Marthasville, Atlanta: The Names It Tried

Lyrics

[Intro]
Before the name, the function.
A surveyor's stake driven in red clay.
1837.
This is the end of the line.
Terminus.

[Verse 1]
Six years pass.
A town needs a title.
December 23, 1843.
Governor Wilson Lumpkin thinks of his daughter,
Martha Atalanta Lumpkin.
And the Georgia General Assembly writes it down.
Marthasville.
No apostrophe, just a clean line on the incorporation act.
The name hangs in the air over Marietta Street,
with pine resin and the woodsmoke from the new frame courthouse.
A name for a girl in Athens, given to a town she'd rarely see.

[Chorus]
How does a place find its name?
Does it wear it like a borrowed coat?
For a governor's daughter?
For a railroad's pride?
Ten years, trying on a voice to see which one will sing.

[Verse 2]
But a daughter's name is a quiet thing.
A parlor room name for a town of steam and iron rails shouting their arrival.
J. Edgar Thomson, the chief engineer, he sees a map, not a family portrait.
He hears the ocean in the name, a destination.
The Western and the Atlantic.
A name that moves.
A name that works.

[Chorus]
How does a place find its name?
Does it wear it like a borrowed coat?
For a governor's daughter?
For a railroad's pride?
Ten years, trying on a voice to see which one will sing.

[Bridge]
So the proposal is made in 1845.
A murmur in the Georgia Journal & Messenger.
And then, on a poster nailed to the depot wall,
January 29, 1847.
The new charter smells of wet ink and coal dust.
Atlanta.
The feminine of the sea it reaches for.

[Outro]
Terminus, just a fact in the dirt.
Marthasville, a ghost on a page in the archives.
The Lumpkin family papers hold her name,
but not her thoughts.
She never wrote down what she thought of it.
The city just... moved on.
And found the one that fit.
The one that could hold the fire, and the phoenix, and everything to come.