Terminus: Where the Rails Began

Lyrics

[Intro]
You were just a point on a map not yet drawn.
A thought from the statehouse, an act passed in oil lamplight.
December, eighteen thirty-six.
Just a place in the pine woods, waiting.

[Verse 1]
Then came September. Eighteen thirty-seven.
Stephen Harriman Long, he found the ridge.
The air damp with pine and disturbed earth.
He raised his hammer, and with one clean swing...
He drove you home.
A single iron stake.
A simple, metal truth in a sea of green.
The Zero Mile Post.

[Chorus]
And they called you Terminus.
Where the iron road would end, and a city would begin.
Terminus.
The promise whispered on a steel tongue.
A crossroads scratched into the Georgia clay.

[Verse 2]
Then John Thrasher built his shanty store.
The woods gave way to a ragged clearing.
Charles Lyell saw it, a few years on.
"A miserable collection of shanties," he wrote.
But he felt it too.
December twenty-fourth, 'forty-two.
The whistle shrieked, the Iron Horse arrived.
Smelling of coal smoke and Augusta.
And everything, everything changed.

[Chorus]
And they called you Terminus.
Where the iron road would end, and a city would begin.
Terminus.
The promise shouted on a steam tongue.
A crossroads hammered into the Georgia clay.

[Bridge]
A name for a governor's daughter, Marthasville.
A brief, gentle sound.
But the rails demanded more.
J. Edgar Thomson saw the ocean in the name.
A feminized Atlantic.
So he called you Atlanta.
A name to hold the weight of all the boxcars coming.

[Outro]
And you're still there.
Underneath Underground.
Our first secret.
The stake that pinned a future to the ground.
Terminus.