TIFTON, Ga. (WALB) - A lone smokestack in Tifton is all that remains of a cotton mill that shaped the city for generations.

Henry Harding Tift built the Tifton Cotton Mills in the early 1900s. The factory filled quickly with adults and children working long hours in difficult conditions.

Tifton resident Jackie Carr, 76, grew up watching her parents work inside the mill for a combined 84 years.

“My mother was in the spinning department, and she did that for 40 years. And my dad worked in the twister department. And he worked for 44 years,” Carr said. “They worked hard. They came home tired. I don’t recall them ever complaining. It was their lifestyle.”

The Village

The mill anchored an entire village. Carr describes a church called Bessie Tift Chapel as the centerpiece of the community. She grew up in shotgun homes along Avondale Avenue, attended Emmanuel Village School, and played with neighborhood kids on a historic Tifton bridge. The homes, school, and bridge are no longer there.

“I grew up here with no indoor bathroom. I had no indoor running hot water. And I did not realize how poor we really were. Very simple, but poor,” Carr said.

Carr married in Bessie Tift Chapel, the community’s gathering place. She said she never felt the stigma of poverty. Her childhood was filled with kids playing on the bridge, shared meals at neighbors’ homes, passed-down legends, and the daily ritual of watching parents walk home from the cotton mill.

“Once I left here, I realized that how blessed I was to have lived in such an environment that down the road made me want to do better,” Carr said. “We were just a big family in the village.”

Today, the smokestack stands as a marker of what historians call a harsh era of labor. But for Carr and others who grew up there, it marks a tight-knit community that shaped who they became.

“If someone had a loss in their family or an illness, whatever they had, everybody contributed to help them and to get through that, like one big family,” Carr said.

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