Remarks in Acworth, Georgia, June 16, 2025

This is a rough transcript

I speak a lot about railroads and how they impacted the community, and I think this is a really unique way to look at railroads here in the south and how they impacted the community in a way that probably a lot of people haven’t thought of previously. And I don’t know that it’s an area that I hadn’t really thought much about before being asked to put this presentation together.

So I hope you find it different, insightful, interesting, and maybe a little thought-provoking as well, because I would say that’s how I view this information when I pulled it together.

It’s really hard to deny the role that railroads played in so many communities. We’re here in Acworth, and this is a great railroad time with a great railroad history that I talked about the last time railroads were so involved in helping build up communities and make them destinations for whether it was passengers or whether it was freight that moved on the railroads, and frankly, Atlanta is a great example of how a railroad could shape and build a community Atlanta wouldn’t exist today, if not for the railroads. It was a town that was known as Terminus before, known as Atlanta.

Why? Because it was the terminal point of railroads, where railroads came together.

So while so many communities were built up because they were on a body of water — whether a port town or whether it was a river, Atlanta exists because of the railroad. And as soon as railroads began to operate in this area, they really 1840s and 1850s is when they really started coming into their own.