Fulton Bag & Cotton Mill: The Dynamo's Roar

Lyrics

[Intro]
Eighteen sixty-eight.
A German accent on the humid air.
Jacob Elsas arrives.
Not with a roar, but with a single idea.
A single thread.
A factory for jute-brown bags.

[Verse 1]
And from that seed, a kingdom of red brick.
Sprawling acres in Adair Park.
Smokestacks reaching for a hazy sky.
A city built within the city.
The floorboards tremble with the coming work.
He built a village for the hands that served the loom.
Taught their children in the Elsas School.
A new Atlanta rising from the clay.

[Chorus]
This is the dynamo's roar.
The sound of a hunger that is never filled.
Thirty thousand bales of cotton, a year's demand.
And a mile north, the Virginia Cotton Docks stand and wait.
This is the engine's heart, the city's iron will.

[Verse 2]
By nineteen-oh-three, the plant is absolute.
The air is thick with cotton dust and machine oil.
A constant, heavy vibration underfoot.
A world away from the quiet of the fields.
The steam whistle screams another dawn, another shift.
Turning out millions of bags, thousands of yards of duck.
The great machine consumes.

[Bridge]
The railroad sidings are the veins.
Carrying the white gold from the farms.
And the cars slow as they pass the warehouse.
That silent building on the corridor.
A holding pen.
A brief pause on the journey south.
Each bale a promise for the spinning frames.
Each one destined for the dynamo's roar.

[Outro]
The hunger never ends.
The roar never sleeps.
It just waits for the next train.
The dynamo turns.
And turns.
And turns.