Daniel Pratt Historic District

The Daniel Pratt Historic 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 f 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 textile stocks 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, "his industry knows no pediment or regards no toil. Night and day this man of enterprise may be found at his post."

The Daniel Pratt Historic 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 com­
parable to the great industrial complex developed by William Gregg, the South's most influential promoter of industrialization, at Graniteville, South Carolina. Daniel Pratt f s 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.

The focal point of the Daniel Pratt Historic District is the oldest continuously-operated industrial complex in the state of Alabama, including buildings ranging in date from the 1840s to the early 1900s. In fact, of architecture expressing antebellum Alabama's incipient manufacturing efforts, the earliest buildings of the Pratt complex—along with those at nearby Tallahassee—are virtually all that remain. Other major pre-1860 manufacturing such as the Bell Factory near Huntsville, the Cypress Mills at Florence, Scottsville in Bibb County, and Autaugaville ten miles west of Prattville, have all disappeared. Yet even among these, Prattville was in 1860 preeminent.

Complementing Prattville f s early industrial remains is a significant collection of mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century domestic and commercial architecture. The Daniel Pratt mansion itself, the key component in Prattville's ensemble of historic domestic architecture, was razed in 1961. Yet a number of lesser mill-related houses survive, representing the domiciles of both the mid-level artisan and managerial class as well as those of the "operatives" or laborers who worked in the various Pratt enterprises. Later dwellings, particularly those erected after 1900, along with an unusually intact commercial district adjoining the mill area, reflect the town's expansion as a local trade center between 1890 and 1930. Still, until recent times the architectural leitmotiv of the community continued to spring from its economic underpinnings as Alabama's oldest functioning industrial community. It is this factor which imparts to the architecture of the Prattville historic district its primary social, historical and visual significance.