Atlanta, Texas: Named for Home

Atlanta, Texas has nothing to do with Atlanta, Georgia, except that many of its early settlers came from there. When the Texas and Pacific Railway pushed through eastern Cass County in the early eighteen seventies, a post office opened at the new rail stop, and the settlers who gathered around it named the town for the city they had left behind. By eighteen eighty-five the community was a busy rail and sawmill town with churches, schools, a bank, and a weekly newspaper.

Timber was the engine. Pine forests covered the Piney Woods region, and the sawmills ran hard. The lumber boom peaked around eighteen ninety, then the trees thinned.

The discovery of the Rodessa oil field in nineteen thirty-five bought the town another generation of prosperity, and Atlanta has remained a small regional center in deep East Texas ever since.