West Ponce de Leon Ave, Decatur GA

The AJC’s Actual Factual Georgia feature tackled this question yesterday.

Q: Clairmont Road gains an “e” heading south toward Decatur, or Clairemont loses an “e” when heading north away from Decatur. What’s the story behind that?

The answer is incomplete at best, but it’s worth a quick look so you can bring it up at Decatur area holiday parties over the next few days!

Thanks to Chris for pointing out this feature!   He adds…

“Years ago, a local historian who researched at the DeKalb History Center (McCurdy?) told my students that the road was named after a beautiful girl named Claire.  The boys who courted her had to climb stairs to the house, “… To get to Claire, you had to climb the mountain.”  I always assumed that the Ridley house was across the street from the YMCA, a house with many steps but the AJC article says the land was at the corner of Clairemont and Garden Lane.”

Unfortunately, Sanborn Maps of Decatur only go a bit north of Williams Street (see above), so those don’t answer the question of the location of the Ridley house. However, the map does introduce another alternative spelling of the street, “Claremont Road”.

Perhaps there are just too many ways to misspell “Claire”.

If you’ve ever wondered about the best route for a run, a long walk or a bike ride around Decatur or Atlanta, you’d probably consider the routes where folks walk/run/bike the most.

But up until the advent of the smartphone, this was something difficult to visualize on a map for large swaths of the world.  But thanks to mapping software and smartphone apps like RunKeeper, we can begin to map the most trafficked (or at least exercised!) routes around Atlanta – and the world!

A company called Mapbox has taken the data from 1.5 million runs, walks and bike rides from RunKeeper and turned it into one giant interactive map that you can play with HERE.  The brighter the line, the most frequented the route.

As you can see above, main routes in Decatur aren’t entirely surprising.  The PATH trail, West Ponce and Oakview seem to be the main walk/run/bike corridors within the city.  But zoom in a little closer and you can see all kinds of interesting patterns.  For instance, the most popular route to take thru the Decatur Cemetery is along the western road.

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