Mountain Park

If Pine Lake has a sister city it would be Mountain Park in North Fulton County.

Mountain Park was incorporated in 1927 as a retreat for Atlanta's wealthiest citizens (everyone else looking for a watery escape in those pre-TVA lake days had to wait, I suppose, for Pine Lake to come along). As happened in Pine Lake (which was founded nine years after Mountain Park), families slowly began to live in the city year-round. Over the years the city got electricity, water, and sewer services and the homes became larger.

In 1952 the lake that was the center of Mountain Park (Lake Garret) was supplemented by Lake Cherful, which was created by flooding a cornfield. Cherful's name came about because of its location on the border of Fulton and Cherokee Counties (a small portion of Mountain Park lies in Cherokee).

Mountain Park and Pine Lake are in many ways similar. Like Pine Lake, Mountain Park is incorporated, and each has its own government, with a mayor and city council. Both have small populations (Mountain Park about 500, Pine Lake about 800). Both are wildlife refuges. Both have recycling programs. Both have civic buildings which can be leased. Both have a Lakeshore Drive And both have streets named for trees: Magnolia, Oak, Hemlock, Spruce, Pine, Olive. Both are little oases surrounded by suburban residential mundancity.

But there's a difference. While runoff has been minimal in Pine Lake, with the waters remaining reasonably healthy, heavy residential and commercial development in areas surrounding Mountain Park have resulted in the loss of most of Lake Garret. Much of Garret is now  by the 1970s (loss of Lake Cherful is impending). The sand-bottomed swimming area in Garret was converted to a concrete pool and the remainder of the area that had once been the lake was turned into a village green. Lake Garret is also being destroyed by runoff.

In 2005, Mountain Park sued developers over the runoff. The developers claimed the runoff was natural and said the lakes would have filled with silt under any circumstances. The city won its lawsuit in 2010, but received less than $50,000 in damages, far less than it had spent, angering its citizens.

Here's a Google Earth image of Mountain Park:

Click on the photo to enlarge.

The demise of Lake Garret (here misspelled) is apparent.

In 2005, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an article by Paul Kaplan, in which he wrote about the impact of siltation on Mountain Park. I'll reproduce it in my next post.