Buckhead Village: Terminus Rising

Lyrics

September, 1837.
Red clay dust in the air.

Wilson Lumpkin’s signature was already dry.
Stephen Harriman Long squints against the sun.
Two sets of hands, their names just a note in a ledger,
cleared the pine brush where the city had begun.
It was eighty-eight degrees at noon.
The smell of resin on the warm air.
No buildings here. No future here.
Just a point on a map that wasn't there.

And you were Terminus.
A pine stake driven in the ground.
Mile Zero.
The first sound.
A line drawn north before the rails were down.
The line that would find Buckhead from this town.

By 1843, you were Marthasville.
By 1850, the pine was gone.
Replaced by an iron spike, harder and colder.
A city rising with the dawn.
And they forgot the feel of the wood.
They forgot the quiet of the ridge.
They built a grid over the memory.
They built a city, bridge by bridge.

But you were Terminus.
A pine stake driven in the ground.
Mile Zero.
The first sound.
A line drawn north before the rails were down.
The line that would find Buckhead from this town.

That same survey line, that same Peachtree trace,
became the path for the electric hum.
The streetcar running north in 1907,
to a future that had not yet come.
From a single post in an empty clearing,
to the glass towers, one by one by one.

Now you're brass under glass in the State Capitol.
Fogging up on a humid Atlanta day.
The zero point.
The start of the way.
Still pushing north.
Still running today.