In 1837 an army engineer named Colonel Stephen Harriman Long drove a stake into the ground and Atlanta began. A year earlier the Georgia General Assembly had voted to build the Western and Atlantic Railroad to provide a trade route to the Midwest. There had been several contenders to be “Terminus” but surveyor Long apparently liked the relative flatness here to enable trains to turn around comfortably.
The town that grew up on the railroad was first known as Thrasherville when Terminus was abandoned. John Thrasher led a work gang building the railroad and constructed houses and a general store for the workers. In 1842, when the population was about 30, the residents wanted to name the settlement after the sitting government Wilson Lumpkin but he asked them to name it after his daughter, instead, and Terminus became Marthasville. Just three years later, J. Edgar Thomson, the Chief Engineer of the Georgia Railroad,suggested that it be renamed to “Atlantica-Pacifica,” which was quickly shortened to “Atlanta.” In 1847 the town was incorporated as Atlanta, shortly after the first trains arrived.
Atlanta had fewer than 10,000 people when it became an important railroad and military supply hub during the Civil War. On November 11, 1864, after a four-month siege, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered the town burned to the ground. The burning of Atlanta would be immortalized in Margaret Mitchell’s novel and film, Gone with the Wind, but Atlantans did not waste too much time wallowing in the drama. In 1868, Atlanta became the fifth city to serve as capital of Georgia. By 1870 the population had swelled to over 20,000 and the city was on course to becoming the business and transportation hub of the “New South.”
Along the way Atlanta decided to not to cling to its southern traditions in the way that its regional neighbors such as Savannah and Charleston did. Many of its modern downtown buildings sit on lots cleared two or three times of earlier structures. Our walking tour will begin where plenty of heritage buildings remain, however, and that is because they are underground...
Midtown Atlanta has had a volatile history although it began peacefully as a pine forest north of the city. In 1848 most of the land above North Avenue - which was just that, the northern boundary of Atlanta - was purchased by Richard Peters to provide fuel to power his downtown flour mill. Over the next 40 years Peters subdivided the cleared forest lands and platted out residential lots; he built his own home at the corner of Peachtree and 4th streets.
A few blocks north Peachtree Street looped around a thirty-foot ravine that came to be called “Tight Squeeze” for ne’er do wells and thieves that inhabited the area and made it a “tight squeeze getting through there with your life.” In the 1880s the ravine was filled in and the riff-raff herded out which cleared the way for wealthy Atlantans to move in. By World War I the blocks between West Peachtree Street to the west and Piedmont Street to the east above 8th Street housed the city’s elite.
After World War II, however, the march to ever more distant suburbs began in earnest and the area was once again in decline, best described as “seedy.” The pendulum swung back again in the 1980s and Midtown rebounded into the second most important financial district in Atlanta, with many of its skyscrapers. Alas, in the streets along the Peachtree Corridor, very little is left over of the area’s original architecture including single-family homes and mansions. Our walking tour of Midtown will begin on that long-ago northern boundary of Atlanta, looking up at the highest of the high-rises...
Two years after founding the British colony of Georgia at the mouth of the Savannah River in 1735, James Oglethorpe directed troops to sail upstream and construct a blockhouse at the head of navigation on the river. He named the new settlement to honor Princess Augusta who was married at the time to Frederick, Prince of Wales. By 1739 a road was being hacked out of the 125 miles of wilderness between Savannah and Augusta, insuring its success as an inland trading post.
Fort Augusta flourished in its early days as a trading center for settlers amid peaceful relations with the neighboring Creek, Yuchi and Savano Indian tribes. After the American Revolution, during which time the British briefly held the town, Augusta began to develop its own industries, first in tobacco and then clay-brick making and then, most famously, cotton. By the eve of the Civil War in 1860 Augusta was the second largest town in Georgia with a population of over 12,000.
Blessed with good rail and water transportation and securely tucked inland, Augusta was selected as the site for the Confederate Powderworks, a munitions factory that would be the only permanent structures built by the Confederate States of America government. Almost three million pounds of top-grade gunpowder would be manufactured here to enable the Confederacy to fight for four years. Although a tempting military target, General William Sherman bypassed Augusta on his march from Atlanta to Savannah as his army was not equipped to lay siege to the town. So Augusta was unscathed by the Civil War but the Powder Works were dismantled afterwards, save for its150-foot brick chimney that still stands as a memorial to its service.
Because it had been spared during the Civil War Augusta got a jumpstart on neighboring Southern towns during Reconstruction. By the 1880s Augusta was the second largest inland cotton market in the world. Banks and railroads were headquartered here as well, Georgia Pacific lumber company was founded in Augusta in 1927 and the United States Army established Camp Gordon in Richmond County that helped keep local cash registers humming.
Not that Augusta was free from setbacks. The town was visited regularly by floodwaters from the Savannah River that eventually forced the construction of a levee. It mitigated the flooding but also took the river out of sight and out of service as a commercial asset. Fires were a regular danger culminating in a conflagration on the night of March 22, 1916. No one died in the Great Fire of 1916 but damages were estimated at $10 million, including the loss of 20,000 bales of cotton. Some 600 commercial building and houses were destroyed, leaving 3,000 people without a place to live.
Nearly a century later the Great Fire of 1916 remains the defining element of the downtown Augusta streetscape. Many of its landmarks arose from those ashes and we will see them on our exploration of the town’s main business artery, Broad Street, that is said to be the second widest “main street” in all of America...
Macon stands at the head of navigation of the Ocmulgee River, a location that has attracted settle- ment for hundreds of years. The most prominent of these earliest cultures were the Mississipians, a mound-building Native American civilization whose earthworks can still be seen not far from downtown.
European settlers began arriving in central Georgia in the early 1800s, protected by Fort Benjamin Hawkins that was constructed in 1809 to foster trading in the region. In 1822 a city was chartered and the following year it was declared the seat of the newly formed Bibb County. The town was named in honor of Nathaniel Macon, a long-time member of the United States Congress who was the Speaker of the House during the Thomas Jefferson administration. Macon was not a Georgian but a North Carolinian - many of the early farms in central Georgia were carved by emigrants from the Tar Heel State.
Macon’s central location served it well with the coming of the railroad. The local cotton crop was shipped by boat and the town thrived. During the Civil War Union General William Tecumseh Sherman bypassed Macon on his “March to the Sea” and today’s city boasts one of the largest col- lection of antebellum structures extant.
The population doubled from 10,000 to 20,000 in Macon between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. The New York Times profiled Macon and dubbed it “The Central City” for the bustling railroads shuffling goods and people in and out of the city. When the national interstate highway system was built in the 1950s and 1960s Macon was linked conveniently to Atlanta via I-75 and Savannah by I-16.
Macon’s city planners set out to create a “city within a park” and blocked out much of the original city plat with green space. In keeping with that vision we will begin our explorations of Georgia’s fourth largest city in Rosa Parks Square, shaded by some of the city’s finest civic structures....
Savannah, Georgia’s First City, sits like a jewel just across the broad Savannah River. Historic 18th century garden squares, gourmet restaurants, antique shops and boutiques beckon by day and night. The name conjures images of nights redolent with honeysuckle, warm breezes and the glint of moonlight over the sweeping river and marsh. History, tradition, courtesy and hospitality are at the heart of our Southern culture.
General James Edward Oglethorpe and 120 travelers of the good ship Anne landed on a bluff high along the Savannah River in February 1733. The thirteenth and final American colony Georgia, was named after England’s King George II and Savannah became its first city. Oglethorpe laid the city out in a series of grids that allowed for wide open streets intertwined with shady public squares and parks. Today, the Historic District is a 2.5-mile walking district full of bistros, quaint shops, green squares and grand architecture.
Savannah played an important role in both the American Revolution and the Civil War and its downtown area is one of the largest National Historic Landmark Districts in the United States. This walking tour of Savannah will begin in one of the best preserved 19th-century railroad complexes in the country, now developed as the hub of the city’s visitor services...