A railroad terminus became the New South's $473 billion hub
Atlanta, Georgia's capital, counted 498,715 residents in 2020 and about 529,110 by 2025 estimates. Named from the Western and Atlantic Railroad, it grew as line junctions multiplied. Post–Civil War industry and later civil-rights organizing made it the unofficial New South capital; 2021 GDP hit $473 billion.
Creek and Cherokee peoples lived in the area for thousands of years; the nearest Native settlement was Standing Peachtree, a Creek village where Peachtree Creek meets the Chattahoochee. Settlers pushed the Creek out of northern Georgia between 1802 and 1825. In 1836 the state legislature voted to build the Western and Atlantic Railroad linking Savannah's port with the Midwest, and the terminus's zero milepost was driven in at what is now Five Points. By 1860 the town had 9,554 people.
Its rail junctions made it a Confederate supply hub, so in 1864 General William Tecumseh Sherman's Union army fought the Battle of Atlanta and besieged the city for four months; on 1 September John Bell Hood pulled out and ordered public buildings destroyed. Rebuilding drew newcomers, the state capital moved from Milledgeville in 1868, and by 1880 Atlanta had overtaken Savannah as Georgia's largest city. From the 1880s newspaper editor Henry W. Grady pitched it to investors as the capital of a New South. The population tripled over the next three decades, though racial tension erupted in the 1906 race riot.
Gone with the Wind premiered at Loew's Grand Theatre on 15 December 1939, yet segregation laws kept out Hattie McDaniel, an Oscar-winning member of the cast. During World War II Georgia Tech's president Blake Van Leer lured firms such as Lockheed, along with military bases, and in 1948 the mayor hired the city's first eight Black police officers. In the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and students from the city's historically Black colleges made Atlanta a centre of civil rights leadership.
Source: Atlanta
