The name is exactly what it sounds like. Cabbagetown, the neighborhood just east of downtown Atlanta that covers less than 100 square acres of narrow streets and tightly packed shotgun houses, got its name from the vegetable that its residents grew in their front yards and cooked in their kitchens — close enough together that the smell of cabbage soup drifted from house to house on payday evenings.
The competing origin stories are variations on the same theme. In one version, peddlers arrived at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill with pushcarts full of cabbages on payday, selling to workers who had just collected their wages. In another, the workers themselves grew the crop because it was cheap, hardy, and filling — the ideal food for families with limited resources and limited land. Both versions point to the same reality: Cabbagetown was a mill village, and everything about it — the houses, the streets, the food, the name — was shaped by the factory at its center.
The Mill
The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill was the engine that built Cabbagetown. The industrial facility attracted Appalachian families who migrated to Atlanta seeking factory work in the late nineteenth century. They settled in the shotgun houses that mill owners built within walking distance of the factory floor — narrow, single-story structures arranged on streets tight enough that neighbors could pass dishes through windows.
The mill operated until 1977, when it closed and left the neighborhood without the economic anchor that had defined it for nearly a century. The decades that followed brought the pattern familiar to former industrial neighborhoods across the American South: disinvestment, population decline, and then — slowly — rediscovery by artists and young professionals drawn to cheap rent and distinctive architecture.
From Mill Workers to Professionals
Today, Cabbagetown is occupied by professionals and young families who live in renovated shotgun houses and loft conversions that would be unrecognizable to the mill workers who built them. The gentrification has been thorough: property values have risen dramatically, the demographic profile has shifted, and the neighborhood's identity has evolved from working-class mill village to trendy urban enclave.
What has not changed is the physical character. The shotgun houses remain — narrow, close together, opening directly onto the street. The Fulton Cotton Mill itself has been converted into lofts, preserving the building that created the neighborhood even as the neighborhood around it transforms. Oakland Cemetery, one of Atlanta's oldest and most historically significant burial grounds, borders Cabbagetown to the south, adding a layer of nineteenth-century history that connects the neighborhood to Atlanta's Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
The Name Endures
Singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins wrote a song called "Cabbagetown" that documented the experiences of the neighborhood's early settlers — the Appalachian families who came to Atlanta for mill work and built a community defined by proximity, poverty, and resilience. The song, like the neighborhood, captured something specific about a place where the name tells you everything you need to know: people grew cabbages here, and they lived close enough together that everyone knew it.
Cabbagetown sits at the edge of downtown Atlanta's eastern boundary, close enough to the city center to benefit from its growth but distinct enough to maintain the character that makes it worth visiting. The shotgun houses, the mill lofts, the narrow streets — they survive because the neighborhood's identity was built into its architecture, and not even gentrification can rename a place whose name is that good.
Original reporting by Georgia Public Broadcasting, August 8, 2018.