[This article is part of an ongoing project of resurrecting evergreen articles from the Cobb County Courier’s stacks, and expanding them with newly discovered information]

I’ve been sorting through the earliest articles we published here, when the Cobb County Courier was known under its original name: River Edges, looking for evergreen articles that can be expanded and published for the much larger audience we have now.

I found a gem I’d uncovered from the Georgia Historic Newspapers database about an excursion taken by automobile in 1911 along what later became Veterans Memorial Highway and Donald Hollowell Parkway.

But first let me explain the first incarnation of the Courier, River Edges.

The name River Edges was dropped for two reasons.

One was that while the site’s original scope was both sides of the river, our content was increasingly about Cobb. It was beyond our ability to cover events in Cobb and Fulton counties.

The second was that a web search turned up hundreds of companies with some variant of “River” and “Edge” in the name.

Another fact worth noting is that our readership in 2016, when this was published, was typically fewer than 5,000 visitors per month, and some months, we published fewer than 5 articles (compared to a readership of over 150,000 now, with a minimum of 200 articles published per month).

A trip from downtown Atlanta through Mableton and Austell

I’ve been expanding and updating the early articles that I’ve found interesting enough to revisit.

I think this one is a real gem, about a woman who made a trip from downtown Atlanta to what was at the time a resort destination in Lithia Springs in Douglas County, but very near Cobb.

I stumbled across this mysterious little blurb from the Atlanta Georgian and News, dated June 30, 1911.  There was no headline, and this is the complete text of the article, with capitalization and punctuation preserved as it was in the original article:

Automobile route to Sweetwater Park Hotel via North avenue, Marietta street to Bellwood avenue, over Chattahoochee bridge, through Mableton, Austell, thence to Lithia Springs. Record time by lady driver — 45 minutes.

This is an intriguing little article for a number of reasons.

The first thing of interest is the mention of Bellwood Avenue. Bellwood Avenue is an earlier name for the section of Bankhead Highway closest to downtown Atlanta. It’s been renamed several times. 

It is now part of the current Donald Hollowell Parkway on the City of Atlanta side and Veteran’s Memorial Highway in Cobb County. 

The bridge over the Chattahoochee mentioned in the blurb was at the location of the current crossing of US 78/278 in South Cobb, entering Mableton. This makes sense since her route took her through Mableton and Austell.

Second, in 1911, the Atlanta area didn’t have a very well-developed road system, so navigating from downtown Atlanta to Lithia Springs, particularly in record time, was a newsworthy event, particularly since the trip was undertaken by a “lady driver.”

The widespread paving of Cobb County roads didn’t begin until after 1915, with the development of the Dixie Highway and a 1921 bond issue for the City of Marietta roads. The road she took was the second continuously paved highway in Cobb County, after Dixie Highway.

So she was probably riding over a roadway of packed mud.

The third interesting thing is the mention of the Sweetwater Park Hotel.  An ad from 1911 in the Atlanta Georgian and News states, “You could not pick out a more charming place to spend the summer than Sweetwater Park Hotel, at Lithia Springs, Ga.”  The ad further promised that Bowden Lithia Springs water, available both in the springs and bottled at the hotel, had

“curative properties and great medicinal value in the treatment of rheumatism, gout, kidney and bladder problems, gravel, insomnia, dyspepsia, indigestion, and constipation.”

I had to look up the medical condition “gravel”.  It is an archaic word for kidney stones.

Digging a little further into the history of the hotel, I found a lengthy Atlanta Constitution article from April 12, 1887, entitled “As if by Magic, a Wonderful Resort Near Atlanta”. The article announced the opening of the hotel, and described the curative powers of the water.

It’s interesting what you can discover with a one-paragraph article in a 110-year-old newspaper as your starting point.