Cement, GA

Ruins of a kiln from the Howard Hydraulic Cement Company that operated at this site from the 1880s to the 1910s. Reverend Charles Howard purchased property in this area in the late 1830s. Howard named his new home Spring Place, and he and his wife, Susan, later opened a school at Spring Bank. Some time in the late 1840s, Howard discovered a natural cement stone on his property adjacent to the Western & Atlantic Railroad and began selling cement under the name Howard Company. After the Civil War, Howard sold the company to his son-in-law, George Waring, who created the Howard Hydraulic Cement Company, which operated at this site until the early 1900s.

Charles Wallace Howard, a native of Savannah, Georgia, migrated to northwest Georgia in the 1830s in search of a healthier climate. He acquired around 800 acres of property north of the town of Kingston and built a home known as Spring Bank. There he and his wife, Susan, raised their family and opened a school in 1852. Reverend Howard's school became well known in the area, and families from across what was then known as Cherokee County sent their children to be educated there.

In the 1840s, Howard discovered a natural cement stone on his property, which was adjacent to the Western & Atlantic Railroad off Hall's Station Road, and Howard began producing cement from the stone. Cement production ceased during the Civil War while Howard served as a captain in the Confederate Army. Upon his return to Spring Bank after the war, he turned the school over to his daughters and devoted himself to writing and research on the topic of agriculture in Georgia. Howard served as the co-editor of the Southern Cultivator, an agricultural journal published by J.P. Harrison until 1872. Howard and his wife moved to Lookout Mountain in the 1870s, and it was at his home on Lookout Mountain that he died on Christmas Day in 1876. Howard is buried in the Spring Bank Cemetery along with his wife, who died in November 1896.

Howard sold his cement company to his son-in-law, George Waring, after the war, and Waring the revitalized company, known as the Howard Hydraulic Cement Company, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The company operated six kilns that produced between 200 and 300 barrels of cement per day and employed up to 50 men.

The community that developed around the cement factory became known as Cement. A post office was established at the site in 1880, and the State of Georgia granted a town charter to the community in 1889. The town, and the company were short-lived. By 1910 the post office closed, and both mining and manufacturing operations began shutting down. The ruins of a double-chamber cement furnace on Hall Station Road about a mile-and-a-half outside of Kingston are all that remain of the town and industrial operation. For many years, the furnace was covered with vegetation, which was removed around 2015 to reveal the ruins of the furnace.

Cement manufactured at this site was used in the Union Depot in Chattanooga, Tennessee and for some of the early buildings of Shorter College in Rome, Georgia. Following the closing of the town's post office in 1910 and the cessation of cement production in 1912, the town of Cement faded away, although the state did not repeal the city's charter until 1995.

Cement. Etowah Valley Historical Society. Accessed April 06, 2017. http://evhsonline.org/bartow-history/places/cement.

Etowah Valley Historical Society Ramble to Spring Bank. Accessed April 18, 2023. https://cms2.revize.com/revize/bartowga/departments/Keep_Bartow_Beautiful/EVHS__Spring_Bank_amended_newsletter_2015.pdf

"Col Charles Wallace Howard," Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/45579739/charles-wallace-howard.

Rocky Ruins are all that is left of Bartow County Town, Rome News-Tribune. January 16th, 2017. Accessed April 18th, 2023. https://www.northwestgeorgianews.com/gallery/news/rocky-ruins-are-all-that-is-left-of-bartow-county-town-named-cement/article_ea3ff366-dbb2-11e6-bd40-07cba08f3fc9.html.