Fulton County

To set up the blogpost that will follow, this post is about Fulton County-- and specifically about its peculiar shape.

Fulton was created from the western portion of Dekalb County in 1953. It was small in size, between 1/3 and 1/4 Dekalb's size.

In the hard times of the Great Depression, Campbell County to Fulton's southwest and Milton County to the northeast were annexed, giving Fulton its present oblong shape. Cobb County ceded land to Fulton to make the southern portion contiguous with the northern. Today Fulton is more than 80 miles long, with the Chattahoochie River running from through it end-to-end in a southwesternly direction.

If you look at the map above, you can make out these three portions of Fulton County: South, Central, and North.

Today the original Fulton County is urban, containing the bulk of the city of Atlanta (about 10% of Atlanta lies in Dekalb). The southernmost portion of Fulton is surprisingly rural, or was about ten years ago when I went with other Pine Lakers to visit a nursery there. As soon as we left I-285 for South Fulton Parkway, we were in the woods.

The northern portion of Fulton County is upscale and suburban, a land of McMansions. Many white upper middle class residents there resent their political and financial linkage with central Fulton, and since 2005 two new cities have been formed by voter referendum specifically to assert their independence: Sandy Springs and Chattahoochie Hills.

In my next post I'll be writing about a community in North Fulton that's very much like Pine Lake: tiny Mountain Park.