Gate City to the South

Nothing in Atlanta's early history suggested that it would amount to much. Founded in the late 1830s as the terminus for the Western and Atlantic Railroad, Atlanta showed so little promise as an urban center that one railroad engineer predicted that it would make "a good location for one tavern, a blacksmith-shop, a grocery-store, and nothing else." During its early years, this prediction appeared prophetic. In 1845, Atlanta contained only twelve to fourteen families and three general stores. However, the town grew in fits and starts during the late 1840s as the Georgia Railroad and the Macon and Western added connecting lines. The Atlanta and West Point added a fourth railroad to Atlanta the following decade. By the time the Civil War began in 1861, Atlanta had begun to call itself Gate City to the South, and its rail lines connected Atlanta eastward to Augusta, southward to Savannah and the coast, westward to Montgomery, Alabama, and northward to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Railroads put Atlanta on the map and railroads kept it there.

Economic growth spurred by the railroads led to commercial growth. In 1846, two hotels opened near the railroad tracks: Washington Hall and the Atlanta Hotel. The latter, constructed and owned by the Georgia Railroad, was two stories tall and the city's first brick structure. Atlanta's first bank was opened in 1847 by an agent of the Georgia Railroad, and a second was opened the following year by financiers based in Macon, Georgia. A newspaper editor named Cornelius Hanleiter moved his Southern Miscellany from Madison, Georgia, to Atlanta in 1847. Billing itself as a "weekly family newspaper," the Miscellany supported the Whig political party in national affairs, endorsing its leader, Henry Clay, and the party's platform of business development. The Miscellany carried advertisements for retail establishments including a dry goods store, a butcher, and a bookseller. In 1849, the Macon and Western Branch Telegraph Company offered Atlantans telegraphic connection to other cities, and Hanleiter was the city's first telegraph operator. By the end of the decade, Atlanta had a population of just over two thousand people.

During the 1850s, Atlanta's population grew dramatically, and so did the number of area businesses, most of them located on Alabama and Decatur Streets, which ran parallel to the tracks of the Macon and Western Railroad, or on Whitehall Street, which bisected the tracks to the southwest, while the more residential Peachtree Street ran to the north. A newspaper called the Weekly Intelligencer acted as a booster for local development. Growing ad revenue and circulation rewarded its efforts. By 1860, the Intelligencer issued daily as well as weekly editions and its circulation expanded from seven hundred to three thousand. Religious, cultural, and educational institutions also flourished during this decade. Starting in the late 1840s, the Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Catholic denominations constructed houses of worship, usually frame buildings of modest size that satisfied the immediate needs of their small congregations but would quickly prove inadequate to the population of the growing city. A variety of private schools catered to the interests of Atlanta's more affluent residents, although efforts to reach a wider audience through proposals for tax-supported "free schools" stalled.

Railroads, industry, and commerce drove Atlanta's economy in the 1850s. The four railroads were major employers, and Atlanta's industrialists profited from contracts with them. Some railroads ran their own machine shops, but privately run foundries also employed a significant number of men. The Atlanta Rolling Mill of William Markham and Lewis Scofield employed 150 men and made eighteen thousand tons of iron rails annually. Next to Richmond's Tredegar Iron Works, the factory of Markham and Scofield had the largest capacity of any iron-producing factory in the South. Joseph and Isaac Winship opened the Winship Iron Works in Atlanta and the Bartow Iron Works in Cartersville. Initially they built railroad cars, but later they began manufacturing boilers, engines, and iron railings. Atlanta's manufacturing interests also included the Peters Flour Mill owned by Richard Peters and a variety of small manufacturing operations that produced buggies and wagons, harnesses, tinware, furniture, candy, copper stills, hats, barrels, cotton gins, cigars, brooms, whiskey, and beer.

By the 1850s, more than one in five Atlantans held commercial jobs, and seventy-seven stores in Atlanta sold dry goods, clothing, shoes and boots, and furniture, with most of the products imported from manufacturing establishments in the North. The firm of Bartley M. Smith and William E. Ezzard ran advertisements in the newspapers claiming it could sell consumers anything from "window-glass to dental and surgical instruments." Some of the merchants who made money from commercial ventures began to build warehouses along Whitehall and Alabama Streets, with rental space in these structures adding to their profit margins. Because most Atlanta merchants sold goods on a "cash only" basis, avoiding credit-based sales, the city's businessmen avoided bankruptcy during the national depression of 1857.

The wagon trade also powered Atlanta's economy. Twice every week, wagons pulled by mules or oxen filled the city streets carrying wheat, fruits and vegetables, meat, and eggs for sale at Atlanta's public market. Farmers also sold modest amounts of cotton, though the fluffy fiber was not a major crop in the piedmont surrounding Atlanta. Open from before sunrise to 7:00 P.M., the market was an economic and social gathering place. The city charged a tax on farmers who sold their goods there, a major source of revenue for the city. Lucy Hull Baldwin grew up in Atlanta in a house on Peachtree Street, and many years later she recalled seeing the biweekly procession of wagons pass her home headed for the market. Lucy and other children stood near their gates to watch their mothers purchase meat and produce from women in shabby calico dresses and sunbonnets.

By the mid-1850s, Atlanta's population was 80 percent white and 20 percent enslaved African American, a relatively low percentage of African Americans when compared with other Georgia cities. Savannah's prewar population of twenty-two thousand was 36 percent black. Of Augusta's twelve thousand citizens, 33 percent were African Americans. Columbus's population was slightly higher than Atlanta's at ninety-six hundred but was 37 percent black. These Georgia cities had a large interest in plantation agriculture and a correspondingly higher stake in slavery. Atlanta's smaller dependence on slavery can...