FOREWORD: This is a time capsule of Westside Atlanta, built during the early internet, with some presently antique website structure. Thus the way to get around, very exciting in 1999, is to click square regions on the ALL the maps on this site for local area maps and documentation of historical industrial buildings.
See Index for a simple list of buildings without doing the maps.
Sara Huff's very fine Civil War book "My 80 Years in Atlanta" and Civil War road plaques are in the upper Artery.

The Marietta Street Artery represents the reemergence from suburban flight of the intertwined paths of Marietta Street and the Western and Atlantic R.R. Industrial Corridor as a urban presence of vitality supporting a broad range of urban uses, as well as a place where a great deal of Atlanta's industrial and Civil War history has transpired.

This historical neighborhood extends Northwest on a railway path emanating from Underground Atlanta, the original termination point for all the railroads coming into Atlanta. Officially beginning downtown at Centennial Olympic Park (lower Artery) and extending approximately three miles to the northwest, the ARTery follows what was once the Western and Atlantic Railway (1837). This linear collection of old buildings along an ancient railroad, the Artery winds through five N.P.U.'s (NPU-M, NPU-E, NPU-K, NPU-D and NPU-L) , has garnered many names over the years including the Marietta Street Corridor (City of Atlanta), the Marietta Street Historical Industrial Corridor (Atlanta Preservation Center) and the The Marietta Street Arts Corridor (1996 by the Corporation for Olympic Development Public Arts Initiative, CODA). The author divided the Artery into lower, mid and upper as a research convenience only.

Due to the local efforts of Bill Gould (Allied Warehouse #2) and King Shaw (King Plow Arts Center, Ashby Street Trolley Barn, King Plow Expansion), two Historic District Nominations to the National Register of Historic Places have been approved: the Howell Interlocking Historic District in the northArtery, and the Means Street Historic District designation in the midArtery. Rhodes Purdue (Northyards, The Giant / Hastings Seed) has done extensive and sensitive adaptive reuse of buildings in the southArtery, an area that could easily be a third historic district within the Arterian neighborhood. Working towards a common goal of enrichment of the region and welcoming interaction from the public, this web site includes a general history of many of the older industrial and retail buildings in the Artery, frequently using National Register Nominations written by historians Bambi Ray or Darlene Roth.

As remnants of a nearly defunct industrial and distribution corridor along the Western and Atlantic Railway Line, buildings illustrated on this site represent the only remaining fairly intact example of the backbone of commerce in Atlanta from before the Civil War until the completion of the interstate highway system in 1940. Historic structures flanking this rail corridor represent an era of development and property in Atlanta that was essential to the city's early commercial experience and enriching to Atlanta's present day identity as an evolved and enlightened commercial and industrial entity. The surviving Artery buildings remain as the most visible example of the linear industrial topography which developed along the rail lines leading into Atlanta.

Beginning in the 1960's the Marietta Street corridor went into an era of rapid decline. Buildings in the area became obsolete for their original uses, the trolley car system was dismantled and residents and businesses fled to outer sub-urbana. A great majority of the properties were abandoned, went into various states of disrepair or were demolished such as the Exposition Cotton Mills. The Georgia Tech Foundation bought up the then deserted storefronts on the east side of Marietta Street in the midArtery and replaced them with architecture valued in the 1960's and 1970's (suburban style big open parking lots, no spacial definition of the street, little reference to the past).

Then in the early and mid 1990's several large certified rehabilitation projects, Hasting's Seed Company, The Carriage Works , King Plow Arts Center, and the Allied Warehouse #2 signaled the beginning of the adaptive reuse of the area. Happily for the residents these buildings will never again function as originally constructed with their operations integrally intertwined with the railroads and transportation industry. Instead, these industrial strength constructions serve to form a rich connection to the intelligent craftsmanship, value systems and technology of past eras as well as create a lively, diverse and irreplaceable backdrop in which one can choose to work and reside.

Built along the single most historically defining manmade feature of 19th century Atlanta, new developments on the Atlantic Steel acreage, the Northyards Business Park on Marietta Street near the Coca-Cola buildings, exciting retail environments utilizing old buildings such as West Side Market and Midtown West and other up and coming projects are bringing new life to this previously depressed area. On the lowerArtery's eastern boundry near Centennial Olympic Park the Atlanta International Aquarium has been slated to become a future neighbor.

The plethora of Civil War activity is also documented for local information. Not surprisingly, the Western and Atlantic Railway arm of Atlanta's railway system attracted significant Civil War activity because of it's northern path. Sherman invaded down these rails from Dalton, using them to haul supplies behind the vast Northern Armies in 1864. (See II, para.3 below).

Atlanta came into being in 1837 when the Western and Atlantic Railway Line carefully choose the high Piedmont Plateau ridge (which noticeably boosts up Atlanta's present day skyline) as the best place to forge a link to the robustly developed railway system and markets of the North.

Chartering of the Western and Atlantic Railway Line in 1837 set in motion a rapid evolution very similar to the Internet. By the early 1840's the W & A was joined by the Macon and Western R.R. and the Georgia R.R. Line, connecting up the Southwest U.S. to the trade centers of Augusta and Macon and beyond. The joining of these railways in Atlanta formed the configuration shown on the 1892 Birds Eye View. Terminus (now Underground Atlanta) is in the middle.

Atlanta's business history began with a sound base--other Southern cities moved at the seasonal pace of planting and harvest, but Atlanta's cash crop was cash from commerce brought in by the railway. The path of the Western and Atlantic Railway Line, which helped put Atlanta on the map as Terminus, is the railroad path running behind almost all of the Marietta Street Artery buildings.

The upper Artery was swarming with soldiers from both armies during the Civil War. General Sherman invaded down the Western and Atlantic R.R. Line entering Atlanta from the northwest through the upper Artery. As Sherman and his mighty, well supplied army slowly made their way from Dalton, Ga., pushing Confederate defenses down the tracks, the well-known Southern Generals Gen.Joseph E.Johnston and Gen.A.P.Stewart made their headquarters in the upper Artery, then the outer limits of Atlanta in the northwest direction. Quite fortunately eight year old Sara Huff also lived in the upper Artery during the Civil War and later wrote a lively and engaging book, My 80 Years in Atlanta, describing these earth shaking events from a civilians' point of view.

As recalled from Gone With The Wind, the defeated army came home from Kennesaw Mountain, barefoot and ragged and starving, along Marietta Street. People who lived in the nice houses then lining the street took them food and water and sometimes invited them inside to rest.

The Surrender of Atlanta in 1864 was made in the upper Artery and is located with the other Civil War sites on the upper Artery image map. The actual Georgia Civil War Historical Markers are able to be seen from the road in most cases (the marker for the Foster house on the Atlanta Water Works property at Huff Road and Howell Mill Road seems to have been recently removed).

Atlantan Culture is sometimes called the "Dogwood and the Dollar" and has bred a resilient commercial spirit symbolized by the sculpture Phoenix Up From The Ashes in Woodruff Park, the ethnic, literary and film classic Gone with the Wind, and a people always pushing forward in business to find better ways of being profitable by uplifting the human spirit with the helpful, and when possible, the beautiful and gracious.

All buildings in the Marietta Street Artery were constructed after the Civil War. General Sherman began crossing the Chattahoochee River on July 5, 1864 and after an incredible loss of life and limb, Atlanta surrendered on September 2, 1864. During the late 1864 occupation of Atlanta, Sherman burned all buildings of any industrial value. A quote from The Man Who Amazed Atlanta - The Journey of Franklin Miller Garrett:

"Now you hear people say that Atlanta was completely burned out, that there wasn't anything left. That's erroneous. Mainly the residences were spared. The object of the Union Army was to destroy the industry, which helped keep the Confederacy going….."

With the collapse of the South's economy after the Civil War country stores sprouted up in small towns and crossroad communities all across the region. Atlanta was a natural distribution center for all the goods that stocked these shelves and Atlantans very naturally and quickly arose to rebuild and take advantage of their strategic transportation location.

By the 1880's the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 had been officially voted out and States Rights voted in. This gave individual states the right to legislate their own laws without the interference of the Federal Government. Jim Crow Laws came into being to the detriment of the steadfast African American civil liberties movement and gave rise to segregation. Prosperous Sweet Auburn Avenue in the heart of Atlanta near 5 Points and the adjacent Atlanta University Center - the largest consortium of Black universities in the world including: Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark University, Atlanta University, Morris Brown College and the Interdenominational Theology Center, were places in Atlanta in which Martin Luther King, Jr's spirit came to consciousness. Blandtown in the Artery has been historically African American for many years.

Starting in the 1880's the post-Civil War generation had gained access to enough economic capital to expedite the cultural changes needed to convert from an agarian based society to a society whose manufacturing activities are evident in the substantial industrial buildings that began rising up all along the railroad tracks of Atlanta around this time period. Textile mills came to the South, industrial complexes were built along the rail lines and mill villages were built to house the workers including Home Park, Blandtown, Howell Station, and homes off Bankhead Avenue.

In 1871 a public transit system was created consisting of horse and mule drawn trolleys which in 1889 began to be converted to electric cars. Marketing skills were invigorated with large-scale International Expositions held in 1881, 1887, and 1895 to attract outside money and business enterprise. Many of the old industrial buildings in existence today are a result of these expositions. The 1881 International Exposition was held in the upper Artery where the Exposition Cotton Mills (Dem.) was built along the R.R. track, just south of present day King Plow Art Center and Ashby Street Trolley Barn.

local map | main map | index of Artery.org contents | index of web links | suggestions & comments | Fulton Co.National Register | de facto