Cotton, fire, and dreams

by Robert Scott Davis

The slavery-based plantation economy of the Old South depended upon the technical progress of the era to survive and prosper. However, at the same time, many southerners opposed industrialization as a northern and potentially abolitionist threat to southern society. Though born in Scotland and trained in the North, Robert Findlay (1808-1859) became one of the few successful industrialists of the Old South. He did so by taking advantage of the market for agricultural technology while ingratiating himself into the society of his adopted home of Macon, Georgia. Macon served as one of the South's few machinery manufacturing cities and became the center of the South's largest railroad and river transportation work. Findlay found ways of surviving and prospering during the economically and politically turbulent years of 1836 to 1859. After his death, his foundry became the main installation of the Confederacy's vast ordnance system. Returned to the Findlay family after the war, the foundry e