially concentrated in the northern states during the nineteenth and early 20th centuries but began to follow the cotton mills south in the 1920s, in part to avoid labor unions. Southern hosiery companies could lower production and labor costs by purchasing modern high-speed, power-driven circular knitting machines that could be operated by women, rather than by men who might demand higher pay.

Carroll County mills produced seamless hosiery and socks made of cotton, silk, and rayon for men, women, children, and infants. Similar to cotton mills, Carroll County’s hosiery companies employed primarily white women and men until federal laws forced them to integrate in the 1960s. However, they did not build company towns, providing more autonomy to employees. With the growing popularity of automobiles, workers could now drive to work from homes in the country or other towns.

While many hosiery mills continued to operate through the 1980s and 1990s, almost all are gone now. However, several of these hosiery buildings survived and are being remodeled as important community landmarks, including the loft apartments in the Lawler Hosiery mill on Bradley Street in Carrollton.