by Larry Felton Johnson
Reading old newspapers has always been an interest of mine, and with the development of the Georgia Historic Newspapers website I’ve been like a kid in a candy store.
Georgia Historic Newspapers is part of the GALILEO project, and is housed at the University of Georgia.
The project team finds and scans copies of Georgia newspapers, and now includes newspapers from the 17th century through the present.
They digitize the papers into PDF copies and run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on them so that they are searchable and available in text format (although the text renderings are not perfect).
This morning I decided to do a search on Acworth, Kennesaw, and Smyrna, and limit my search to the Hearst paper that published in Atlanta from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, the Atlanta Georgian.
On the first result screen there was a front page of a 1918 Hearst supplement, the Sunday American, with the headline “We’re Alabama Bound Today: Atlanta to Borden Wheeler.”
You can see the copy from the original by following this link.
As a bit of background: roads in the United States were terrible in 1918. A few years back I published another item from the Georgia Historic Newspapers site about a woman who drove from downtown Atlanta to Lithia Springs via Mableton and Austell in 1911, and the short blurb, also from the Atlanta Georgian, read as if she were undertaking a cross-country race. By 1918 some additional paving had been done, but not much.
The article from the Sunday American described the itinerary in detail, including mileage covered along the way a few descriptions of hazards.
Here’s a transcription. I have no idea what “FISH” is but apparently it was an obvious enough place in 1918 that it was included in the itinerary without explanation.
The Itinerary
SUNDAY AMERICAN’S ITINERARY OF THE ROAD TO BORDEN WHEELER 0.0 ATLANTA.
From Five Points and Peachtree street go…
Read the full article here
