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    Newnan
    Newnan
    Newnan
    Ebook209 pages42 minutes

    Newnan

    By W. Jeff Bishop

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    About this ebook

    Discover how Newnan, also known as the "City of Homes" has kept its 19th century charm and architecture, inspiring songs and books to be written.


    Newnan, founded in 1828 in the rolling Piedmont section of west Georgia, has long been known as the "City of Homes." While many small towns in the South have been burned, bulldozed, or transformed by industry and development, Newnan retains much of its 19th-century charm and elegance, including more than a dozen restored antebellum homes and a 1904 courthouse on the downtown square. The town produced two of Georgia's most progressive governors and provided writer Erskine Caldwell with his earliest, formative memories. Newnan is the small town that country music singer (and native son) Alan Jackson immortalized in his hit song "Little Man"; in these pages, readers will see the "old Lee King's apothecary" and other downtown buildings that Jackson found so inspiring during his childhood.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateOct 6, 2014
    ISBN9781439647639
    Newnan
    Author

    W. Jeff Bishop

    W. Jeff Bishop, an author and public historian, has lived most of his life in Coweta County. As executive director of the Newnan-Coweta Historical Society, Bishop heads programming, exhibits and development at the McRitchie-Hollis Museum and the Newnan History Center at the Historic Train Depot. He has served as president of the Georgia chapter of the Trail of Tears Association and has also written for the Newnan Times-Herald newspaper and various other newspapers and magazines.

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      Book preview

      Newnan - W. Jeff Bishop

      Society.

      INTRODUCTION

      We had no schools nor churches, and we were all living on dirt floors or split puncheons to our cabins, with one door and one room for cooking, eating and sleeping, and nearly all of us barefooted in summer from necessity of money to buy shoes. This is the primitive Newnan remembered by its first historian and pioneer citizen, William U. Anderson, a former postmaster, hotelkeeper, and blacksmith who meticulously chronicled the names of all the young town’s newspapers, businesses, schools, and other institutions. If a street moved or had a change in name, Anderson took note of it, and when a wooden building burned and was replaced with something modern and brick, or even just changed owners, Anderson would add it to his growing encyclopedia of Newnan trivia. Anderson compiled lists of the town’s legislators, judges, lawyers, merchants, doctors, prominent citizens, and even the not-so-prominent ones he thought worthy of mention in his brief 1880 survey of the tiny West Georgia town.

      We then rocked our children in hollow-log cradles; men, women and children would walk five miles barefooted to a Saturday night frolic, dance all night and go home with the gals in the morning. We then thought we were as big as big Indian and as proud as anyone now with their red calico dress with a dozen tucks. All then nearly wore our own homespun. We felt proud of it, too; for it was home manufactory . . . But we soon began to improve.

      Before steam power became prevalent, everything was hand work. Anderson writes, We made our wagons, carts, and all our plows, axes, farming tools at home. We had our smoke-houses at home, and corn-cribs in our horse lots, and if a neighbor had to buy corn or meat . . . he went to his neighbor and got his supplies.

      It is a different Newnan now. According to the US Census Bureau, Coweta County added 38,102 new residents between 2000 and 2010, bringing its total population to 127,317. Newnan doubled its population over the most recent decade, to 33,039. That was a surprise to us, Newnan mayor Keith Brady told the Times-Herald newspaper when it reported the new figures. We knew we had grown, but we did not think it was going to be a double number.

      What makes Newnan attractive to newcomers is an obvious answer, he said. While many downtown areas have languished, Newnan has retained the integrity of its historical core, even as longtime downtown shopping venues transformed into eateries and old movie theaters became pizza places and churches. What we offer here, as a city, not only provides opportunities for shopping, eating and recreation for our citizens, but it does things like attract newcomers, and business, like the Cancer Treatment Centers of America. The most important thing we focus on as a council is to build quality of life that makes generations want to come back here.

      Change is inevitable, but Newnan has never lost sight of its origins, and its people have worked diligently to preserve its history, especially its architectural history, according to Georgia Shapiro, a local preservationist who was instrumental in identifying many local historical buildings. These structures add to the character of the community, Shapiro said. You ride through all these little towns, and so many of them have lost their soul. You don’t understand the community because their neighborhoods are gone. Shapiro remembers a group from a movie production company that drove from Charleston to Newnan and told her they were dumbfounded that Newnan is so unique in having so many old homes. ‘We thought every Southern town looked like Newnan,’ they told me.

      There is a reason why Newnan is known as the City of Homes, Shapiro said. And it did not happen by itself. A lot of people have worked really hard to make it this way. And I am so proud of what we have accomplished.

      This is the pictorial story, then, of Newnan’s gradual evolution from backwater frontier town to a thriving metropolitan hub, and today’s historical City of Homes.

      One

      MCINTOSH TO BULLSBORO

      Early historian William U. Anderson described Newnan as a wilderness, but, in fact, it was strategically located in February 1828 at a productive spring near the convergence of several major trading routes, most notably the McIntosh Road and the Grierson Trail. These routes, congruent with ancient trails, had been widened into wagon roads and used by Native Americans and whites alike for years prior to Newnan’s settlement.

      The Chattahoochee River, bordering the new county of Coweta, along with the river’s many tributaries, had been home to the Creek Indians and their ancestors, Muskogee-speaking peoples, for many thousands of years. Towns were typically located along major waterways, with large earthen mounds serving as ceremonial and civic centers. The Piedmont and its resources had been carefully managed by these early occupants.

      High school textbooks for generations have perpetuated the myth of intrepid white pioneers taming a vast, uncharted, and untamed wilderness, but the last truly virgin landscape in North America would have existed during the Pleistocene epoch, which ended about 11,700 years ago, soon after bands of hunter-gatherers crossed into the Americas from Siberia. Almost as soon as they came here, these Paleo-Indians were also transforming the environment by hunting megafauna, creating trails, crafting tools, and gathering mast, as illustrated in this 16th-century engraving by Theodor de Bry.

      These prehistoric people left behind many artifacts that are still commonly found in local

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