The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills

Set in a Southern mill town called Cottontown, the novel traces the intertwined lives of mill owners, managers, workers, and families as the cotton industry shapes their fortunes. It follows characters such as a mill overseer, a scheming whipper-in, mill girls, clergy, and various townspeople through courtship, labor disputes, moral reckonings, illness, accidents, a destructive fire, and legal and spiritual reckonings. Themes include industrial change, class tensions, community responsibility, faith, redemption, and the human costs and reforms of mill life, culminating in reconciliations, transformations of characters, and efforts to create a more humane model mill.