The Daniel Pratt Historic District [†], encompassing the nineteenth-century nucleus of the town of Prattville, consists of over two hundred properties representing a diversity of commercial, industrial, residential, and institutional architecture. Most of the structures in the district fall into the period between 1840 and 1930, with an especially heavy concentration of buildings erected during the four decades between 1880 and 1920. The district fans northward and easterly from Autauga Creek over some fifteen city blocks. A small but highly significant portion of the district also lies along the southwest side of the creek and includes the earliest industrial buildings around which the town developed after 1839. Here, too, is located the picturesque hilltop Pratt family cemetery, the only remaining component of the extensive domestic complex which Daniel Pratt developed about his now-destroyed family mansion. (Pratt's residence, erected in 1841-42, stood approximately two hundred feet west of his cotton gin factory on a site obliterated in the 1960s by the expansion of the Bush Hog/Continental Gin complex, successor to the original Pratt enterprise.)
District is significant for its association with Daniel Pratt. A New Hampshire born industrialist, inventor, manufacturer, architectural designer and builder, Pratt was the equal of William Gregg of Graniteville, South Carolina in his efforts as a champion of the cause of industrialization and the use of poor white labor in the mills of the staunchly agrarian South. From 1838 until his death in 1873, Pratt oversaw the development of his namesake town as a model Southern .industrial community. In recognition of his efforts, the University of Alabama conferred the degree of Masters of Mechanical and Useful Arts upon Pratt in 1847. By 1860 Pratt's Gin Company, located at Prattville, had become the most successful manufacturer of superior quality cotton gins below the Mason-Dixon Line and his Prattville Manufacturing Company was one of the leading producers of varied textiles to be in Alabama. From 1861-1865 Pratt served in the Alabama Legislature as a representative of Autauga County. After the War Between the States, Pratt purchased extensive tracts of mineral lands in North Alabama and was a pioneer in the development of the Birmingham Iron District. Pratt was the driving force behind the development of Prattville. As J.D.B. DeBow described him,"hisindustry knows no pediment or regards no toil. Night and day this man of enterprise may be found at his post."
The District is significant as probably the foremost example, in Alabama, of a mid-19th century Southern industrial community in which all facets of operation and social conditions were controlled by a single individual. The industrial complex and village of Prattville, developed and controlled by Daniel Pratt is comparable to the great industrial complex developed by William Gregg, the South's most influential promoter of industrialization, at Graniteville, South Carolina. Daniel Pratt fs intention was to upgrade the status of poor rural whites and to overthrow the prejudices against mill labor held by the agrarian South. Pratt built his factories and village infused with the New England attitude towards work in order, as he stated, "to give the laboring class an opportunity of not only making an independent living but to train up workmen who could dignify to labor." Pratt modeled his mill village after his home town of Temple, New Hampshire, always conscious to maintain a small village and not an industrial city. It was easier, asserted Pratt, to maintain health and social controls in a small village rather than a large city. By 1860 Pratt deemed the social experiment of the industrial village of Prattville, for the most part, a success. Pratt's attitude towards the upgrading of poor whites and the social controls he implemented in Prattville were forerunners of those held by Post-Civil War industrialists and could be found within the industrial towns created during the manufacturing boom of the New South.
† Adapted from: Michael Bailey and Robert Gamble, Alabama Historical Commission, Daniel Pratt Historic District, nomination document, 1984, National Register of Historic Places, Washington, D.C., accessed October, 2024.
