Visited: Madras, Raymond, Moreland, Grantville, Hogansville, Luthersville, Haralson, Alvaton, Gay, Woodbury, Manchester
Weather: Cold, rainy, and mostly overcast.
Camera: Samsung Galaxy S6 mobile phone.
Notes: For the first trip of the year, I paired up with a travel buddy. He’s a good friend, and a meticulous travel planner, even when he feels like he’s winging it. On this day, we took the day off, and I rented a car so I could do some of the driving (when we travel together, usually I bum a ride).
We booked it to Palmetto and hopped on Roosevelt Hwy. Even though we didn’t stop, it’s worth mentioning that Palmetto and South Fulton County sometimes feel like a different world from central and north Fulton County. Stretches are still undeveloped, rural, dotted with country houses and plantation mansions. And while sometimes it feels untouched, its very preservation is sometimes thoughtful planning on the part of the City of Chattahoochee Hills, incorporated specifically to preserve the rural character and undeveloped lands. The town founders incorporated huge swaths of the rural county in the 2000s, choosing to focus and guide development and density where it makes sense, rather than letting it creep across the landscape, patching over farms with subdivisions.
Madras was the first stop, a collection of buildings I’d passed before without realizing they were once a community. Barely set back from the road, a few commercial buildings hang on - whatever Madras was, it was big enough to get a wooden freight depot, which is now in someone’s yard.
After buzzing through Newnan, we reached Raymond, a small residential community with a church or two left. Raymond was once a coaling stop on the Central of Georgia Railroad, and an impressive concrete coaling tower remains. These have been out of use since the dusk of steam railroading, but they’re huge, and sturdy, and probably really expensive to take down. They’re also amazing, dwarfing you in size, so I’m glad they’re not worth the effort.
We likewise buzzed through Moreland, Lewis Grizzard’s hometown. Grantville had some interesting modern history, thanks to the Walking Dead, which filmed there. At one point the town had a Walking Dead tour, and a gift shop, but it didn’t last. This would be a theme for the next hour or two as we wound our way through a region offering plenty of empty storefronts and rural blight, perfect for depicting apocalyptic abandonment via zombie pandemic. Some towns didn’t need much window dressing; the economy had done the prep work before AMC got there. Grantville’s mills shuttered, and seemingly took most of the town with them.
But Hogansville had some pep, and a great coffee shop in its old railroad depot. And an antique store that was really neat. And an old stone water tower that was the centerpiece of a small walking trail network. We made our way through Haralson, where we saw a Walking Dead cosplay tour, and to the Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge, and on to Massengale Mill, where we passed over the millpond on the sketchiest bridge I’ve encountered yet.
After a few more towns, we entered The Cove, a possible meteor impact crater sometimes known as the “Cove Dome” or the “Woodbury Structure.” I wanted to see The Cove because of the satellite dishes - two dishes 30 meters across, radio antennae constructed by AT&T in the mid 1970s. Roughly a decade later, AT&T gave up on them, and they sat dormant and neglected until the late 1990s when they were adopted by Georgia Tech, who also seems to have left them behind. The mammoth structures sit, sleeping, falling apart,.
But the ones in The Cove were spared the ends of other AT&T satellite dishes, a fate that AT&T’s website describes a little too gleefully: “What do you do when a giant satellite dish has outlived its usefulness? First, you take stock of its accomplishments over the years. Then, you blow it up.” To me, watching AT&T’s video hurts a little. In The Cove, Georgia Tech made the case that these rare assets could be used for other purposes - to support the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and student projects, to provide two quick examples. AT&T’s tower demolition offers no spectacle, no immediacy. Skyscrapers implode and disappear in a massive dust cloud, faster than you want to believe is possible. Instead, AT&T’s satellite dish is severed, but doesn’t even fall, and eventually has to be tipped off its pedestal until it collapses sadly under its own weight. The sight is an underwhelming wreck and strikes me as a terrible waste.
The sun was setting as we approached Manchester, and we made a quick visit to its namesake textile mill, which burned some years ago. A quick run down the main street of the downtown convinced me that I’d have to go back when I had more time. But the day was winding down, and we were hungry, so we called off the day’s exploring and took off for Columbus. A strip-mall taqueria provided the perfect end to the day, we took a moment to recap and catch up while we sat tucked away in the back. Getting there was so much more fun, but it was time to head home.