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    Sandy Springs
    Sandy Springs
    Sandy Springs
    Ebook169 pages43 minutes

    Sandy Springs

    By Kimberly M. Brigance, Morris V. Moore and Heritage Sandy Springs

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    Sandy Springs has always been a community in transition. Bounded to the north by the Chattahoochee River, the area was contested by both the Cherokee Nation and the Creek Confederacy, who used the river as a territorial marker. To the south, the urban center of Atlanta has blessed and, at times, cursed her rural neighbor with close proximity. Today Sandy Springs is still in transition. From a rural village to one of Georgia’s newest cities, the history of Sandy Springs is a story of change.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439637777
    Sandy Springs
    Author

    Kimberly M. Brigance

    Author Kimberly M. Brigance, curator of historic resources at Heritage Sandy Springs, has selected images from the foundation�s archives, private collections, and other repositories that best reflect the land and people of Sandy Springs. Combined with the knowledge of local historian Morris V. Moore, Images of America: Sandy Springs provides a glimpse of a proud rural past beneath the sprawl of modern suburbia.

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      Book preview

      Sandy Springs - Kimberly M. Brigance

      Committee.

      INTRODUCTION

      Before Sandy Springs was a city, it was a community. Before that, it was a gathering place. In the beginning, it was simply a local landmark, the place where a natural spring flowed out of the sandy soil.

      Native Americans likely first encountered Europeans in northern Georgia in the mid-1500s, when Hernando Desoto explored the region under the flag of Spain. The exact thoughts and feelings of the native people regarding this encounter are unknown to us, but the archaeological record reveals that Desoto and his men left death and devastation in the wake. Unknown to anyone at the time, the diseases introduced by Europeans began a series of destructive events that would end the indigenous way of life.

      Some scholars believe that as much as ninety percent of the Native American population succumbed to European disease before the first permanent English settlement in America was founded at Jamestown in 1607. Certainly by 1733, when Georgia was founded, the once powerful Creek Confederacy and Cherokee Nation had diminished in size and political influence. The English settlers in Savannah encountered native people that had interacted with Europeans for more than 200 years and were well versed in the rapacious nature of English settlement. Overwhelmed and overpowered, the native people tried to make the best agreement possible for their lands and hoped for coexistence.

      Early English settlers prized the fertile, relatively flat plains of central, southern, and coastal Georgia. Gently sloping land was ideal for cultivating long straight rows of crops. The hilly upland region of Georgia, however, was considered too difficult to farm and was therefore left to the Cherokees and Creeks—for the most part. The borders of Creek and Cherokee lands, though, were never fully respected by settlers or the Colonial or state governments of Georgia. Missionaries, traders, hunters, travelers, and farmers regularly trespassed on Native American lands. The discovery of gold in North Georgia in the early 1800s triggered a gold rush as thousands of settlers swarmed into the lands belonging to the Cherokee. Almost immediately, the Georgia legislature began planning to remove the Cherokee from their land. Through treaty, warfare, and outright removal, the homelands of the Creek and Cherokee were in the hands of the U.S. government by 1840. The most infamous removal was the Trail of Tears of 1838–1839.

      In 1821, the former Creek Indian lands were divided into five counties. The counties were then subdivided into districts and land lots. Each land lot was 202.5 acres. Originally, the sandy spring was located in Henry County, but in 1822, DeKalb County was created, encompassing the spring and the surrounding community, most commonly referred to as Oak Grove. In 1853, the future town of Sandy Spring was in Fulton County, which had been carved out of DeKalb.

      Seven times between 1805 and 1832, Georgia used a lottery to distribute land. Almost three quarters of the land in present-day Georgia was distributed under the lottery system. Commissioners appointed by the governor would draw the names and lot numbers from two separate drums. For a fee of $19, the fortunate drawer could take out a grant on the lot he drew. The lottery system encouraged agricultural and rural development instead of urban growth. Living on large land lots, families tended to be isolated and self-sufficient. This scattered settlement pattern slowed the development of towns.

      Lured by the availability of cheap land, many families migrated along the wagon routes from the mid-Atlantic states, through Virginia and the Carolinas into the new Georgia counties; others traveled north from coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Many settlers received land lots that contained the remnants of Native American settlements and fields, which the settlers immediately converted into building sites for log homes and crops of corn, wheat, and tobacco.

      Little hamlets such as Pole Town, Seaborn Town, Groganville, Oak Grove, Sentell, Shallowfords, Oak Shade, Dunwoody, and Roswell merged and overlapped in the mental landscape of residents. Most of these places were small enclaves of different generations of the same family sharing farmland and labor. Later some neighborhoods grew large enough to support a church or school and perhaps a post office and businesses. The majority of the early names of settlements simply died out as smaller settlements blended into larger ones. For more than 100 years, Sandy Springs was a name that loosely described the area around the sandy spring; today Sandy Springs is legally defined and mapped to precision. It is a new city grappling with the ills and blessings of modern urban society

      Photographs

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