Terminus: The Iron Heart

Lyrics

It started with a sound.
A cold metal thunk.
December twenty-first, eighteen thirty-seven.
You were just a point on a map that didn't exist yet.
Just a surveyor's pin in red Georgia clay.

Stephen Harriman Long, he squinted at the sun through the pines.
Found the spot. The end of the line.
The Zero Mile Post.
They called you Terminus.
A name for a place that was only an idea.
A promise hammered into the dirt.
No streets, no Union Depot yet.
Just the rustle of leaves and the sound of an axe.

And from that one iron heart, the arteries grew.
Steel veins reaching for the coast, pushing to the new.
From a single stake, a single beat.
A city rises on iron feet.
Terminus. The beginning at the end.

Then came the hiss of steam.
September, forty-two.
The locomotive 'Florida' came chugging through the quiet.
Brought the smell of coal smoke and hot metal.
Broke the stillness.
The first pulse.
The first real breath of the machine.
Lemuel Grant started drawing lines on paper,
Giving you shape beyond the tracks.

And from that one iron heart, the arteries grew.
Steel veins reaching for the coast, pushing to the new.
From a single stake, a single beat.
A city rises on iron feet.
Terminus. The beginning at the end.

They gave you a softer name for a while.
Marthasville. For a governor's daughter.
But it didn't fit.
Then a letter from J. Edgar Thomson.
"A short, musical, and appropriate name."
He wrote it on parchment with a quill.
Atlanta.
Echoing the ocean you were trying to reach.
Atlanta.

And the stake is still there.
Under the concrete of Five Points.
The Zero Mile Post, enshrined.
I can still hear it sometimes.
That first cold thunk.
The iron heart.
Still beating.