Terminus: The Crossroads Call

Lyrics

December twenty-first. Eighteen thirty-seven.
Cold pine and damp red earth.

Just a stake in the ground, by a surveyor's hand.
Wilson Lumpkin's grand design, across the Mvskoke land.
Stephen Long points the way through the Georgia dark.
Just the sound of a hammer, leaving its mark.
This is the end of the line, the final post.
Where the Western & Atlantic gives up its ghost.
They call you Terminus, a simple, lonely fact.
Nothing but potential on an unmarked track.

But I hear the crossroads call.
A whisper in the steel.
From a single point of iron, something real.
A future humming on the rails, a city in the seed.
Planted by a hammer blow, for a coming need.

Then a name for a governor's girl, Martha Atalanta's grace.
Marthasville for a time, a muddy, hopeful place.
A handful of houses, the smell of coal and pine.
Then a letter from Thomson, a new and bolder line.
He called you Atlanta, a daughter of the sea.
A name for what the iron rails were destined to be.

And I hear the crossroads call.
A whisper in the steel.
From a single point of iron, something real.
A future humming on the rails, a city in the seed.
Planted by a hammer blow, for a coming need.

But whose hands held the hammer? Whose backs cut the grade?
The Irish and the bonded, a shadow price was paid.
For every crosstie laid down, a story underneath.
In the silence of that Zero Post, the city draws its breath.

From one stake... to these streets.
From that clang... to these heartbeats.
The echo of the hammer, in the engine's steam.
Terminus.
Marthasville.
Atlanta.
The waking dream.