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One. Housing the City, 1865 to 1910
- University of Georgia Press
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13 CHAPTER ONE Housing the City, 1865 to 1910 In , General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union troops plundered and burned Atlanta as they marched to the sea. Citizens returned to find bent rails, solitary chimneys, and scattered cannonballs in what had once been a thriving trading center at the nexus of the Western and Atlantic, Georgia, Atlanta and West Point, and Macon and Western railroads. Thousands of Atlanta homes had been destroyed that summer, leaving only a few hundred to shelter returning residents and refugees. Visitors painted a dismal scene. In , journalist J. T. Trowbridge wrote that hundreds lived in “wretched hovels” covered with “ragged fragments of tin roofing from the burnt government and railroad buildings.” Others had constructed makeshift homes of “irregular blackened patches, and partly of old boards, with roofs of huge, warped, slouching shreds of tin.” But quickly rebuilt roads and rail lines and the subsequent business revival lured job seekers and entrepreneurs. In , Whitelaw Reid reported that Atlanta’s streets were “blockaded with drays and wagons” as workers and artisans, merchants and city boosters, fashioned a new city. The flurry of home and business building combined with lack of regulation and the spirit of short-term gain to produce a muddled and haphazard town. Journalist Sidney Andrews, touring the region in , commented that, with the exception of Boston, Atlanta was “the most irregularly laid out city [he] ever saw.” Newly designated streets were “narrow, crooked, and badly constructed,” and they began “nowhere and end[ed] nowhere.” Amid the jumble, builders and factory owners built worker housing among the factories, distributors, and service providers that flanked the rail lines trisecting the city. Operating decades before whites proposed residential segregation ordinances and prior to the widespread selling of planned neighborhoods and subdivisions, hundreds of builders and investors scattered homes throughout the city. As a result, the homes of Atlanta’s workers, nascent middle class, and business elite were intermixed with one another and distributed among warehouses, fashionable hotels, factories, and smaller businesses. The South’s social rules dictated black-white interaction, precluding any perception of need for residential segregation by law. Some neighborhoods housed a range of blue-collar and white-collar workers; some were mixed by race; some Chapter One by both occupational class and race. By , though, whites’ discomfort with this housing geography—and race relations more generally—was evident, and white elites in particular sought new ways to remake neighborhoods and housing landscapes. Rebuilding the City, 1865 to 1890 City boosters were determined to fashion Atlanta into not just the state’s but the South’s leading city. Prior to the Civil War, Atlanta had been a weak competitor to Savannah, the state’s major port. But the Gate City’s comparatively high altitude cut some of the lower South’s humidity, making it a good storage place for sensitive crops like tobacco, and less subject to the yellow fever and cholera epidemics that plagued many southern towns in the late s. Business recovered quickly after the war. “New stores are opening every week,” recounted Octavia Hammond in . But these were no stalwart business houses; traders threw together temporary shacks in an effort simply to get business up and running. The former president of the Board of Trade secured the basement under the only standing building on Alabama Street to reopen his grocery and produce trade. The Daily Intelligencer explained that the new buildings were “neither large nor elegant”; the structures would, however, as the report observed, “answer the purposes of our people until more prosperous days will on us dawn.” The steady flight from the rural South to Atlanta and the frequent blusters of New South rhetoric masked the Gate City’s halting industrial development in the two decades after the Civil War. Much has been made of Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady’s petitions for industrial and agricultural diversification , but the editor’s bold prescriptions effectively hid the region’s—and Atlanta ’s—struggles with business development. To be sure, many local leaders promoted investment in manufacturing in order to stabilize the city’s economy. Indeed, much of the South actively pursued industrial expansion after the Civil War. Historian Constantine Belissary notes, for example, that “no sooner were the guns stacked than the Nashville press began a vigorous campaign for more factories.” But antebellum Atlanta had been little more than an agricultural trade town, and many Atlantans were content with such a locally important though not regionally significant status. Certainly, the town, like...
