Cecile Redding Collection

This collection has been the primary task that I have been working on throughout my internship with the Center for Public History at the University of West Georgia. The collection itself contains the mementos, newspapers, and work-related documents that a couple named Jean and J.C Otwell had collected over the years as they lived in Bremen and worked for the Sewell company, which manufactured clothing from the 1950s up to the late 1980s. The Sewell company began in Atlanta in 1918 and after the original owner sold his shares to the Sewell brothers, which included Warren, Robert, and Roy, they moved their manufacturing company to Bremen, Georgia in 1928, where they began manufacturing men’s apparel for the national market, starting by buying a plant in nearby Bowdon in 1948. Following this purchase, the company continued to expand, opening new plants in Temple, Bowdon Junction, and Helfin, Alabama. The company would reach its peak in the 1970s and 80s when Bremen and surrounding plants became to be known as “The Clothing Center of the South”[1]

My main responsibility for this collection was to go through and process each item, making note of its physical collection before final drafting an arrangement plan and finding aid for this collection. Overall, I feel I've done a decent job of processing this collection as a novice archivist. I was able to gain a lot of insight of how much work and time goes into processing a single collection. I'd initially thought that processing this small collection would take two weeks into my internship yet as I started working on this collection, it eventually occupied most of my time but enjoyed every minute of it nevertheless.

[1] The Center for Public History at the University of West Georgia, The West Georgia Textile Heritage Trail. Charleston. Arcadia Publishing, 2015.