Marietta, Then & Now: Down the Rabbit Hole Once Again…

[4.20.22] 5-Min Read: Every once and a while, I get something on my mind I feel compelled to spend time researching, reading-about and sometimes writing about to capture what I’ve discovered. For years, it’s been primarily about things like cycling and bicycles, motorcycling and motorcycles and things I’ve done to “personalize” vehicles.

However, ever since stumbling across the history of how Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park came to be, I’ve found myself on a local history kick. Part of that is possibly because there are five initiatives on the May Primary ballot regarding the establishment of five new cities in Cobb County which is, well, curious given current politics and the timing. At the heart of the matter is zoning and development which, quite frankly, sure seems like a red herring based on what I know and have since learned.

Regardless, what really grabbed my attention was something I read about Marietta Public School No. 1, aka, the Waterstreet School, built in 1892 that was still in use into the 1960’s, which brought about all kinds of enjoyable anecdotes on a local history-buff’s personal, enthusiast page by long-time residents of Marietta and who attended classes at the school. My interest in the school’s history and its demise to make way for road expansion sent me down a rabbit hole when I found a series of Insurance Maps created in 1911 by the Sanborn Map Company that essentially provided a visual, hand-drawn inventory of all the streets and structures in the City of Marietta, circa 1911.

I was further compelled to knit all 16 of the contiguous maps together to create a complete picture of the city so I could get a feel for what was still here, and what had been consumed by progress, i.e., development, re-zoning and re-development. I ended-up putting that map as well as what I learned in yet another blog entry in the same vein as this one: it was something I’d gotten on my mind, learned a great deal about and wanted to capture for future reference and posterity: “Map of Marietta, 1911.”

While I was doing all of this, I stumbled over some old, black & white historic photos of Marietta that apparently were used in the 2007 book whose image I shared above entitled “Marietta, Then & Now.” The book had been co-authored by long-time local newspaper editor Joe Kirby who had passed in 2015. I also realized Mr. Kirby’s co-author was Damien Guarnieri, a very nice young man who worked at the Marietta Daily Journal with Mr. Kirby before joining and managing the photography group at Lockheed-Martin in 2010, and with whom I had the pleasure of working. With that in mind, I felt compelled to find a copy of the book, did so and have enjoyed reading through it. Given the limits of time and resources available to create the book, there were definitely some shortcomings and a subsequent edition could be vastly improved. But, to what end? Just how many people are THAT interested in the history of a small southern town these days, never mind going forward.

No, the real audience for such a book were the adults who grew-up or lived in Marietta from the early 1900’s through its major redevelopment in the 1960’s through 1980’s that transformed the city and, as Mr. Kirby points-out, erased much of its past and history. But, such is life… a cycle of creation, development and growth and maturity where the cycle begins again with rebirth that often requires tearing down the old and obsolete.

I would argue that Marietta’s square has only gotten better the longer we’ve lived here, and now that they’ve been here so long and with some of the aesthetic’s adjusted, most of the public buildings look right at home.

If you compare the current area occupied by the court houses, county and city government offices as well as the re-located post office to the city as it looked in 1911, there were a total of 36 businesses and 45 homes displaced by redevelopment, and Hansell, Dobbs and Tucker Streets have also vanished. Circa 1911, there was only the Cobb County Courthouse and County Jail sitting where the current State/County Courthouse now sits on a single city block vs the 15 city blocks now occupied by public structures and parking lots. Personally, I’d prefer it if businesses were still the largest employers in Marietta, Cobb County, Georgia and the United States instead of “Government” at every level. That’s just not sustainable, but I digress.

Where Cobb County and Marietta got it wrong was what many cities got wrong in that same 1960’s to 1980’s and even 1990’s era of massive growth and redevelopment that came with the Baby Boomer’s, when the buildings that replaced the grand, historic structures were really quite awful. However, the Marietta Square was not aging well and with the arrival of shopping malls away from the downtown area, redevelopment was overdue, even if it did come with massive expansion of government buildings that transformed the nature of the square and city itself.

Thankfully, most of the really awful, “post-modern” box-like have gotten cosmetic make-overs since then, if only adding red-brick veneer to the otherwise, originally all-white concrete Superior Court building (at far right) that sits where the original Cobb County Courthouse sat. Next to it and on the square is the U.S. State Courthouse with its contemporary take on the clock tower, sitting where several small businesses used to be. In fact, circa 1911 there were 10 businesses just along North Park Street and a total of 22 businesses in the block that was razed to make-way for the State Courthouse.

Now, as to what really caused me to create this particular retrospective of Marietta, it was a “then” photo of four wood frame structures circa 1940’s — looking quite distressed — located at the intersections of Cherokee Street running north & south just 4/10th of a mile north of the Marietta Square where the former Page Street intersected from the east, sitting on what is now the North Marietta Parkway, and where a 100′ to the north, Brumby Street — now a dead-end / back entrance & exit to MVMNT Gym — intersected from the west.

Paired with it was a “now” photo taken of the current intersection of the North Marietta Parkway and Cherokee Street, but that didn’t seem to be quite right, nor have several other “now” photos taken. That’s because, what was at the time “Brown’s Transfer & Grocery” sat on the corner of Brumby St. and Cherokee. St, according to the 1911 Sanborn Insurance Maps. It was later called Prather’s Grocery and likely went by several names between the 1940’s when the photo was taken and when it was razed in the 1970’s to make way for the construction of the Marietta Parkway Project. Interestingly enough and, as already noted, the segment of Brumby Street that used to intersect with Cherokee St. is still there, but dead-ends before reaching the now somewhat elevated Cherokee St. in the parking lot of what has been at least 5 or 6 different businesses in the past 31 years that I can recall.

So, now with far too much information at my disposal and some free-time, I went down another rabbit hole — and perhaps I should rename this blog “Down the Rabbit Hole Again” given that’s what this blog has caused me to do far too often with some 100 blog entries since starting it in January — to create a small composite of the two Sanborn maps that capture this area circa 1911 and then an overlay with a current satellite image of the area courtesy of Google Maps.

As you can see below, sure enough, once you account for lens compression in the 1940’s photo that makes the first three structures look like they’re sitting closer than they actually were, the four structures were all in existence back in 1911 with their porches clearly visible on the Sanborn maps and the grocery store and the house next to it would today be sitting on the North Marietta Parkway, never mind Sope Creek also running through the center of the intersection. I’ve not had time to run out and take a photo of my own, so I snagged a screen shot off of Google Map’s “Streetview” taken of the area more closely approximates where the intersection of Brumby Street and Cherokee street and Brown’s Grocery Store would have been marked by the address, and where the three neighboring structures would have been.

In closing, this type of history-based trivia fascinates me and I’m now compelled to take on something of an urban photo safari to see how many of the original structures from circa 1911 Marietta captured on the Sanborn maps I can find and match-up with the map segments. Sadly, the addresses are no longer all the same, case in point being these four structures which would now be in the 200’s not the 600’s. However, at a minimum, I may just investigate a few of the photos from “Then & Now, Marietta” to come up with my own “Way Back Then, Then, and Now” collection of things on my blog if I find myself needing a distraction.