The Goat Farm Arts Center

This guide to the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta starts with Robert Haywood, a Wisconsin transplant who bought a kudzu-swallowed Atlanta cotton mill in the early nineteen seventies and let loose a herd of goats to clear the vines. It follows how that fix got away from him as the goats kept multiplying, and how painters, sculptors and musicians began moving into the emptied brick mill buildings drawn by cheap rent and the odd sight of livestock grazing beneath old smokestacks. The mill itself once turned out cotton press machinery for gins across the region, long before anyone thought to bring in goats.