100-Year-Old Mill Makes for a Tight-Knit Community

If you live to be 100, it’s reason celebrate. So next month a bunch of people will get together to toast a centenarian—the building they work and live in on Radium Street in Marietta.

It was a place where 100 years ago a man could get himself a good pair of socks, Radium half-hose they were called, for a quarter. Lesser brands could be had for 15 cents.

The hosiery was manufactured by Marietta Knitting Company in a new mill, where company president R. H. Northcutt employed 175 people.

“Our socks are worn in every state in the nation,” the company once boasted in an advertisement, “and we ship them direct to half a dozen foreign countries.”

By 1931 Marietta Knitting Company had moved on, and the building was home to Hole Proof Hosiery (a doubtful promise but a nice name). In 1995 it was an antiques mall, and in 1997 it became the McClaren Mill lofts.

Today it is home to 11 lofts, three medical offices and one printing company.

The building is historic. It has original 14-foot beadboard ceilings, original hardrock maple floor, brick everywhere and spiders.

“Really big spiders,” says Jennifer Wells with a laugh. She lives with her husband, Roy, in a corner, one-bedroom loft with a wraparound brick patio. “I have arachnophobia more than I’ve ever had in my whole life.”

No worries. Jennifer isn't really afraid of spiders. She loves the place.

“Neighbors actually talk to each other,” says Wells, the children’s librarian at the Cobb County’s Central Library on Roswell Street. “I see people (in the neighborhood) who use the library. I did a library card for somebody recently and said, 'You live on my street.'”

Wells said she’d miss that community feeling if she and her husband lived in Midtown Atlanta, which is where they lived when they first married.

Wells grew up in East Cobb, went off to college at Georgia Southern and the University of South Carolina and started her career in Griffin at the Flint River Regional Library. “I didn’t mean to come back. I got done with grad school and thought, I’ll just move wherever I can find a job. But I got engaged, and he was living in Cumming.”

Roy Wells was commuting to Atlanta, so they moved to Midtown. “There was a job open in Cobb for a children’s librarian,” Jennifer said. “I didn’t want to be a children’s librarian, but I thought, well, that would be way closer.

“Turns out I like children.”

Wells started working in Cobb in 2000, commuting to several of the library system’s branches. The couple bought a house in Smyrna in 2002, and Jennifer was named children’s librarian at the main library in 2004.

The house in Smyrna was always “too big,” Wells says, so when a sales center opened for the Meeting Park development, a block from the library, the first thing that came to mind was, "We’d love this. It had the feel of Midtown, being able to walk to things."

“We were some of the first few people to buy in the condo portion.”

The developer was only able to get a few town homes built in the middle of Meeting Park before the housing market crashed. More than a year later the project was redesigned, and people who had put down deposits were called in to sign new contracts.

“They were making it more ‘East Cobb,’” Jennifer Wells said. “They started with ‘just slightly East Cobb but sort of Midtown,’ but turned it into something that was ‘East Cobb.’

“I grew up in East Cobb. I don’t have a problem with East Cobb, but it really wasn’t what we wanted.”

Still, it was a block from Marietta Square and a block from the library. Close enough to Roy’s job in Vinings. Still “sort of Midtown.”  They signed.

Six months later the development went bust, and everyone got their money back.

Driving around in 2009 looking for something else, the couple came upon the old sock mill on Radium Street. The condos vary in sizes from one to three stories, so they waited for the loft they wanted—“small and cute with an outdoor space,” as Jennifer puts it.

“It’s not quite as close, but we’ll walk to the square,” she said. “We really like walking to the square (a bit over a mile), but walking back we sometimes get about halfway and go, 'Oh, this stinks.'"

Wells, 37, can walk to work too.