Posts

The Chamblee to Roswell Railroad

Image
Although there are practically no remnants of it left, there was a railroad, the Roswell Railroad, that ran from south of Roswell to Chamblee from 1881 until 1921.   It carried both passengers and freight.   The north end of the line was located south of the Chattahoochee River near Roberts Drive in Roswell.   A bridge over the Chattahoochee was planned but never built. Ike Roberts, after whom Roberts Drive in Roswell was named, was an employee of the Southern Railway when it decided to construct the railroad. Roberts helped in the grading and track-laying for the line and worked as an engineer during the entire time the railroad was in existence. His home on Roberts Drive still stands. One of three railroad employee houses which was the near the tracks also still stands at Old Dunwoody Station near the intersection of Chamblee Dunwoody and Mount Vernon roads. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt rode the train to Roswell to visit his mother's childhood ho...

How a 1977 catastrophe on a small highway in Paulding County, Georgia played a role in the Miracle on the Hudson

Image
Sadly there was no miracle for most of the passengers of Southern Airways flight 242 which crash landed on a Highway 92 (now Dallas-Acworth Highway) in New Hope, Georgia about 17 miles west of Marietta on the night of April 4th, 1977.   The Southern Airways DC-9 passenger jet had suffered extensive hail damage in a severe thunderstorm en route from Muscle Shoals, Alabama to Atlanta. The hail was so severe that it shattered the windshield, caused both engines to flame-out and forced the pilots to make an immediate emergency landing.   But there was no airport close enough, or so they thought.   Air Traffic Control suggested Dobbins Air Force Base, which was 20 miles away but it was too far. The closer airport was Cornelius Moore field, now called Polk County airport, but somehow the air traffic controllers were not aware of this airport as it was just outside their area of responsibility.    Running out of options, time and altitude, the pilots sp...

How this now abandoned Atlanta estate once housed over 100 circus animals (a case study in the need for strong protective real estate covenants)

Image
Asa “Buddy” Candler, Jr.’s cryptic 1931 telegram sent from Germany to his architect in Atlanta was likely met with some confusion.   The architect might have even thought it was a joke.   But as his architect and neighbors quickly discovered, it was not.   There are several accounts of how the private zoo on Candler’s Briarcliff estate near the Emory University main campus came to be. One account has Candler drinking in a bar in Germany and initially agreeing to finance the performances of a bankrupt circus for a season, but after a few drinks, deciding to buy the circus outright.   According to this account, Candler wires his architects the message “bought circus build zoo” before heading to bed to sleep it off.   One might suspect that when the sun peaked over the horizon the next morning, and the memories of the preceding evening began to slowly filter in, that this decision might have been reconsidered.   But to the dismay of his archi...

Some say that the new Hollywood is in Georgia; truth is, the original one was in Georgia too

Image
Of course to get the full picture, and like any good Hollywood movie you have to start at the beginning, the very beginning.   The first couple of attempts for the colony called Georgia were not going to be set in Georgia’s present location.   And the original boundaries of the Georgia that did ultimately succeed would surprise you. In 1731, there were twelve English colonies on the east coast of North America with a population of over 500,000.   Remarkably, there had been 1,500 transatlantic crossings by that time as well. (Morton, William J., The Story of Georgia’s Boundaries p.17)   England was interested in expanding its footprint on the new continent and wanted to get rid of French and Spanish settlements already on the new continent that were competing for land and commerce.   There were several attempts to start the colony “Georgia” to be named after King George II. The first attempts did not work out so well.   The first colony of Georgia...

The Other Duel that Killed a Founding Father

Image
Due in part to the wildly popular Broadway musical “Hamilton,” many people are aware of the infamous duel in which a founding father, Alexander Hamilton, met his premature demise.  But most people are not aware that there was another, earlier duel in which a prominent founding father took a deadly bullet; and this one happened in Georgia.  The party drawing the short end of the stick in this duel was a man whose last name is quite familiar to most Atlantans: Button Gwinnett, namesake of Gwinnett County.  And like Hamilton, Gwinnett was killed by a political rival. The backstory: Gwinnett emigrated to the American colonies in 1762, and after less than stellar careers as a merchant and subsequently a Savannah store owner, became a planter on St. Catherines island off the Georgia coast.  At about the same time as becoming a planter, Gwinnett entered politics, first as a justice of the peace of his parish and then as his parish’s elected representative to the Georg...

GEORGIA WAS NOT ‘ALL IN’ ON INDEPENDENCE AT FIRST

Image
Many of us come away from our grade-school American history classes with the perception that after that fateful shot was fired at Concord, the one ‘heard round the world’, that independence was almost universally supported in the colonies.  Not so, and certainly not so in Georgia. When the colonists of Georgia landed on Georgia's shores they were the first new colonists on the eastern coast for over 50 years.  When discord with the motherland arose, colonists in Georgia were still very much connected to family and friends back home in England and were not immediately interested in the prospect of independence.  Add to it that the Georgia colony had a thriving economy exporting commodities like silk back to England.  Georgia colonists did not want to jeopardize their healthy economy and were generally content with the status quo.  Georgians were not even upset about the presence of British redcoats in their towns, a thorn in the side of colonists in other c...

A Little-known Georgia Island’s Role in an Early Epidemic

Image
One of the Quarantine Station buildings on the south end of the island. Georgia has played a prominent role in the national fight against epidemics and pandemics even before the CDC was established in Atlanta in 1946.  [1]  This prior role began 66 years earlier on an island rumored to be the hiding place of an infamous pirate’s buried treasure.   The pirate was Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach (or Thatche), and the island was Blackbeard Island, an island located northeast of and practically connected to Sapelo Island in McIntosh County.   Legend holds that Blackbeard buried his treasure on the island, even though no buried treasure has ever been found .  [2]  Given the myriad of secluded inlets and waterways around the island and its proximity to his piracy activities, it is likely that Blackbeard spent time there.  The island was first officially designated “Blackbeard Island” in 1760 when that name appeared on a map of...