Roswell King

Roswell King (1765 – February 15, 1844) was an American businessman, planter, slave owner and industrialist. Together with his son, Barrington King, he founded Roswell Manufacturing Company in the Georgia Piedmont, establishing a cotton mill and industrial complex. They co-founded the town of Roswell, Georgia, inviting friends to be part of its and the mill's development in the 1830s.

King was born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1765, the son of Timothy King, a weaver and Revolutionary naval commander, and Sarah (née Fitch) King. At the age of fifteen in 1780, he moved to Darien, Georgia in the Low Country and started working. His early professional life included jobs as surveyor in Glynn County, and Justice of the Peace in McIntosh County.

King eventually became manager of Major Pierce Butler's rice and cotton plantations on Butler and St. Simons islands, Georgia, where he worked until 1820. The plantations covered hundreds of acres on each island. A total of 500 slaves worked and lived on the two plantations. King also owned a plantation and numerous slaves to work it in Darien, where he became a bank manager.

In the 1830s, King moved his family from the coast to the Piedmont area around Vickery Creek (referred to as Cedar Creek at the time), the area of the future town of Roswell. King had identified this as a good area for the construction of a cotton mill. He had the idea to combine cotton production and cotton processing at the same location. Invention of the cotton gin had made cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable in the uplands of the South. King invited planter friends James Stephens Bulloch and Archibald Smith to join him in the new enterprise.

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