The Cincinnati daily star. [volume] ([Cincinnati, Ohio]) 1875-1880, 1880-06-01
And a Glance at Her Railroads
and Trade Advantages.
Population, Location, Buildings,
Schools, Churches, Banks,
City Government, Busi.
ness Houses, Etc.

The question that springs first to the
lips OF stranger arriving at Atlanta,
Georgia, is why this fair city should exist
at all, with its stately public and private
edifices, its paved and gas.lit streets, with
twelve miles OF street railroads, with
magnificent hotels and business houses that
individually boast trade as high as So, 900,
900 per year, with cotton factories,
iron foundries, rolling mills commits
sion merchants, ice factories with a
capacity of producing twenty tons of ice
per day, with free public schools, and SEM
naries and colleges, with forty-five
churches, mary of them of striking archi.
tectural excellence, with eighteen daily
and weekly newspapers, with private
dwellings of elegance and luxury, with
parks and cemeteries, and hundreds OF
manufactures of greater or lesser magni-
tude, with medical colleges. -four mills,
with six chartered and several private
banks, and with a population ranging be-
tween forty and forty-five thousand souls.
Fifteen>or sixteen years ago the stern
fortune of war wiped out the thriving city
that existed here, and Atlanta, with the
exception of three or four business houses,
and few dwellings was utterly destroyed
| from the face of the earth. To-day in all
the South no city is so fair as she where,
Ph@nix-like, she has risen from her ashes
to new life, new beauty, and to an ac-
tivity and size at least four-fold the Allan
ia of the years before the war. And yet
she stands beside no navigable streams no
center of region rich in agricul-
tural products. Her manufacturing
industries bear no proportion to
her population or her commercial activity;
hence it is that Atlanta to any one who has
not visited her and scrutinized the causes
of her remarkable growth is the Chinese
puzzle of the age.
The corporation of Atlanta embraces
an area exceeding three miles in diam
eter, and although the real and per-
sonal property listed for taxation with
in this circuit reaches the sum of
$12, ,2O7S51, there are scarcely dozen
houses in all this busy, prosperous, beauti-
full city that has not been erected in the
sixteen years since General Sherman start
ed from her streets upon his memorable
march to the sea, leaving the devastated
city scene of desolaton behind.
The site on which the city is built is a
beautiful plateau of rolling country ele-
waited 1850 feet above the level of the sea,
being in fact the southern terminus of the
great Appalachian chain of mountains
stretching through North Carolina, Tennes-
see, Virginia and Penns, lvania, and that
here spreads out into broad undulating
plateau as if on purpose for the accommo-
dation of the future great center of COM
merce of the cotton district of the South.
Atlanta is in fact the water shed of the
State of Georgia, and from her corporation
limits streams flow into the Chattahooche.
whose waters empty into the Gulf of Mexi-
co and others into tributaries of the Alta
hama whose mouth is the Atlantic Ocean.
The city is regularly laid ont, the busi-
ness streets are all paved, and her private
and public buildings being comparatively
new, the place has none OF that weather.
beaten look peculiar to Southern cities
almost everywhere. The stores and build
ings in the business part of the place are
generally superb structures, and would be
cfSdftable to any American city; her lead.
ing hotels are models of elegance and COM
fort, her churches are many of them superb
while the private residences of her citizens
and their contiguous grounds are as elegant
as one could find in the vicinity OF any city
in the United States.
She has gas, and very excellent Water
works that furnishes the city with pure
and delicious water in profusion, but the
| great source of her rhatchless and growing
commerce is the railroad system, OF which
she seems to be the focal point Of Georgia
not only but all the contiguous cotton
planting States. North from Atlanta
stretches the Western & Atlantic Railroad.
which at Dalton is fed by the Rome &
Selma Road and with the East Tennessee
Virginia & Georgia and the network of
roads that converge at Chattanooga. To
the east runs the Georgia Railroad I'll
miles to Augusta, and thence connecting
with Savannah and Charleston.
To the northeast the Atlanta & Char
lotte Airline, 1858 miles to Charlotte, N.
c., and its connections beyond. To the
southeast is the Central Railroad, of
Georgia, 293 miles to Savannah, touching
the important city of Macon on the way |;
while to the southwest is the Atlanta Il
West Point Road, 81 miles to West Point,
and its connections to Mobile and New
Orleans further on. South OF Atlanta,
and between there and Macon and the
piny region beyond. is the broad, black
central belt OF rich land constituting the
productive cotton section Of the State, the
source of its former agricultural wealth.
1t is the perfect system of railroads with
which Atlanta is surrounded that has led
to her sudden and surprising growt',, re.
versing the laws of trade and commerce,
and which has brought to her doors the
business that once centered in Charleston
To nd Qayonpoh Atlanta kho ii