The Bell Bomber Plant (Images of America: Georgia)

Few would have believed in the late 1930s that Depression-wracked Marietta and Cobb County, where cotton was still king, would later be the site of the largest industrial complex south of the Mason-Dixon line, or that it would be churning out hundreds of the largest and most technically advanced airplanes ever built to that point. Images of America: The Bell Bomber Plant uses more than 200 photographs to recount how opportunistic local leaders persuaded the federal government to build an airfield in Marietta and then parlayed it into the plant. It tells the story of how a workforce of undereducated farmers and thousands of “Rosie the Riveters” proved surprisingly adept at mastering the technical challenges of building bombers, and of how the plant jump-started the transformation of Cobb County from a semi-rural backwater to a suburban Southern powerhouse.