Lithonia, Georgia

The name Lithonia comes from the Greek, lithos for stone and onia for place: the place of stone. It was an accurate description. The town incorporated in eighteen fifty-six in eastern DeKalb County, surrounded on all sides by dense deposits of granite. Hand quarrying gave way to drills and dynamite in eighteen seventy-nine, and within decades the Davidson family and other operators had developed an operation that became, at its peak, one of the largest granite quarries in the world.

The stone cut from Lithonia was prized for its density and strength and shipped across the country for construction projects. The area around the town is now protected as the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area, where the quarry's worn landscape of exposed stone has become a hiking and nature destination. Lithonia today is a small city absorbed into the Atlanta metro's eastern sprawl, but the bare granite ridges just outside of town still carry the name that Greek gives to a place made of stone.