Atlanta, Georgia: How Terminus Became Marthasville, Then Atlanta

Atlanta, Georgia, was called Terminus and then Marthasville before a railroad engineer coined its name from the word Atlantic. That’s the version with the most paper behind it. But historian Lucian Lamar Knight admitted in 1913 that there was “quite a divergence of opinion,” and you’ll find a governor’s daughter and a Greek goddess in the old books too.

A town called Terminus

The city started as the end of a line. In 1837, the state’s engineer in chief, Stephen H. Long, surveyed the route of the railroad Georgia was building north toward Chattanooga. He couldn’t find a good spot on either bank of the Chattahoochee River, so he put the end of the line seven miles east of it. Knight’s Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials and Legends says “the earliest name given to the pioneer settlement which arose in the virgin forest at this point was Terminus.”

Long wasn’t a believer. “Not a dollar of his own money went to purchase a lot,” Knight writes. The first settler, Hardy Ivy, had already built a shanty there in 1836.

Martha’s town

By 1843 the settlement wanted a proper name and a charter. E. Y. Clarke’s 1877 Illustrated History of Atlanta says the legislature incorporated it on December 23, 1843, as Marthasville, “in compliment to the daughter of ex-Governor Lumpkin.” That may look fast, Clarke admits, for “a community of ten families at most.”

Wilson Lumpkin was one of the commissioners in charge of building the state railroad, the Western and Atlantic, and he helped lay out the town. According to Knight, people wanted to name the place for Lumpkin himself, “but he discouraged the movement. Nevertheless, it was named for his youngest daughter, Martha.”

The engineer’s letter

Marthasville didn’t last. Knight says Richard Peters, one of the town’s leading pioneers, asked J. Edgar Thomson, the Georgia Railroad’s chief engineer, to suggest something better. Peters thought Marthasville took too long to say. Letters went back and forth until Thomson came up with this: “Atlantic, masculine; Atlanta, feminine—a coined word, but well adapted.” Peters wrote down that story in 1887, when he was asked how the city got its name.

The old Atlanta books spell the engineer’s name Thompson, so you’ll see it both ways. An 1890 history of Augusta, at the other end of the Georgia Railroad, spells it John Edgar Thomson.

The logic was simple. Thomas H. Martin’s Atlanta and Its Builders (1902) says the meaning of the name was obvious to everybody back then. Terminus had been founded to open a trade route between the Mississippi Valley and the Atlantic seaboard, and the name stood for that project. Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal list of place names agrees that Atlanta was “so named to designate its relationship to the Atlantic Ocean, by means of a railway running to the coast.”

Townspeople were using the new name before it was legal. Martin says newspapers ran Atlanta datelines and the railroads put it on their timetables. On December 29, 1847, the legislature made it official: “the town of Marthasville shall be known as and called the city of Atlanta.”

The Atalanta question

Here’s where it gets murky. Martin writes that “there is some controversy as to who has the honor of having first suggested the name.” Thomson usually gets the credit, but F. C. Orme, a former postmaster, “claimed that he coined the word Atlanta.”

Then there’s the spelling. A sketch of the city written by lawyer Green B. Haygood for Atlanta’s first city directory in 1859, reprinted by Martin, says the name “was for a short time written Atalanta, which seems to favor the claims of the goddess.” Atalanta was the fast runner of Greek myth. Knight adds that “there is no doubt that the nickname of Martha Lumpkin was Atalanta,” which is how some people tied the new name back to the old one.

Knight weighed all of it and came down on Thomson’s side: “He simply coined it from the word Atlantic.” That’s the version this article goes with, but it’s a judgment, not a closed case.

The woman behind Marthasville

Martha Lumpkin, by then Mrs. Compton, outlived the town name chosen for her by a long stretch. Knight wrote that she was still living in 1912 at the old Lumpkin home outside Athens, close to the century mark. She’d long said she wanted to be buried in Atlanta, and Knight says a place was being held for her in Oakland Cemetery. So the woman Marthasville was named for planned to end up in Atlanta after all.

Sources & further reading

• Lucian Lamar Knight, Georgia’s Landmarks, Memorials and Legends, vol. 1 (1913), pp. 565-571. Long’s survey and the name Terminus, Hardy Ivy, Lumpkin and his daughter Martha, Peters and Thomson’s letter, the Atalanta nickname, and Martha Lumpkin Compton in 1912.
• Thomas H. Martin, Atlanta and Its Builders, vol. 1 (1902). The 1847 act that renamed Marthasville, F. C. Orme’s competing claim (pp. 66-67), and Haygood’s 1859 sketch with the “Atalanta” spelling (pp. 146-148).
• E. Y. Clarke, Illustrated History of Atlanta (1877). Marthasville’s charter of December 23, 1843, and the ten families.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Atlanta and the railway to the Atlantic.
• Charles C. Jones Jr. and Salem Dutcher, Memorial History of Augusta (1890), p. 486. The Georgia Railroad’s chief engineer, John Edgar Thomson.
• GNIS feature 351615 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Atlanta, state capital since 1868.