There’s no painless way to explain the history of a massive brick structure being renovated into apartments in this central Alabama city — a factory that played a key role in the expansion of slavery before the Civil War.
Dating back to the 1830s, the labor of enslaved Black people helped make it the world’s largest manufacturer of cotton gins, an innovation that boosted demand for many more enslaved people to pick cotton that could be quickly processed in much higher quantities than ever before, historians say.
Pratt designed his company town about 15 miles northwest of the state’s Capitol to resemble the New England communities of his past. With a physical layout matching an ethos built on labor, education and faith, he had workers build a church, schools and stores near the factory. His grave rests atop a hill overlooking the city, where he’s celebrated as a paragon of virtue.
Pratt aimed to teach poor, white Southerners the value of manual labor, which generally was considered the job of enslaved Black people before the South industrialized, and most of the factory’s workforce was white by the 1850s. But when production lagged, Pratt changed supervisors and purchased skilled slaves to do the vital work whites wouldn’t do. Evans wrote that by 1860, Pratt owned 107 enslaved people.
“I think people just still aren’t comfortable talking about it,” she said. “People get tense and uptight talking about it.”
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