Metro Atlanta

She was the first female architect in Georgia and the first woman in the South to receive formal architectural training. Henrietta Dozier was born in Fernandina, Florida, in 1872, and moved to Atlanta when she was 2 years old. Dozier studied Beaux-Arts classicism at the Pratt Institute in New York. At 27, she earned her […]

He was one of the most influential black leaders of the 20th century, and he taught in Atlanta for almost 25 years. W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868 and received a PhD. from Harvard in 1895—the same year Booker T. Washington made his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech, calling for accommodation rather than […]

Since early May 1864 U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman had been moving south from Tennessee toward Atlanta, with Joe Johnston’s Confederates blocking his path. Every flanking move Sherman made, Johnston countered, frustrating Sherman’s plans. Finally, Sherman’s patience snapped. No more flanking. He would attack Johnston head on and destroy his army. It would be the […]

“Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”: the immortal words of General William T. Sherman when he captured Atlanta on this date in 1864. Sherman had taken the Deep South’s major manufacturing center and railroad hub, a huge loss for the Confederacy. Unwilling to attack Atlanta’s strong defenses, U.S. forces swept west and south around the […]

With fires burning brightly, this day was still one of the darkest in Atlanta’s history. Atlanta was the gateway through which most of the traffic passed between the south Atlantic seaboard and the regions to the west, and the city became a major prize during the Civil War. Sherman captured the city in September after […]

General William Sherman and his army were set to take Atlanta in July, 1864. General Joseph Johnston’s Confederate army had fought them since May. But they could only slow Sherman down, not stop him. The citizens of the Confederacy’s major railroad hub were justifiably worried. So was Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Fearing Atlanta would fall […]

The man who helped Henry Grady promote Atlanta as the heart of the “New South” was born in South Carolina.  Georgia newspaper editor Clark Howell was the son of a former Confederate artillery captain. His father bought a half–interest in the Atlanta Constitution in 1876 and hired Henry Grady and Joel Chandler Harris to work […]

He took Coca-Cola from the drug store to Main Street, and endowed a great university. Asa Candler was born in Villa Rica in 1851. While working as a pharmacist in Atlanta in 1887 he bought the rights and formula for Coca-Cola from John Pemberton for $2,300. Candler thought the concoction’s future was a soft drink […]

He wrote the section of Georgia’s constitution that guarantees religious liberty to its citizens. Jesse Mercer was born in North Carolina in 1769 and migrated to Georgia with his family as a child. A preacher’s son, he was ordained a Baptist minister and was a gifted preacher who pastored seven churches in his life, several […]