One of the more remarkable features of Atlanta from the air, aside from its suburban sprawl, is its linear skyline rising from a nearly continuous canopy of trees in an arc over eight miles long, stretching from Downtown north through Midtown and Buckhead and northeast to the city limits. The structure for that arc of tall buildings—two of which rise higher than either Stone Mountain, fifteen miles to the east of downtown, or Kennesaw Mountain, twenty miles to the northwest—is the city's most famous thoroughfare, Peachtree Street, as it is known in Downtown and Midtown, and Peachtree Road from Twenty-sixth Street northward.
Figure. 1-1. Detail from 1821 plat of survey for Seventeenth District of originally Henry, now Fulton County, showing delineation of the original Peachtree Road. (Georgia Archives) |
The road's origins were during the War of 1812 when Federal contractors finished clearing a rough wagon road between two newly built log forts on the Georgia frontier, one at Hog Mountain in what is now northeastern Gwinnett County, the other thirty-five miles to the southwest at the site of the ancient Indian village of Standing Peachtree on the Chattahoochee River in what is now Fulton County. The road is believed to have been created, at least in part, out of the trace of ancient Indian trails and was first mapped as "the road to Standing Peachtree," or simply "the Peachtree road" [sic] in 1821. The route has been altered in many locations, and parts of it are now known by other names, but most of the original Peachtree Road remains in use two hundred years later. For almost that long, the course of the road has been the axis of Atlanta's growth, and in in the twenty-first century, it remains the apotheosis of the urban core.
Figure. 1-2. Detail from 1821 plat of survey for Seventeenth District of originally Henry, now Fulton County, showing delineation of the original Peachtree Road. (Georgia Archives) |
This and associated web pages are an expanded version of a paper presented at the Preserving Historic Roads Conference 2014 in Savannah, Georgia. They are presented here for your amusement and edification and not for commercial use. Tommy H. Jones, Atlanta Georgia, December 2020. |