Over 150 years ago, the land that is now Atlanta belonged to the Creek and Cherokee Indians. The United States was well into the War of 1812 when the first white settlement, Fort Peachtree, was established on the banks of the Chattahoochee River near the Cherokee village of Standing Peachtree. The Creek Nation ceded their lands to the State of Georgia in 1825. The Cherokees lived with their white neighbors until 1835 when the leaders of the Cherokee nation agreed to leave their lands and move west under the Treaty of New Echota. At that time, Georgia officially took possession of Cherokee lands, an act that led to the infamous Trail of Tears.
Early settlers in the Atlanta area were farmers and craftsmen from Virginia, the Carolinas and the mountains of North Georgia. They obtained their land by lottery disbursement and were, for the most part, deeply religious, hard-working, small landholders. They owned few slaves and lived in harmony with their Indian neighbors. They established churches and schools, traveled to Decatur for “store-bought” goods and marketed their cotton in Macon, 100 miles south.
They were as close to a yeoman (small farmers/craftsmen) society as possible in the ante-bellum South. A few of their pre-Civil War homes, churches, cemeteries and mills still exist in the Metropolitan Atlanta area. Atlanta’s inception was a combination of geography and necessity, spawned by the steam engine. In 1836, the Georgia General Assembly voted to build a state railroad to provide a trade route from the Georgia coast to the Midwest. The sparsely settled Georgia Piedmont was chosen as the terminal for a railroad that was to run “from some point on the Tennessee line near the Tennessee River, commencing... near Rossville... to a point on the southeastern bank of the Chattahoochee River” accessible to branch railroads. The new railroad was to be called the Western and Atlantic Railroad of the State of Georgia.
An experienced army engineer, Colonel Stephen Harriman Long, was selected to choose the most practical route for the new rail line. After thoroughly surveying half-a-dozen routes, Long found it necessary to choose a site eight miles south of the river where connecting ridges and Indian trails converged. He drove a stake into the red clay near what is now Five Points in Downtown Atlanta. The “zero milepost” today is marked by a plaque not far from that very spot in Underground Atlanta. The site staked out by Colonel Long proved to be perfect, the climate ideal. Atlanta is situated on the Piedmont Plateau at an elevation of 1,050 feet, yet there are no natural barriers such as mountains or large bodies of water to impede the city’s growth.
In the fourteen short years between the time Colonel Long drove his marker into the ground and the start of the Civil War, Atlanta grew like the boom towns of the West. Instead of mining, Atlanta struck gold in the rail lines.
