On August 14, 1900, cloaked in darkness, a group of Elberton citizens toppled the town’s Civil War monument. The next day, they buried it. These were not anti–Confederate activists. On the contrary, Elberton, like many Southern towns in the 1890s, wanted to honor the lost cause. It also wanted to promote its new granite industry […]
Getting the stuff to do it yourself got a lot easier on this day in 1979 when the first two Home Depots opened. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank started a chain of large home improvement warehouses that would stock more products, often at lower prices than any competitor or hardware store. Employees knew what was […]
Farmer, railroad worker, horse jockey, moonshiner and country music’s first big star — that was John William Carson. Fannin County native fiddlin’ John Carson was a colorful character who played every year at the Georgia old-time fiddlers’ conventions in Atlanta beginning in 1913. He first gained fame performing “The Ballad Of Mary Phagan” during the […]
It grew from a crop-dusting company based in the Mississippi River delta and became one of Georgia’s most famous corporate residents. Delta Air Lines began life in 1924 as a crop duster, based first in Macon and then Monroe, Louisiana. Collett Woolman bought the company in 1928 and renamed it Delta Air Service, with passenger […]
It was the first steamship in the world to cross the Atlantic. The steamship Savannah was built in 1818 in New York as a sailing packet but was converted to a steamship after a Savannah shipping firm committed to buy it for transatlantic service. The ship was a 320-ton hybrid, equipped with a steam engine, […]
Peaches, peanuts, poultry: Georgia has a lot of all of them. But Pickens County has the most crystalline marble of any place in the world. One of the most highly prized minerals, it’s in 60 percent of the monuments in Washington D.C. Native Americans used north Georgia marble hundreds of years before it was first […]
$162 million. That’s the economic impact that Dobbins Air Force Base brings to Marietta. Not bad for what started out in 1941 as a small airstrip called Rickenbacker Field, as America prepared for World War II. Then, during the war, it became Marietta Army Air Field when the Bell Bomber plant was located there. With […]
Columbus was one of the South’s most important manufacturing centers before the Civil War. Georgia’s third largest city lay out of the U.S. Army’s path until Easter Sunday, 1865, a week after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. U.S. General James Wilson and his cavalry—13,500 strong—launched a night attack that captured the city and more than […]
When it comes to Vidalias, no one ever says “hold the onions.” Looking for a new cash crop during the Great Depression, Mose Coleman of Toombs County tried onions, thinking they would be hot. Instead they turned out sweet….and popular. Other farmers followed his lead and an industry was born. During the 1940s, the state […]
The Bell Bomber plant transformed Marietta—and helped the Allies win World War II. On this day in 1942, construction began on the Bell Aircraft Corporation plant that built more than 600 B-29s during the war. The Roosevelt administration wanted to build aircraft away from the coast, and Atlanta was a prime location. Cobb County boosters […]