Terminus: Where Rails Met Red Clay

Lyrics

Before the name...
Before the smoke...
There was just the color.
The stubborn red of the earth.

I remember the sound of the stake.
Stephen Long, driving it into you.
Eighteen thirty-seven.
Not a city, just a point on a map.
A surveyor's dream, a place to end the line.
They called you Terminus.
The last stop.
But you were a beginning.

Then the clearing began.
The scent of cut pine and sweating oak.
Hands I never knew, faces lost to the record...
They laid the ties, they leveled the ground.
That thick, wet clay clinging to every boot, every shovel.
Until September of 'forty-two...
A single engine coughed its way into the clearing.
And you breathed smoke for the first time.

This is the spot.
The Zero Milepost.
Where iron ambition met Georgia clay.
This is the heart, the first beat.
Terminus.
Where the future arrived on a rail of steel.
And a city began to bleed from the ground up.

J. Edgar Thomson wrote a letter.
He said you deserved a better name.
Something that tasted of the ocean.
Atlantic... Atlanta.
A name to grow into.
A name for a crossroads, not an ending.

Now the Milepost is cased in concrete.
Buried under the viaduct.
But you remember.
You remember the stake in the ground.
The first taste of smoke.
The red clay that stained everything.
The beginning.