Cabbagetown today sits between the Beltline's Eastside Trail and the Fulton Cotton Mill Lofts, a neighborhood of refurbished bungalows, cottages, shops and community spaces that ranks among the most desirable intown addresses. \"Cabbagetown '76: The Photographs of Barbara McKenzie\" documents the moment before any of that was imaginable.
The neighborhood was built in 1881 as a mill town housing white laborers, many from Appalachia, who worked at Fulton Bag & Cotton Mills, the South's first textile processing facility. When the mill closed in 1977, families left to find work elsewhere, leaving behind original mill residents, empty houses and vacant buildings. In the 1980s, young artists — mostly musicians — moved in for the cheap rent and central location, and the neighborhood became the production hub for a music scene whose influence still runs through Atlanta.
McKenzie photographed the gap between those two eras. Born in 1934 in Mount Vernon, New York, to Scottish immigrant parents, she was an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Georgia in 1976. Four years later UGA Press published her book \"Flannery O'Connor's Georgia,\" reprinted in 2013. Her Cabbagetown subjects sound like standard documentary fare — a boy and his dog under the mill towers, families on front porches, dilapidated storefronts, decorated living rooms, church services, neighborhood characters — but the work had never been publicly shown.
Henry Owings, the record producer and co-founder with Stephanie Quinn Jackson of the Chunklet Music Preservation Project, was stunned when he first saw it. \"I was just hit along the side of the head with this material,\" he said. He knew Oraien Catledge's 1985 book \"Cabbagetown\" and knew Atlanta photographer Panorama Ray, \"but this material had never so much as been muttered about.\" Chunklet acquired McKenzie's archives in 2025; six weeks after the paperwork was signed, McKenzie, who had dementia and other ailments, died from sepsis. Owings, who lived at 215 Carroll St. in Cabbagetown after moving to Atlanta in 1997, was struck by the access she had. \"The fact that she took so many intimate photographs, meaning in their houses, with their children, it says so much about her abilities. But I don't think she was pressing people. Her energy just invited herself into it.\"
The exhibition came together after Owings posted a few images on Facebook asking curators to get in touch. Jacob Elsas, executive director of the Patch Works Art & History Center and the great-great-grandson of the Fulton Bag & Cotton Mills founder, and curator Nina Elsas needed one viewing session to commit. \"To look at these pictures and know that the majority of them, if not all of them, were just one take is absolutely amazing,\" Nina Elsas said. \"I had chills.\" Jake Elsas drew a line between McKenzie and other outsiders who photographed the neighborhood: \"She wasn't trying to manipulate anything. Most outsiders in the 1970s looked at Cabbagetown as this blighted community filled with impoverished people who must be just sad about their lives. That's kind of the inaccurate, erroneous conception from the outside.\"
The main show holds 25 photographs drawn from more than 700 in the archive. An adjacent room runs a 360-degree slide projection of McKenzie's images with an audio recording she made of the first Cabbagetown reunion. The run opened with three concerts by musicians who lived and played in the neighborhood in the 1980s and early '90s — the loose body of work sometimes called the Cabbagetown Sound. Kelly Hogan, the Atlanta native who fronted the Jody Grind before recording solo and singing with the Decemberists, the Flat Five, Neko Case and Mavis Staples, performed. \"I knew all the musicians there, but I also lived right next to Leon Littles' store,\" she said, adding that she and her mother used to cut through Cabbagetown from Little Five Points to reach I-20: \"I remember growing up and just being fascinated with the mill building and the smokestacks and all the row houses. It's just in my blood, I guess.\" Bill Taft, who co-founded the Jody Grind and now leads W8ing4UFOs, traced the lineage further back: \"So the first band I was in, the Chowder Shouters, started in Cabbagetown. Ever since that band, other bands grew out of that Cabbagetown community and the sounds and beats kept growing and evolving and changing — and it goes on today.\"
\"Cabbagetown '76: The Photographs of Barbara McKenzie\" runs through Aug. 30, 4-8 p.m. Fridays and noon-4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Free. Cabbagetown Community Center, 177 Estoria St. SE, Atlanta. 404-806-7288, thepatchworks.org.
Original reporting: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2026-07-27)