Roswell: A Mill Town Named for Its Founder

Lyrics

You were just a creek.
You were just the fall line finding its voice.

He came south from Windsor, Connecticut.
May the third, 1765, was his first day.
Seventy-four winters in his bones, standing by your water in the gray.
He held a brass surveyor's compass in his palm,
watched the needle tremble, then find its home.
His men stretched the sixty-six-foot Gunter's chain through the laurel,
measuring the power in your foam.
The year was 1839.
He saw the future taking hold.

And he said: I will call you Roswell.
I will give you my first name.
A straight, deliberate line from New England,
laid across this Georgia clay.
I will call you Roswell.
And the water here will learn to say my name.

The air smelled of tannin and damp earth that October.
The water ran fifty-eight degrees.
For three weeks, his party camped on the bluff,
beneath the hickory and sweetgum trees.
He left a single pewter spoon in the dirt,
a small thing stamped with the letters R and K.
A quiet claim, a silver promise,
before the first foundation stone was laid.

The Cherokee paths were not yet cold that year.
The ink from the treaty was not yet dry.
The men who held the rod steady for his survey,
their names were never written, you and I
know only the sound the water made,
a steady, constant, patient roar.
He heard the whisper of the looms to come,
the turning of a heavy factory door.

And he said: I will call you Roswell.
I will give you my first name.
A straight, deliberate line from New England,
laid across this Georgia clay.
I will call you Roswell.
And the water here will learn to say my name.

A name.
Spoken to the water.
A charter signed in the Georgia Assembly that December.
A new sound on the wind.
Roswell.