Sarah Toton, Vale of Amusements: Modernity, Technology, and Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Park, 1870-1920; Southern Spaces

U.S. cities began to establish public parks in last half of the nineteenth century as a means to offer "healthy" recreational activities to the growing urban population, and particularly to its working-class elements. City planners and urban reformers hoped municipal green space would morally elevate the poor and immigrant populations, with the enticement of fresh air and cut grass luring people out of taverns, streets, and other "sites of vice." In their history of Central Park, Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar note that "as early as 1826, New York businessmen used social and moral arguments that the 750-acre park in the center of Manhattan would 'improve' the 'disorderly classes' and foster order among them."4

When Central Park opened in 1858, the City of New York numbered approximately eight-hundred-thousand residents. Atlanta, by comparision, had a population of just above nine-thousand residents, making it the ninety-ninth largest city in America behind Hoboken, NJ; Columbus, GA; and Schenectady, NY. When Major General William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta in 1864, one estimate numbered the city's population at just thirty-five hundred residents. In the aftermath of the war, Atlantans thought more about survival than establishing municipal parks. When they had time for recreation and amusement, they gathered at impromptu leisure sites, often on private land.

In the late 1860s, Atlanta residents began visiting the springs in John Armistead's beech grove two miles east of town. With the filling-in of Yancey Springs to make way for the Air-Line Railroad in 1868, Atlantans looked to Armistead's springs to supplement their residential water supply. A retired Atlanta physician, Dr. Henry L. Wilson, named the spot "Ponce de Leon Springs" based on his assertion that the water held rejuvenative properties. To meet rising demand, Armistead set up a residential water delivery service in late 1871. By the spring of the following year, an omnibus carried passengers daily from Atlanta to Armistead's springs.

The growing traffic from Atlanta to Ponce de Leon Springs drew the attention of Richard Peters, co-founder of the Atlanta Street Railroad Company. Looking to profit from the city's latest hot spot, the streetcar company extended its Peachtree Street Line east to Armistead's property in 1874, along what is now Ponce de Leon Avenue. The extension required the construction of a two-hundred-fifty-foot-long trestle over Clear Creek. The railroad's investment soon paid off as the popular line took Atlantans by horse-drawn trolley to the Springs for a ten-cent fare.

Excerpt from Harper's, 1895:

The temptation to capitalize on the Springs led Armistead to begin charging five cents a person to drink the water in May, 1886. Enraged, E.C. Peters, son of Richard Peters and Atlanta Street Railroad's general superintendent, launched a campaign against Armistead for control of the Springs. Peters told the Atlanta Constitution that the new fee infringed on an 1874 agreement between the railway company and Armistead. While the railway held no control over the Springs themselves, Peters saw the site as an lucrative investment. If patrons balked at the five-cent fee, Atlanta Street Railroad lost their passengers and the income from the Ponce de Leon Line.

As the Springs became an increasingly popular leisure spot for white Atlantans, blacks were excluded. Sensationalized news stories of supposed black outrages at the Springs published by the Atlanta Constitution fueled white racism and provided justification for Jim Crow segregation. In 1887, the Constitution reported that a "negro boy swindle[d] two children out of money and butter" as they traveled from their home beyond the Springs.5 Just two months later another Constitution story reported that "a young negro" maliciously wounded a black boy with a knife while he played with a group of friends near the Springs.6 A year later, the Atlanta Constitution reported another alleged crime in which a "low, chunky, brown skinned negro" maliciously assaulted a "maiden lady" on her way home from the Springs. These stories helped justify segregation in the park by describing scenarios where unsupervised racial mixing led to the violation of prevailing racial or social norms. Once open to blacks and whites alike, by the 1890s, Ponce de Leon Springs had become one of many white-only leisure spaces in the city and across the South.

Stories of black assaults coincided with the transfer of the park to corporate ownership. In 1887 the property changed hands when the Atlanta Street Railroad Company purchased thirty acres surrounding the Springs (uniting the Ponce de Leon Springs trolley line and its final destination under one owner). Ponce de Leon Park underwent numerous changes in the last decade of the nineteenth century as an assortment of individuals attempted to turn the park into the "pleasentest [sic] resort in Atlanta."7

Image:

Nine Mile Circle Trolley, circa 1895

Established by the Fulton County Railroad in the early 1890s, the Nine Mile Circle line went through growing white suburban areas, including Inman Park, the Highlands, Ponce de Leon Springs, and Grant Park. Riders boarded the open air streetcars to take in a cool breeze and the changing city in what had become a popular pleasure trip. During the 1895 Cotton States Exposition, the line took visitors to the fair site, a space now known as Piedmont Park.

As the private Ponce de Leon Park changed, so did the public streets of Atlanta. Electricity came to the city in 1884 through the Georgia Electric Light Company. Downtown streetlights shifted from gas to electric in the mid-1880s, but streetcars took longer to transition to electric power. Through the 1880s, mules remained the most popular means to move trolleys, just as they did when the first streetcar ran from Whitehall Street to West End in 1872. After his death in 1889, Richard Peters left his son E.C. the Atlanta Street Railroad, which included fifteen miles of line, fifty cars and two hundred mules and horses.8 When the smaller Gate City Street Railroad was sold in 1889, its assets included seven cars and twenty-eight mules.

Atlanta's population grew rapidly in the last decades of the nineteenth century, from almost 22,000 in 1871 to nearly 65,000 in 1888. Local businessmen set out to build additional transportation networks, and between 1872 and 1888, eleven more street railroads were chartered.9 With growing demand and competition, some entrepreneurs looked towards emerging technologies to distinguish their railroads. The Metropolitan Street Railroad Company experimented with dummy steam engines in the mid 1880s, but residential complaints about smoke and the dearth of experienced engineers created more problems than profit.10 While Montgomery, Alabama had electric streetcars in 1886, it took until 1889 for the first electric streetcar to run on Atlanta streets.11