Monday Musings – 29 January

I rode my bike up Atlanta’s famous Beltline Trail toward Piedmont Park last week. As I crossed highways, passed a loft apartment building that once churned out Ford Model T cars, and rode behind the old Sears Roebuck warehouse (now the Ponce City Market), I was reminded why this pathway is here. It was once an active rail line.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of railroads to the development of cities like Atlanta. Rail was the only way to transport goods long distances and on any given rail-line, dozens of short sidings allowed locomotives to drop off and pick up cars at various businesses along the way. You can see the remnant of an old rail siding behind the Ponce City Market.

One such siding allowed the railroad to deliver Atlanta’s first elephant to Piedmont Park in the summer of 1890, prior to her 5-mile walk to the zoo. I wrote about it in my September 2019 blog, Atlanta’s Elephant Parade. I wanted to see the park for myself—see if there was any trace of the elephant that was once housed there. There was not. And the only sign of the railroad that brought her is the Beltline Trail, still bustling after all these years.