Note: This post first appeared in my newsletter on 1 May 2024.

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When Vanessa Kinley first popped into my head, I had no idea what her setting would be. Crossville, GA, the fictional bedroom community of Atlanta, where the series is set, developed naturally during the writing of the first book, Between a Witch and a Hard Place.

Kinley's, her brother Nick's bar, needed to be grounded within the community, for example, and right from the first scene, way before the story was even outlined, I knew there was something special about the building.

These are the kinds of things that I generally wait for characters to tell me. Nessa explained how she and Nick came to live and work in that building, but she didn't know the whole of it. It wasn't until Seth was more fully fleshed out that I discovered why he'd given that space over to them.

But even still, the building had to have a background. To create it, I drew on my own background as a historical researcher and my travels around the South.

Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, cotton mills (later called textile mills) dotted the South and were often manned by women and children. Whole families would pick up and move from town to town, seeking the best pay and working conditions, not just a nuclear family of a father, a mother, and their children, but siblings and their spouses and children.

Westerners don't migrate like that anymore. The ease of modern travel has made it possible for single men and women to move clear across the country from their family, or even to a completely different one, without losing their support network.

But until roughly the post-World War II era (more or less), that's not the way things were done. Families often moved together, and it wasn't unusual still for whole communities to pick up and move, even at that late date, as they had in much earlier times. Often, a nuclear family would migrate to a place where another part of the family lived, or young, single men would explore a new area then go back home and bring the entire family back.

One such mass migration involved families moving from the Southern Appalachians to the Pacific Northwest (Oregon and Washington) to work in the timber industry. This affected not-too-distant members of my grandmother Ledford's family, the Andersons, Dills, and others who moved from Cartoogechaye Township in Macon County, North Carolina, to Skagit County, Washington, and elsewhere beginning in roughly the 1910s. The Franklin Press, Macon County's paper of record, would publish news sent back in letters and, later, phone calls so locals could keep track of friends and family members.

Anyway, many of the cotton mills were constructed of brick, and boy, were they massive. Eventually, though, as America moved more and more of its workforce away from textiles into technological jobs and knowledge work, the mills shut down and/or moved overseas and the buildings were abandoned.

There's been a concerted effort over the past couple of decades to renovate these old mills and turn them into useful spaces. In nearby Greenville, SC, several have been converted into higher end apartments. One of our more local mills was turned into an indoor market space.

But there's more to a mill town than the mill itself. Workers had to have housing, and to encourage workers to stay, owners often constructed simple houses for them. Cincinnati, OH, still has examples of one style of mill houses that are now seeing a rising popularity among property developers.

I set Crossville's mill houses a little farther away from the renovated mill than I probably should have, but the story needed the space for various reasons.

The Depot, too, was set farther away for the same reason, even though in reality, mill owners tried to minimize the distance between the mill building and the local train stop, to reduce the time it took to move products in and out of the town.

There's a reason for that distance, which was laid out in Between a Witch and a Hard Place:

"Most towns of any size have a seedy area. The strip mall where Angel ran her fortune telling business was one of Crossville’s, but not the only one, and certainly not the most dangerous. That would be the Depot, the area around the burned-out husk of the old train depot containing the remnants of grain silos and warehouses destroyed by a raging fire during the early 1930s. The factory’s owners had built a new depot closer to the factory, leaving the old depot area to rot. Tenements had been built there during the second Great War, and the area had seen a small resurgence for a time, until the gradual shift of clothing manufacturing overseas during the last half of the twentieth century.

"Now, the Depot sheltered druggies, the homeless, and those too beat down to make it outside of what was essentially a slum. It’s where the serious conmen originated, ones that made Angel’s parlor tricks look like rainbows and sunshine."

You can see there how heavily I relied on my own background to construct that history.

So, those are the two secrets behind Crossville's buildings and layout: I waited for the characters to give me clues, then I leaned on historical research, some of it already floating around in my head, to fill in the details.