A Couple Dirty, Little Decatur Secrets
Decatur Metro | July 1, 2010 | 9:41 amBack on her Decatur horse, Pecanne Log says that the city “was home to the original NIMBYs”. Christa has unearthed a 1939 AJC article where the writer unearthed a few odd facts from “The Inventory of County Archives – DeKalb” about Decatur from an even earlier time.
Among them, a 1860 plan to build a wall on the west side of Decatur to keep “that offensive, boisterous and growing community of Atlanta on its western boundaries”, and a little ditty that Decatur residents used to recite as a rallying cry against laying track for the “dirty” railroads within the city limits.
Christa also references the oft-cited rumor that Decatur residents actually turned down an offer to become the “terminus” station for the coming rail line, but I’ve always heard conflicting reports as to whether this is in fact true. Most state this as fact – or at least accepted rumor – but a couple doubting Thomases have mentioned to me that there’s actually no proof of such an offer being made (and rejected) and that Atlanta (aka Marthasville, aka Thrasherville, aka Terminus) is actually a more logical spot for a number of railroads as that’s where many of them intersect.
Perhaps the aforementioned aversion to having track inside the city limits was expanded upon to come up with this revised history, which puts Decatur in a slightly more favorable light? I dunno. It sure would be interesting to look at “The Inventory of County Archives” though!
Nice find. Love the western wall idea. Definitely we should revisit revisit that. Maybe swing it around to the Northwest as well?
My understanding on the decision of where to place “Terminus” was that it was a topographic one. The tracks in question were to go from Milledgeville to Chattanooga, and the surveyors determined that Decatur was a good spot to run the track, since it sat upon the north-south ridge that we know as Clairmont (which was an old indian trail), at the intersection of the continental divide ridge that we know as Dekalb Ave.
What is now Atlanta was also an option, due to a similar north-south ridgeline or low grade corridor, also intersecting at Dekalb Ave.
It makes perfect sense to me that they would have preferred Decatur over Terminus at that time, since there was a town in place.
But who knows. Probably just a small story blown up into legend.
“Train in Vain”
The article also describes how the courthouse cannon was taken to Atlanta and fired at the newly elected mayor’s general store (Talk about explosive Southern politics!). I assume that the cannon was eventually returned and is today located on the south courthouse lawn.
The western wall was never built and the 1860 DeKalb courthouse and much of old Atlanta is long gone but the Decatur cannon remains. I believe the monument under the cannon states that it was used to drive Native Americans out of the county during the Indian Wars of the 1830s. As a young boy growing up in Decatur in the 1950s, I always thought the WWI German naval cannon on the north lawn was more interesting than the tiny cannon on the south lawn but this small cannon played a major role in our early history.