But in the early 1800s, Georgia, the largest state east of the Mississippi River, badly needed a better transportation corridor to the prosperous North. Acting on the results of a forward-looking land survey, the state Legislature voted to build the Western & Atlantic railroad from the Tennessee state line southward, ending at a point where three tall granite ridges converged. Here, the new line was to link with extensions of railroads from other parts of the state.

The tiny railroad settlement had a humble beginning: Even its name -- Terminus -- said this was the end of the line. "The terminus," declared W&A engineer Stephen Long in 1837, "will be a good location for one tavern, a blacksmith shop, a grocery store and nothing else."

In fact, as unbelievable as it would have seemed at the time, little Terminus (briefly called Marthasville, then Atlanta) was already on its way to becoming the economic and cultural center of the southern United States. Just 20 years after regular train service began, Atlanta was linked by rail to Chattanooga, Tennessee; Augusta, Georgia; Macon, Georgia; Mobile, Alabama; and many points beyond.

Because the tracks made it a crossroads in the quickly booming overland transportation industry, Atlanta evolved from the start as a new kind of town: an inland port. People, goods, money and news were always moving through. The constant flow of travelers and rough-and-ready railroad men gave the town a bawdy flavor. The first tavern opened in 1835; the first church-and-schoolhouse had to wait until 1845. In the first mayoral election in 1848, the temperance candidate was defeated by a Decatur Street tinsmith and still-maker backed by the Free and Rowdy Party.

From the very beginning, Atlanta promoted itself as a modern city, different from the tradition-bound South. Atlanta's bustling, forward-looking spirit is well-evidenced in the following two items quoted by Norman Shavin and Bruce Galphin in their excellent illustrated history, Atlanta: Triumph of a People. An educator who arrived in 1847 found the citizens quite welcoming, noting that they "bow and shake hands with everybody they meet, as there are so many coming in all the time that they cannot remember with whom they are acquainted." And an 1859 city directory boasted, "Our people show their democratic impulses by each allowing his neighbor to attend to his own business, and our ladies are even allowed to attend to their domestic and household affairs without being ruled out of respectable society." Between 1850 and 1860, Atlanta's population swelled from 2,500 to nearly 10,000.

But proud Atlanta's shining rails were about to be twisted into its noose. The U.S. Civil War was the first war in history in which railroads played a major role, and Atlanta beat as the iron heart of the Confederacy, pumping soldiers and supplies to battlefronts across the South. In the unsentimental eyes of U.S. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the railroad hub was a key military target -- even though it sat at the center of a city of, by then, more than 20,000.

In the spring of 1864, Atlantans knew Sherman was on the march from the Tennessee border and that he had set his sights on their city, but most were confident that Confederate troops would halt the advance. Besides, they believed that the city, ringed by 10 miles of sharpened stakes, rifle pits and forts with cannon, would never fall. In fact, the fortifications did hold: Not a single Union soldier fought his way across them. (Ironically, a Yankee designed them: Col. Lemuel P. Grant was a brilliant civil engineer who moved South in the railroad-building prewar years. Today Grant Park, home to Zoo Atlanta and the Cyclorama, bears his name.)

By summer, the city's bravado was replaced by dread as the booming battles, now within earshot of the city, grew louder daily. After suffering ghastly casualties on July 22 in what became known as the Battle of Atlanta, the Confederate troops were forced to take refuge inside the city's fortifications.

Once their big guns were within range, Union troops mercilessly shelled the city. From July 20, when the shells claimed their first civilian victim (a little girl playing with her dog), until the bombardment ceased on August 25, hell rained down on Atlanta, and terrified residents cowered in makeshift bomb shelters. When Union troops seized the railroad south of the city on September 1, the Confederates realized their hopeless plight and abandoned Atlanta to avoid capture. The Rebels blew up 81 freight cars full of ammunition and seven locomotives to prevent their use by enemy forces. The enormous fire destroyed two-thirds of the city, including the Atlanta rolling mill -- one of only two factories in the South that could turn out badly needed iron rails.

After the mayor's formal surrender on September 2, Atlanta became a Union camp. Sherman ordered the remaining civilians evacuated: A total of 1,644 people were forced out to face more hardships farther south. On the night of November 14, as his 62,000 men pulled out to march to Savannah, Sherman ordered most of the town's remaining structures set afire. Of the 4,000 buildings in the city at the war's beginning, only 400 survived the conflagration. One month shy of the 17th anniversary of its incorporation as a city, Atlanta lay in ruins.

The numbers tell the tragic tale: The Civil War claimed more than 618,000 American lives, more than the combined U.S. losses of every other war from the Revolution to the Korean War. That bloody spring and summer of 1864, 31,687 Union troops and 34,979 Confederates lost their lives in the Atlanta Campaign, which accounted for more fatalities than the number of Americans killed in battle during all the years of the Vietnam War.

After Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9, 1865, a pall of misery and destitution hung heavy over once-haughty Dixie. But Atlanta, like the spitfire heroine who would symbolize the city in Margaret Mitchell's novel 70 years later, got on with life. The South was split into five military governorships and, as the headquarters of the third Military District under U.S. Gen. John Pope, Atlanta was again at the center of things. Federal troops continued to occupy the city for the better part of 10 years.

The railroads had been wrecked in the war, as Union soldiers ripped up the rails, roasted them over fires and twisted them into what were called "Sherman's neckties." But with help from the Army, newly liberated black workers and Northern investors, the four rail lines were restored in just two years, and a new line was working its way to Charlotte, North Carolina, by 1869.

Life was tough in the harsh winter of 1864-65, and a smallpox epidemic swept through in 1866. Even so, the town was struggling its way back to civilization. Theatrical performances resumed in 1865, and by 1866 the reborn city boasted two opera houses. That October, a 75-member touring company presented Italian grand opera on three consecutive nights, although the steep ticket price ($2) kept many Atlantans away.

In 1868, the Georgia capital was relocated to Atlanta from Milledgeville, a decision that was ratified in a popular referendum in 1877. By 1867, 250 stores were open in the city. Atlanta was home to 21,000 people in 1870 and to 37,000 in 1880.

Everywhere there were signs of progress: In 1871, the first horse-drawn streetcar began to service a 2-mile route. In the 1870s, the city inaugurated free mail delivery and a downtown garbage collection service.

In 1886, Atlanta produced what remains its most famous export. John Pemberton, a Marietta Street pharmacist, blended a "brain tonic" with a secret recipe of extracts from the coca plant and kola nuts. When a customer happened to order his Coca-Cola syrup with soda instead of plain water, the world's favorite soft drink was born. Dr. Pemberton sold ownership of his product for $2,300 to entrepreneur Asa Candler in 1887. Available only in Atlanta at first, Coca-Cola soon spread across the South and the nation. By 1899, the company was shipping 300,000 gallons of syrup a year and beginning to sell the premixed drink in bottles.

In 1890, the city had 65,000 residents, only 12 percent of whom had called the "first" Atlanta home. In the South, only Richmond, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee; and New Orleans, Louisiana; were larger than Atlanta. By 1894, electricity, not mules, powered the streetcars on their routes.

Foreshadowing the importance of the modern-day convention business, Atlanta hosted large expositions in 1881, 1887 and 1895, attracting international attention and investment. Gen. Sherman himself came to the 1881 exposition; President Grover Cleveland attended the 1887 fair. The Liberty Bell was displayed at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, which attracted nearly a million visitors in its three-month run and boldly included pavilions celebrating the progress and accomplishments of blacks and women. The latter two fairs were held on the site of the present Piedmont Park, which was purchased by the city for $93,000.

As the 20th century dawned, Atlanta's population stood at 90,000; by 1910, it had jumped to 155,000.

Atlanta's African-American population grew rapidly during the war years as slaves were ordered in to aid the Confederacy, and many of these new citizens returned to make their homes in the city after the war. By 1870, the black community was five times larger than it had been in 1860. By 1890, blacks made up 43 percent of the population and 50 percent of the workforce.

Northern missionaries and other reformers started Freedmen's Schools to educate ex-slaves and their children. (One such school operated in a box car divided into classrooms.) This early movement planted the seeds that made Atlanta a center of black higher education, and today the Atlanta University Center is the largest consortium of historically African-American colleges in the nation.

Even in the days of enforced racial separation, Atlanta prided itself on being a town with the good sense to put business before prejudice -- although it was not always successful. On September 22, 1906, a white mob, enraged by inflammatory newspaper reports of numerous "outrages" against white women, attacked and murdered blacks and burned black homes. Order was not fully restored until September 27, and the rioting left a dozen blacks and several whites dead. The white rampage, reported throughout the nation and in Europe, badly damaged Atlanta's emerging reputation.

In the wake of the riot, much of Atlanta's African-American business community withdrew to Auburn Avenue (then called Wheat Street). Auburn became Atlanta's other main street, offering a full range of retail, service and entertainment concerns as well as religious and social organizations. Among its most successful businesses was Atlanta Life Insurance Co., founded by Alonzo Herndon, an ex-slave and sharecropper who built a lucrative barber business and became Atlanta's first African-American millionaire. In 1956, Fortune magazine called Auburn "the richest Negro street in the world."

It was only natural that Atlanta, long a center of black culture and education, would become a center of civil rights activities in the tumultuous 1960s. And although integration was certainly a contentious issue, forward-thinking black and white leaders helped Atlanta avoid the eruptions of violence that tore apart so many U.S. cities in those years. It was tough, but Atlanta lived up to Mayor William Hartsfield's boast in a 1959 Newsweek article: "Atlanta is a city too busy to hate."

At the center of the civil rights movement throughout its most dramatic years was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was born in a modest frame house on Auburn Avenue on January 15, 1929. A gifted student, he was admitted to Morehouse College at age 15 and earned his doctorate from Boston University in 1955. After leading the successful drive to desegregate buses in Montgomery, Alabama, King returned to Atlanta in 1960 as president and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and co-pastor (with his father) of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

In October of 1960, King and 51 others were arrested when they staged a sit-in to protest segregation at Rich's department store; in all, some 180 people went to jail. Most refused to post bail in order to attract attention to their demands. King's arrest was especially problematic because he was on probation for driving without a Georgia license (his license was from Alabama). His probation was revoked, and he was sentenced to six months in the state penitentiary. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy is said to have intervened personally to secure King's early release.

In Atlanta, as in most Southern communities, the desegregation of public schools was hotly debated. But here integration proceeded far more smoothly than in many cities. On August 30, 1961, nine black students made history by enrolling in formerly all-white high schools. That afternoon, President Kennedy publicly congratulated the city, urging other communities "to look closely at what Atlanta has done and to meet their responsibility, as the officials of Atlanta and Georgia have done, with courage, tolerance and, above all, respect for the law."

To the chagrin of many conservatives, King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in Sweden in 1964. Although still a very controversial figure in his hometown, King was honored with a banquet staged by city leaders, Coca-Cola magnate Robert W. Woodruff chief among them.

On April 4, 1968, an assassin's bullet stilled King's voice for peace and progress. Gripped by grief and rage, more than 100 U.S. cities exploded in violence, but Atlanta, again, was spared. The eyes of the world focused on the city on April 9, when hundreds of thousands watched King's cortege make its way slowly from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College, where president emeritus Dr. Benjamin E. Mays said, "To be honored by being requested to give the eulogy at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King is like asking one to eulogize his deceased son, so close and so precious was he to me."

Today King's body rests in an elevated marble tomb at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change on Auburn Avenue, near his boyhood home and beside his church. The Center lies within the boundaries of the 42-acre Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and annually welcomes about a million visitors each year, making it one of the city's leading tourist attractions.

After King's death, Atlanta continued to make important strides toward social justice for all. In 1974, 35-year-old Maynard Jackson became the youngest mayor in Atlanta's history and the first African American to become mayor of a major Southern city. Jackson's aunt, Metropolitan Opera soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs, performed at his inauguration; she had refused to sing in Atlanta when audiences here were segregated.

The atmosphere fostered by the coalition of civil rights leaders and white liberals made the city a progressive oasis in conservative Georgia. Even as some affluent whites fled the city for the suburbs in the 1960s and '70s, many more people took their places. Flower children, gays and lesbians, peace activists and a variety of intellectuals and nonconformists made their homes here, eager to live in a harmonious and evolving integrated urban environment.

While the city is hardly the "People's Republic of Atlanta" that its detractors sometimes portray, its politics remain decidedly left-leaning. In the '70s, Atlanta was a center of antiwar activity: Presidential candidate Senator George McGovern once led a peace march down Auburn Avenue with Mayor Sam Massell. In the '80s, Atlanta was deeply involved in the fight to free South Africa. Recently released political prisoner Nelson Mandela was wildly received by an enormous throng at Georgia Tech's Bobby Dodd Stadium when he came here to thank the city in 1990. And each June, the mayor proclaims Lesbian and Gay Pride Week in recognition of that community's contributions to the city's life.

And then there's the matter of the Georgia state flag. The Georgia Legislature modified the flag in 1956, in a defiant anti-integration gesture, to include the Confederate battle emblem. After a movement to remove the Stars and Bars failed in the state Legislature, Atlanta City Council acted on its own, banishing the banner from City Hall and replacing it (on February 4, 1993) with the pre-1956 flag.

If Atlanta was born in 1837 on the day the Western & Atlantic surveyors drove in the "zero milepost" that marked the end of the rail line, modern Atlanta was born in 1925 on the day the city took a five-year, rent-free lease on an abandoned auto racetrack in Hapeville, 10 miles south of town, promising to develop the overgrown 287-acre site as an airfield.

Interest in flying built slowly at first. Atlanta was already at the center of a web of tracks and roads; aviation was more of an expensive curiosity than a major factor in transportation. But when young William Hartsfield looked at planes, he saw the future. First as an alderman, then, for 22 years as Atlanta's mayor, Hartsfield pushed for improvements in aviation. By the early 1930s, Atlanta had the second-largest number of air routes in the country.

From the beginning, the demand for aviation services far outstripped Candler Field's capacity. More land was acquired, runways added and better facilities built, but the booming aviation business quickly outgrew each improvement. In 1955, 2 million passengers passed through the airport, making it the busiest in the nation. A $21 million ultramodern facility (the largest single terminal building in the country) opened in 1961. It, too, was quickly too small. "Whether you're bound for heaven or hell," said the old joke, "you'll have to change planes in Atlanta."

In January 1977, work began on the world's largest terminal building at the airport (now renamed Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport to honor the mayor whose vision had readied Atlanta for the jet age). The project cost a half-billion dollars and took 3½ years to complete. Throughout construction, normal operations continued at the world's second-busiest airport. The new Hartsfield, built around a space-age, automated people-moving system 40 feet underground, opened to much fanfare on September 21, 1980. Hartsfield is home to Delta Air Lines, one of the world's leading carriers. Delta offers more than 600 domestic and international flights a day out of the airport. In 1996, the airline carried more than 97 million passengers worldwide, and averaged about 2 million out of Atlanta each month.

Even huge Hartsfield had its limitations, and in September 1994, the city unveiled the new Concourse E for international travel. It is, predictably, the largest concourse in the nation. A dramatic new central atrium connecting the north and south terminals opened in late 1995. It was one of some 60 airport improvement projects under way to make Hartsfield a more welcoming first stop for Atlanta's Olympic visitors.

Throughout recent decades, Atlanta has continued to acquire the high-visibility accessories of a world-class city and to host events of international interest.

The city built an arts center with the largest regional theater in the Southeast and a symphony hall; a 4,591-seat civic center that hosted the Metropolitan Opera; a 16,000-seat coliseum; a baseball/football stadium; a 2.5-million-square-foot convention center; and the world's largest cable-supported domed stadium. Atlantans even pulled together to prevent the destruction of the lavish, 4,678-seat Fox Theatre, built in 1929, and now one of the nation's few surviving grand movie palaces.

In 1966, Atlanta became the first city ever to acquire professional baseball and football teams in the same year. Professional basketball followed in 1968. Atlanta's Omni complex was the site of the 1988 National Democratic Convention, which was watched worldwide. The city's new Georgia Dome hosted Super Bowl XXVIII in 1994, attracting sports fans and media from around the world.

Then the unbelievable happened: In 1990, Atlanta shocked the world when it overcame stiff competition and was awarded the 1996 Olympics, the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympic Games. At first, all seemed to be theory and planning. But in 1994, the Olympics began to change Atlanta's silhouette.

Atlantans watched the Olympic Village rise on the west side of the Downtown Connector, and we saw the mammoth Olympic stadium take shape right beside Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, then the home of the Braves. The number of international visitors, which was always significant, seemed to skyrocket as people from around the world showed up for an advance look at the Olympic city.

Preparing to welcome the world was quite a tall order, but Atlanta had plenty of practice. The still-rebuilding city hosted a major exposition just 17 years after it was burned to the ground. Atlantans and Georgians from across the state responded to the challenges of the Olympics with energy and enthusiasm. Though it only lasted for two weeks in that summer of 1996, the Olympics remain a milestone event for many who eagerly share their remembrances of the excitement and pride that spilled into every street. The lasting legacy of the Games can be found in various locations around town: where kids still splash in the fountains at Centennial Park; where the Braves now play at Turner Field, the former Olympic stadium; where outdoor sculptures, murals and other artworks anchor parks and street corners.

Now that you understand a bit about Atlanta's past, it's time to begin exploring the modern city. So drop this book in your bag, grab your sunglasses and/or your umbrella (more about the weather later), and let's have some fun in Atlanta!