[MUSIC PLAYING] Little boxes in the archive, little boxes made by Hollinger, little boxes in the archives, little boxes all the same. There's a gray one and a gray one and a gray one and a gray one, and they're all made out of cardboard, and they all are acid-free.
You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks-- The Research Library Rock'n'Roll Radio Show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Marlee Givens and Fred Rascoe. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you tune in for, we hope you dig it. MARLEE GIVENS: Today's show is called "Bringing the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills to the Library." So here's a quick history lesson. Oh, really?
Yeah. It'll be quick. The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, built in 1881 in what is now known as the Cabbagetown neighborhood of Atlanta next to Oakland Cemetery, were an essential and transformative part of the industrialization of Atlanta and the South. CHARLIE BENNETT: That was quite quick. The mills closed in 1978 or thereabouts, and Atlanta residents now know the complex as the Fulton Cotton Mill Lofts.
At the Georgia Tech Library, in the archives, we have a Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills collection containing everything from payroll ledgers to sewing machines from the mills.
And the Georgia Tech archives have created a public exhibit in the library from that collection designed to introduce students and faculty to the history of the mill and maybe offer a classroom resource for faculty and departments like Materials Science and Engineering, History of Technology and Society, Economics, or Writing and Communication.
We wanted to talk about the exhibit, and we tried something new for this episode. We recorded a panel discussion with members of the Archives department in front of a live audience, and we're using some of that audio as our interview segments for today's show.
I was also part of that panel. CHARLIE BENNETT: I saw you there. It was really the strangest thing. I feel comfortable behind the board here in the studio with my buttons and faders and everything, and I feel nervous in front of an audience.
I think it's easier to talk to thousands of people you can't see than it is to talk to 30 people you can see.
Thousands. We're going to set a record here on this episode.
Dude, dude, the potential of Lost in the Stacks as a broadcast--
It's limitless--
--is millions.
--limitless.
Yes.
Hello, everyone. Our songs today are a lot about labor, how it's hard, who does it, and whether we've made any progress. Those kinds of stories are all there in the Georgia Tech Library's new exhibit about seeing an old bag factory in a new light.
Easy there.
So let's start with a classic song about bags recorded in a new light. This is Papa's Got a Brand New Bag as recorded by The Sweet Vandals from Spain right here on Lost in the Stacks. [THE SWEET VANDALS, "PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG"] Come here, sister, 'cause Mama's in the swing-- "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag--" or actually, I think she was saying "mama's got a brand new bag-- as recorded by The Sweet Vandals.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called "Bringing the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills to the Library," which is also the name of a panel discussion we recorded on Tuesday, September 19. The participants were Alex McGee, the University Archivist, Kirk Henderson, the Exhibits Program Manager, and Connor Lynch, the Exhibits Associate. Let's drop into the panel now right after we asked Kirk how exhibits fit into the mission of the archives.
So one of the things we're after in doing exhibits is leveraging the fact that we have all these kinds of collections, and an exhibit is a way of packaging that, telling a story around some of our materials. A lot of times we have such depth on certain collections-- and I think this collection that's on display now is an example of that-- but that we want to give people an introduction to those materials.
So it's a way of showcasing resources that the library has to the campus community and also, especially with this one, opening it up to the community at large because a lot of what this particular exhibit is about and the collections that support it have to do with something that happened in Atlanta a long time ago. So exhibits is that way of-- another means of discovery for the library, for the archives, and inviting you in to go deeper to find more of what we have or to research other topics.
Can you talk about objects that are in the archives? If you have a favorite, that would be a great place to start.
Well, using this particular example-- of course, this is on the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills. It's a textile mill. And so that is in Archives for us an area of collecting because of the-- and we may get into this more later, but because of the association of Georgia Tech with Georgia industry and the textile industry in the South and in Georgia specifically.
But in this particular exhibit, something that doesn't fit conveniently in a file box is we have a couple of sewing machines that were in the mill, and so that's an artifact.
Are these the sewing machines with the solid base that are as tall as a person or-- CONNOR LYNCH: They're pretty heavy. KIRK HENDERSON: They're pretty heavy.
But they're-- I'd say they're about the size of a regular sewing machine, but they are pretty heavy.
Yeah. If you think-- and actually, there's a photograph from our collections in the exhibit that shows rows of these multiple machines in the factory itself where, in fact, mostly women were actually using them to sew the products that the cotton mill was making. And so that's an example of, it doesn't fit in a box, it doesn't fit in a folder, but it is worth our while to keep that as an example.
It's such a spark to thinking-- for the person that's not necessarily thinking, I need to find research about mill factory work in Atlanta, you wander into the library gallery space, and you see like, oh, they have bags that have been-- not only were produced here but then were embroidered because they were repurposed for different things, the sewing machines, and all kinds of giant foot-thick ledgers of salary and wages that were paid, something that I would never think of exists.
It's a great way to display what's in an archive to someone who wouldn't think to go look, oh, I want to find out what's in that box using the finding aid, using the--
Yeah, I do think the exhibit is a really good example to show the breadth and depth of what we have in these areas from the big metal-looking wheels to the sewing machine to the ledgers--
Right, gears from the machine.
--to the reports, yeah. Yeah, gears. That's the word I was looking for.
The pattern parts, yeah.
Where are those normally? Are those in the building, or do you all have a stash somewhere--
This is Kirk's area.
--elsewhere?
I'm going to let Kirk answer this one.
Yeah, where's the gear drawer?
Kirk, where do you hide this stuff?
Archives--
You're on the hot seat.
Why are you keeping it away from us?
Yeah, so a collection like this has different kinds of things, and so some of the artifact materials are housed at the Library Records Center because they don't conveniently fit in the kind of housing that we would use if we sent it to the Library Services Center, which is our other off-site storage area. So some of the records for the collection are here in the building, downstairs in a collection storage area, the boxes and the folders.
Some things are at the Library Record Center, and other things are at the Library Services Center. Those are two off-site storage facilities that allow us to store more things conveniently.
More oversized things.
More oversized things than we can conveniently keep in the building at any one time.
We asked Alex Mcgee what made the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills important to Georgia Tech, to Atlanta, and to the South.
The interesting thing about the textile industry in Atlanta in particular is that it comes about post-Civil War, post-- as industrialization is happening in the South. There was a horrible recession, and in the 1890s things started changing. We saw more industry, more mills opening up, and the mill owners needed people to work in their mills. They needed engineering. And so there was a campaign in the state to create a school of technology.
We had the University of Georgia, but we didn't have a dedicated school of technology to educate folks. And so they approved the funding. They had a search to decide where it would end up. It almost went to places like Milledgeville and Athens and Macon, but it ended up in Atlanta thanks to a number of folks advocating for the proximity to the mills, the industry already happening here, the railroads.
And thankfully, the textile engineering program at Tech came about rather quickly due to men like Oscar Elsas and his father, who supported the creation of this textile school. They needed people to work in their textile mills.
Yeah, Kirk gave me this quote from Jacob-- you're saying El-sas? KIRK HENDERSON: It's Elsas, yeah. It looks-- it's E-L-S-A-S, and so my brain just goes crazy. It wants to pronounce it in all kinds of ways. But he said, "We are selling our old raw materials at $5 a ton to states that have trained engineers who fabricate it and sell it back to us at $75 to $100 a ton." That monetary equation was a big part of why we have the Georgia Institute of Technology.
And President Lyman Hall actually was very successful fundraising for the creation of the French School of Textile because he actually deployed language around the South-- because all the people working in the mills, the engineers-- they were being trained at schools like MIT, at Cooper Union. They wanted-- they were feeling like they were losing talent to New England, and they wanted-- it was, the South needs to fight back and establish themselves against the North.
And there are editorials in the Atlanta Constitution where he's very successfully advocated for funding using that kind of language. And actually, they tried to recruit him to go be the president of UGA because he was so good at fundraising, so thankfully, Georgia Tech got him, got to keep him.
This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more about the "Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills" exhibit at the Georgia Tech Library after a music set.
File this set under HD5325.T42
[FRED NEIL, "THAT'S THE BAG I'M IN"]
[KANSAS JOE AND MEMPHIS MINNIE, "WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH THE MILL?"]
That was "What's the Matter with the Mill? It Done Broke Down" by Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie. By the way, trivia for Lost in the Stacks folks, that was the 5,000th song ever played on Lost in the Stacks.
Hey.
Goodness.
And the 4,999th song right before that was "That's the Bag I'm In" by Fred Neil. Those were songs about coming to grips with an industrial workplace. Not the usual little sound effect bumper that we played right there, but--
That's all right.
--it serves the purpose.
Keeps us on our toes. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Bringing the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills to the Library" featuring excerpts from the panel we held at the Georgia Tech Library speaking with members of the archives team that created the exhibit. During the panel, there was discussion of how in many ways the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, quote, "re-engineered Atlanta," and that prompted Fred to ask--
And so in that transformation, obviously it brought a lot of economic development to Atlanta, kind of helped Atlanta on the path to where it would become as a prominent Southern city. And your exhibit highlights that, but it also highlights how it was not necessarily equal opportunity that was generated for all. There were union issues, racial issues. Do you want to talk a little bit about how your exhibit highlights those kinds of conflicts that happened?
Sure. The bulk of our collection does kind of help a researcher explore the early days of the mill, say from its founding in 18-- or the building of the original building in 1881 up through into the 1920s and so forth. And so part of what we've done with the material-- the featured materials we have is sort of focus on some early parts of the story.
Again, when you do an exhibit, oftentimes you find you don't have the time, the space to actually tell everything, And so it does-- we feel kind of like an exhibit-- this is an introduction to the collection and an introduction to a visitor to come and find out more about this.
You're literally talking about space in a gallery.
Yes.
And time to do the design?
Yes, yeah. All those things are constraints on what--
And there's space constraints. I guess it's about the size of an average classroom, maybe a little--
Yes, it's around 1,300 square feet.
Slightly bigger than a classroom, Fred.
Specifically, some of the things that we hit on in the exhibit-- the narrative structure that we arrived at for the exhibit was basically sort of to block out the story that we were going to tell into five chapters plus a timeline. And again in that sense of you're building something for different kinds of users, like somebody who may come in and read everything that's written there versus somebody who may come in and read all of the text that's over 6 inches tall or something like that.
So you want to block out the ideas in a way that they would walk out of the exhibit with some sense of what this is all about, and one of the ways in which we elected to do that was to highlight the context of Atlanta and the South and the post Civil War era that Alex was speaking to. For the mill itself, what was the working life like? The people who worked there-- what did they get paid? Or how long did they have to work in a day?
There's an important strike-- not the only strike that takes place but an important strike that takes place in 1914, so one of the chapters kind of addresses that and addresses the conflict, the labor conflict between management and the workers that emerge out of that and also some union organization-- union organizing that takes place in there.
And then our last chapter is "History by a Graveyard," which sort of hits on this idea of, once all the-- once the party is over, once everything is done in the mill shuts down in 1974, what happens to all the things that were the documentation of the business?
I want you to say that again. "History by the Graveyard"?
"History by a Graveyard," which is a title that we stole from an article by Robert McMath, who was a former professor here, and it was one of his original articles that appeared in a journal that had to do with how Georgia Tech got the collection. And we got the collection in 1985. Again, the mill had been closed for about 10-plus years at that point, and the archivists at Georgia Tech were invited to kind of collect some materials.
And they found more than they had bargained for, I think, in a lot of ways.
Had it been sitting in an unused building for 10 years?
Yes. Yeah. And so the collection includes-- and maybe Alex wants to jump in-- papers, photographs, architectural drawings, the ledgers. There's one of the large payroll ledgers in the exhibit, but we have lots more of those documenting just-- it's like the record-keeping of a business.
That was a very striking thing to me to see that giant ledger with the-- the description of the person who had the most pay that was listed on there was like a notorious awful manager to his folks. It was during the strike, and it was like-- KIRK HENDERSON: Gordon Johnstone. That was the name. Thank you for reminding me. Yeah, a lot of source of conflict there, but the highest pay on the ledger for sure.
So wait. Did you all add the context that he was a notorious, horrible person, or is that in the ledger itself?
Well, when we-- it was-- when we were going through item selection, we actually had a smaller ledger that we were going to use initially but ended up finding this bigger one that had a really nice impact and filled the case really well. And then when we were looking closer at it, I think Kirk recognized the name and had a story behind it as well. So we were able to highlight that as well.
Now, I have seen some pictures of archive staff-- not from 1985 but from more recently-- with hard hats and gloves and kind of walking through dust and cobwebs. Several people in the audience right now were in those pictures. So was that the nature of the collection, just going into a mostly-abandoned building and pulling stuff out and filling up moving boxes and that kind of thing?
Before my time, but yeah, that's my--
You must have heard--
That's my understanding of-- Bob McMath in the article that he wrote talks about having been invited into-- here's some things in filing cabinets. And then they ask some more questions like, are there any other business records? And it's like, oh, there are these ledgers, which could have ended up in the trash.
And then there are hundreds of architectural drawings that document all of these old mill buildings, the building of which started in the late 19th century and continued into the 20th, schematics that have to do with how does the stuff in the mill work, so machinery drawings and those kinds of things.
So all the historians that-- I'll mention a couple people if you want to find out more about this collection, Gary Fink and Cliff Kuhn, both of-- I think both from Georgia State University, had used this collection years ago to write-- each of them wrote a book on this specifically focusing on the 1914 strike.
But they were great fans of the extent of the documentation that was captured in these collections that kind of shows what was mill life like in an industrial complex in an urban area in the South in the early days of the 20th century.
I really like the idea that the archivists are detectives and looters to some extent.
Pirates, really.
I have worked with people that have dumpster-dove for collections. And there's rights issues with that, but thankfully it was a situation where a firm had-- a very well-known architecture firm had gone under, and they literally just chucked all the records of this very significant architecture firm. And I worked with the people that like 20 years prior had been dumpster-diving to save everything.
Are you able to sum up that rights issue that you mentioned in a minute or so? Or is it way too complicated? Is it another show, or is it--
That's probably another show. I can introduce you to those folks, I'm sure.
All right. Yeah, we're doing that. We have to do that.
But for now, you're listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll hear more about the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills and maybe some Archive shenanigans on the left side of the hour.
We can go again.
Yeah, go, go.
OK. I'm Norie Guthrie.
And I'm Scott Carlson. NORIE GUTHRIE AND SCOTT CARLSON: And we're Indie Preserves. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks.
WREK Atlanta.
(SINGING) Well, you're in your little room, and you're working on something good. But if it's really good, you're going to need a bigger room. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called "Bringing the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills to the Library," all about the Mills and the exhibit at the Georgia Tech Library. Histories are made and told in many different ways. I'd like to read a small section from A History of Cabbagetown, which was created by the Cabbagetown Neighborhood Improvement Association.
"The mill is a rare example of Atlanta's earliest industrial architecture and was added to the National Historic Register in 1976 along with the original houses surrounding the mill. After the century-old mill closed in 1977, Cabbagetown went into a brief decline. Some of the original workers left to find work, but many stayed. Sparked by an influx of artists in the 1980s, including the photographer Raymond Herbert, known by many as Panorama Ray, Cabbagetown started to see tremendous growth.
Many had high hopes for the Atlanta art scene and aspired to make Cabbagetown into an art gallery district as well as an overall artistic zone. Panorama Ray opened an art studio and photo gallery called Cirkut Central--" And this is Charlie. He misspelled circuit pretty seriously. I don't know what he's trying to do there. "--Cirkut Central on the main drag of Carroll Street.
In 1995, during a time of rapid renewal and gentrification within Atlanta's neighborhoods, the mill was sold for conversion into lofts. The project was one of the biggest loft conversions in the United States and required funding from several sources, including city of Atlanta, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Empowerment Zone Program. Today the old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill is a gated community called the Fulton Cotton Mill Lofts.
Since Panorama Ray's death in 1997, Carroll Street has become the home of some of Atlanta's most noteworthy restaurants and makes a great people-watching spot." I find that such an interesting end to a short history of the mill in Cabbagetown. File this set under KPL1394.K48.
[GISELLE SMITH AND THE MIGHTY MOCAMBOS, "WORKING WOMAN"]
[CREDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL, "THE WORKING MAN"]
That was the working man by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Did you notice, Fred, he doesn't believe in magic, he goes to work instead?
That's the persona that Fogerty created, for sure.
Weird dude. Before that was "Working Woman" by Giselle Smith and The Mighty Mocambos. Those are about-- those are songs about people who do the work.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Bringing the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills to the Library" featuring recordings from a live discussion of the Georgia Tech Library's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills exhibit with members of the archives. Here is Kirk Henderson, Exhibits Program Manager, talking about how to start designing an exhibit like this one.
I think usually our first step with an exhibit like this that has a historical story to it is that we kind of created a narrative framework, and--
Does that come like you would set up an academic paper? When you said "five chapters," do you kind think of it like an argument that you're making? Or is that something different?
It can be, but you also might be gauging-- one of my former colleagues at the History Center always used to say, an exhibit is not a book on the wall, and so you're managing how much content, how much of the story you can tell. And so part of that structuring the narrative is based on that, and that was facilitated by the fact that our archivists had gone through this collection and processed it previously. So there was a structure in terms of how things were organized.
We had background content already written. That was a general story of the mill, and we were able to seize on that to start building a timeline. So earlier when I said we had five chapters, I think of it five plus a timeline. And so we try to figure out, what is that content going to be? And also that becomes, what is the job description of-- how do we get the stuff written? And that was a collaborative project between all of the archivists and Connor and myself.
And then selecting the artifacts is also something that was mostly in the hands of the archivists that kind of would fit into those chapters or at least be-- and their stories those artifacts would be enough adjacent that it makes sense to include them in the overall story. CHARLIE BENNETT: So you didn't have an artifact that was the thing wanted to present and then build around it? Oh, you can do that too.
You do that?
Yeah.
I kind of-- I thought-- I imagined you putting a bunch of stuff out on the floor and saying, OK, what looks good? What can I talk about?
Well the sewing machines were always in.
I would say--
I've got two sewing machines? They're going in.
Yeah. I would say that happened on a smaller scale because I came in later in where a lot of the chapters and like overall story had already been decided, so Jody and Alison and Alex had done a lot of work selecting artifacts that they thought could work for the exhibit.
So then I came in and worked on with Kirk of looking at-- pulling out all those items and then placing them in the case that made the most sense, or where it could support the story, or where there were other little interesting tidbits that couldn't get expressed in the larger story that kind of got to be featured in the exhibit cases. So that was one of the ways I went through and kind of organized it a little bit, although it had already been somewhat organized as well, so.
In the layout of the room as you were considering it-- 1,300 square feet, you said-- and all the constraints that you're working with-- you also mentioned the constraints of chapters. You said five chapters, but then you kind of caught yourself, said maybe it should have been more. So what really broke your heart that you couldn't include, like you just didn't have room to get either a part of the story or an artifact or something out there for either one of them?
Well, from the looks on their faces that's a question for each one of you.
I'm trying to think--
I need to hear the thoughts that just happened.
I think the timeline was ventured as a multi-layered timeline, and making decisions on that-- and we all kind of got together and--
--multiple sessions. KIRK HENDERSON: --talked that through, and there was multiple sessions and a big wall in a room downstairs where all kinds of photocopies were pasted up and things are written down and so forth that-- one of the things-- well, just to speak for a moment about the general thesis.
The introduction to the exhibit kind of makes the case that Georgia Tech and the mill grew up together, and because they were, as Alex was pointing out earlier, the textile industry and educating a class of engineers to run these kinds of industrial facilities, that there was always this interconnectedness, and we wanted to kind of play that out.
So one of the things, one of the layers on the timeline, is like, what happens at Georgia Tech during this time that does kind of tie into textile industry production and so forth? And we found some instances where there was kind of a close connection, where Jacob Elsas is a benefactor of Georgia Tech in the early days and a promoter of establishing the school.
And the timeline is-- we also envisioned that we would have more content that would have what's happening in Atlanta or in the United States at this time. And I think one of the things that happens when you get into-- just like, oh, that's a lot more complicated than we have space and time for, and when you consider that kind of thing-- if you-- well, if we introduce a topic, we've got to cover it. And then it's like-- you realize like, and we don't have space to cover that.
So we had to make editorial decisions.
Literally space on the wall but then also mental space, right?
Yeah.
You can't overload an exhibit-goer.
So that's an example-- it's a little bit high-concept-- of just kind of like, how much stuff can we fit into that-- and we early on kind of made the decision to take the timeline all the way through to the present day, where the mill is now residential housing, which we found kind of an interesting turn of events for the physical property. CHARLIE BENNETT: I just had a-- so is "History by the Graveyard" history by Oakland Cemetery?
Oakland Cemetery.
Correct.
OK. I had this image like the metaphorical graveyard, so historians by the graves--
A literal graveyard.
And Jacob, the founder of the mill, is buried in Oakland, correct?
Yes.
Because I believe Alex got a photo of that.
No, that was Katie.
It was Katie.
Katie did a lot--
Sorry, give credit to Katie.
--for this exhibit, yeah.
Shout-out to Katie Gentilello, past and future guest.
Yeah. I would also say something, that maybe I wish we could have incorporated a little bit more, as we mentioned before, there's a lot of architectural drawings, but they are very large, so don't fit easily in a frame, didn't fit in a case. So we did fit one of the smaller blueprints of a mill house in one of the cases, and then we had to photocopy a few others to include. But there are a lot of large-scale architectural drawings.
CHARLIE BENNETT: And that's what you wish you could have more of in the exhibit? Yeah, like if we had a big enough frame.
Yeah, I guess mine would be-- I know we have a lot on-- a lot of reports on injuries or accidents that happened at the mill, which we have a few that made it in. But we have a ton, some very interesting ones that just for space we couldn't include it. But I think it really illustrates just how dangerous it was and what the conditions were like for folks doing these jobs for so little pay and why they wanted to strike ultimately.
Yeah I think we were able to include maybe two stories--
Yeah, but we have--
--when it's huge.
Huge.
Heavy box.
Right. So like each of those aspects could have its own exhibit, right?
In some ways, yes.
We're coming to the end. I'd like to ask each of you, what did you learn in this project? And not all of it, but just, what is something that you're taking away from having done this work?
I've been living in Atlanta for 20-plus years, and I always knew that the mill was there, and I kind of knew some of the stories behind it and because I've been here in Archives for a long time was kind of familiar with the collection itself, but just delving into this with the idea of pulling out a presentation, a story, a narrative gave me the opportunity to get a much clearer sense of, oh, I understand now which building is which when I drive by. I know more about who the characters were.
I know more about the social context of, say, Cabbagetown, the mill village adjacent, and know more about the specific characters who were the players in this particular story. And so that was an opportunity to get more in depth about, oh, yeah, Cabbagetown, you know where that is? Yeah, I do, yeah. It's like, do you know the story behind that? Let me tell you, so.
Yeah, I would probably say-- so I wasn't even here a full year when we started working on this exhibit. I hadn't had my one-year anniversary. So for me, it was a really good opportunity to really delve into the early days of Georgia Tech and who were the players and how did the early departments come about. I was-- there's a really great book, Engineering the South, that is like this big and has a ton of footnotes and an index.
And I was just deep in it, reading about just how Georgia Tech came to be, who were the names, who were the people giving money, how did we end up with these schools being the first or the early ones that we got. And I had studied Georgia history. That was one of my areas for my master's degree. But I think really I didn't-- I hadn't really thought about the role that Georgia Tech played in the industrialization of Atlanta after the Civil War, and so that was very helpful for me.
I'm really glad I got to have that time and space to do that and contribute to this exhibit, so.
Yeah, I think-- not to be too repetitive, but similarly, because I was newer coming into Tech, it was really nice to get into an exhibit that told so much of Tech's history, so it kind of helped me also learn some of the background and history. And I've also lived in Georgia my whole life, and my father is a Georgia history teacher. But even something like this is-- you know that there's a textile industry.
You know that exists in Atlanta and it was industrialized, but getting to learn the specifics and see all the details that were included in the exhibit as well. So I enjoyed all of that.
Very nice. Fred, you got a final question?
Why now? We've had this material since 1985. Obviously the exhibit gallery is only a couple of years old, but out of all the things in the archives, why that one now?
Why not?
That's the right answer.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and you have been listening to excerpts from a recorded live discussion of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills exhibit at the Georgia Tech Library featuring Alex McGee, the University Archivist, Kirk Henderson, the Exhibits Program Manager, and Connor Lynch, the Exhibits Associate.
File this set under TS1581.S4.
[AL GREEN, "DRIVING WHEEL"]
(SINGING) My baby--
[BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, "FACTORY"]
You heard "Factory" by the boss, Bruce Springsteen, and before that we heard "Driving Wheel" by Al Green, songs about how machinery sometimes moves things forward and sometimes it doesn't. Today's show is called "Bringing the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills to the Library," which is a nice bookend to how the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills brought Georgia Tech to Atlanta in a way.
I got to go check out that exhibit. Fred, make something labor-related when you roll those credits.
Got it.
[TALKING HEADS, "FOUND A JOB"]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. The track is "Found a Job--"
There you go.
--so--
Well done. Thank you for that. Legal counsel and a perfectly preserved driving wheel were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. Where do you get that?
Special thanks to Kirk, Alex, and Connor for being part of the show, to all the folks at the Georgia Tech Library who helped make the exhibit and arranged the panel discussion. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us.
Next week on Lost in the Stacks, we're going to talk about instruction again, and this time we're bringing in an expert.
Wow.
It's time for our last song today. Hopefully, today we all learned a little about how important the manufacturing of the humble bag was to Atlanta's history but also how an archives department can assess a collection, curate it, and make it visually and intellectually compelling even if the content is just about making bags.
Fred, what have you got against bags, man?
That's what good archives folks do, Charlie. If you need an interesting exhibit, the Archives Department has got it in the bag. So we're going to close with "In the Bag" by Dojo Cuts right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.
You too, Fred.
[DOJO CUTS, "IN THE BAG"]