The new West Georgia Textile Heritage Trail — which is linking several Coweta County mills with people and projects in towns from Dalton in north Georgia to Columbus — started with a student at the University of West Georgia.
“It basically began out of a research project,” said Dr. Keith Hebert of the UWG’s Center for Public History. Graduate student Steven Eubanks got an Elizabeth Lyons Fellowship — named for a longtime leader is historic preservation in Georgia.
Eubanks used the fellowship to spend a year documenting mills throughout Georgia and particularly in western Georgia. He presented the results of his findings last year “during Historic Preservation Month” at a Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation meeting, Hebert said.
Several people were impressed with the research and resources Eubanks had brought together. It would have been a shame “to go into a report that only a few people saw,” Hebert said.
Hebert and others worked to obtain the initial grants to hold the conference in Bremen “and to start the trail,” he said.
The board of directors for the trail will include people from throughout the region, with members bringing different skills and strengths. Hebert said a goal is to make sure “we can get good advice as we move forward.”
“Our region was known as the clothing center of the South,” reflected Robin Worley, CEO of the Sewell Companies in Bremen. Four of every 10 suits manufactured in the United States “were made right here,” he said.
“It’s been over a hundred years now since that entrepreneurial effort began. It’s worth remembering – and honoring,” Worley said.
Worley and Sharon Sewell, the mayor of Bremen, were among those at a conference at the Sewell Mill to kick off the West Georgia Textile Heritage Trail project.
Sewell was born in Bremen, and her father started one of the many textile firms in the community. She grew up, she recalled, “watching how you grow a company from the garage behind your house.”
In addition to textile mills operated by members of her family, Sewell remembered other companies. The Hubbard Company was one of them, and Sewell remembered Cluett-Peabody’s employees sewed Arrow shirts.
“Each one of those facilities was a family,” Sewell said. She related that each company fielded a baseball team with uniforms.
Sewell said she has kept the town’s textile heritage in mind as the town has grown and changed – expanding its library and adding a cultural arts center. “I wanted the world to remember the Bremen that I knew,” she said.
“History must be remembered,” Worley said, “and it must be properly honored.”
