After I started research about my grandfather’s playing career at Tech High and Georgia Tech last year, I had the idea that I might want to write an Atlanta history blog since I don’t know of anyone writing one. Speaking with my Great Aunt Jane recently has made me even more interested in the idea.
If you want to know how a lot of the posts would read, surf over to this Pecanne Log entry about Atlanta’s seedy past culled from various sources. That post even gave me an idea for what I’d name the blog: Snake Nation. Snake Nation was one of two sections of Atlanta “inhabited by the criminal element,” a “wicked suburb” which was “a great annoyance to the good citizens of Atlanta.” Perfect.
I have a lot of ideas for posts. I’d probably start out combining tidbits I found in books and old newspapers with some of my own family’s history. There likely would never be a shortage of material for “this day in Atlanta history” posts since Atlanta history is well-represented in books, but I’m betting there’s a lot of anecdotal history like Jane’s floating around that hasn’t been published many places, if at all. Ultimately, that’s what I’d like to find and write about.
Jane has been writing down her memories, which span about 35 single-spaced pages at the moment. To give but one small example of the stories I’d like to find and publish on this hypothetical blog, here is some of what she wrote about “Grandpa Tarrant” (my great great great grandfather William T. Tarrant). Emphasis mine:
Grandpa Tarrant was born in 1858 in Atlanta, on Whitehall Street, which was one of the main streets at the time. Atlanta was first called Terminus because it was where the first railroad into the town terminated. It was later named Marthasville after the daughter of an Ex-Governor, Wilson Lumpkin, who had been most active in getting plans for expanding the railroad systems. By 1845 Marthasville had three railroads that opened up transportation in all directions. This was the beginning of making our city into the “Gateway of the South.” In 1848, just ten years before Grandpa was born, the legislature incorporated the town and named it City of Atlanta. At the time it had twenty-one citizens, and its city limits were set a mile in all directions from the depot. Grandpa told us at the age of nine he remembered waving good-by to his daddy as he got on the train to go fight in the Civil War. His father had moved the family down to Stockbridge near some of his relatives when the “March to Atlanta” started in Tennesseee.
I never felt a sense of place growing up in Marietta or living in Knoxville when I went to school there. Much of my mother’s side of the family lived in Atlanta proper for about 100 years before moving to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. There is something comforting about living and working here that comes from this connection to the city’s history. Technically I live a few hundred feet outside the city border, but I still feel an obligation to be a caretaker of that lineage since I’m close enough.
The part that deflates me about the blog idea is the time commitment necessary to do it right would be too much for me right now. I’d want to, and have to, enlist the help of some co-conspirators. Having been on the other end of the “do you want to do a bunch of work for no pay?” question more times than I’d like to recall, I understand that the grocery store doesn’t accept good will and exposure. So I’m not optimistic that will work out.
I should note, for example, that I haven’t fact-checked the passage I quoted from Jane. That’s something I’d have to at least make an effort to do if I were writing a dedicated history blog, which could get very time-consuming very quickly.
So it may be a while. It may never happen. Maybe someone like the Atlanta History Center will start writing a really awesome blog with factoids like Peccane Log put together, and I can just be content to read it and continue research about my own family.
And it may be that something like this exists right under my nose and I just haven’t stumbled across it yet. Please tell me if that’s the case in the comments.
Update, July 4 10:13 a.m. – Actually, I probably wouldn’t call it Snake Nation since the Atlanta History Center ran/runs a “social club” by that name. I’m going to try to check it out if it still exists. It’s hard to tell since there doesn’t appear to be much recent online activity since 2007 and I can’t find info on the website.
