Roswell was chartered in 1854, but its founding identity took shape two decades earlier when Roswell King relocated from coastal Georgia and established the Roswell Manufacturing Company along Vickery Creek in 1839. The mill harnessed the creek's fall line to power cotton and woolen production, and the families King brought with him — the Bullochs, the Smiths, the Dunwodys, the Pratts, and others — built the antebellum homes that still stand inside the historic district today.
The Civil War interrupted that arc. In July 1864 Union forces under General Kenner Garrard burned the Roswell mills and forcibly relocated roughly 400 mill workers, most of them women, north to Indiana, an event still marked locally as the Roswell Mill Women incident. The mill buildings were rebuilt after the war and operated into the 20th century. The original mill ruins along Vickery Creek and the surviving antebellum homes — Bulloch Hall (1839), the Smith Plantation (1845), and Barrington Hall (1842) — anchor the present-day Historic Roswell district.
Through the second half of the 20th century, Roswell shifted from a small mill town to a residential anchor of north metro Atlanta. The completion of GA-400 in the 1970s and the rapid expansion of Fulton County north of the Perimeter pulled population growth into Roswell's western neighborhoods, while preservation ordinances enacted in the 1970s and 1980s protected the antebellum core. Canton Street's transition from a quiet town center to a restaurant and retail destination came later, in the early 2000s.