Buckhead Village: James Montgomery’s Mark

Lyrics

Peachtree and East Paces Ferry.
The glass is new. The traffic never sleeps.
But I stand here and listen for a different pulse.

James Montgomery. Or just Montgomery.
The records are quiet on your first name.
No photograph, no letter in your hand.
Just a tavern, they say, right on this corner.
A place for a drink and a land deal.
Did you have a beard thick with dust?
Was your voice low from the Georgia heat?
The city kept your grid, but lost your face.

And your mark isn't chiseled in stone.
It’s not a plaque on a bronze door.
It's the turn in the road, the surveyor's line.
The ghost of a deed for a piece of the sky.
You drew the center, James Montgomery.
Then you vanished from the frame.

I smell the woodsmoke from your chimney.
Hear the clink of a heavy glass on a pine bar.
The low talk of a purchase, a promise, a price.
Before the streetcars, before the neon hum.
Just lantern light on tired faces,
mapping out futures on a napkin.
Now it's the hiss of tires on wet asphalt,
the whisper of money in a different tongue.

They built towers on your property lines.
They paved over the dirt where your horses stood.
Every title search, every mortgage note,
is a faint echo of the bargain you struck.
A foundational ghost, a name in a ledger,
while the world you started rushes past.

Peachtree and East Paces Ferry.
I look for your tavern in the glare.
I listen for your name in the wind.
Just the traffic.
Just the pulse.
Your mark.