Marietta in History
The Dixie Highway
Circa 1930
Used to be, if you were traveling through Cobb County, you were traveling on the Dixie Highway, which went right through the Marietta Square on the way to parts south. It was a fabled route that wound among piney woods and sleepy little towns, past chenille bedspreads hung out for sale, boiled peanut stands and countless mom and pop motor courts. Stretching from the Midwest to Florida, the Atlanta Road section of the highway was paved from Marietta to Smyrna in 1920. Three years later, the paving stretched to the Chattahoochee River and by 1929 went all the way through Georgia.
The Dixie Highway changed things. Now people were just passing through. They stayed at tourist camps advertised along the highway with signs that said, "Room, $1. Heat. Baths. Free garage." In her book, The First Hundred Years, Sarah Blackwell Gober Temple writes, "The Middle West, with which Cobb County is principally concerned, leaves its winter climate and its coal bills, and packing itself and its baggage into cars and trailers, passes along Cobb's highways to Florida. Inquisitive dogs bark from the windows of Iowa and Michigan cars; supercilious cats blink from the back of Indiana and Ohio cars, bound for Florida and making a night's stop on the way down in the autumn and a night's stop on the way back in the spring."
Temple, Sarah Blackwell Gober. The First Hundred Years.
Scott, Thomas A. Cobb County, Georgia and the Origins of the Suburban South, A Twentieth-Century History.