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Sat 9 Dec, 2006 01:13 pm
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Small towns in Georgia wiped off the map
By Greg Bluestein
Associated Press
December 9, 2006
CHATTOOGAVILLE, Ga. -- Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Due West and Po Biddy Crossroads.Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too.
In all, 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.
Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.
The state began handing out the new map at rest stops and welcome centers in the summer.
Gone are such places as Dewy Rose,Hemp, Experiment, Retreat, Wooster, Sharp Top and Chattoogaville, a spot in far northwestern Georgia that consists of little more than a two-truck volunteer fire department, a few farmhouses and a country store where locals fill up their gas tanks.
"We're not under obligation to show every single community," Transportation Department spokeswoman Karlene Barron said. "While we want to, there's a balancing act. And the map was getting illegible."
That doesn't ease the snub to the people who live in those places.
"This gets back to respect for rural areas," said Dennis Holt, who is leading a community group that wants to restore the good name of western Georgia's Hickory Level, population 1,000, which was founded in 1828 and recently put up five new welcome signs. "I'm not sure we're going to accomplish anything, but I would have felt bad about myself if I didn't say something about it."
Mapmaking criteria vary by state, and it is not unusual for a little housecleaning over time, often to get rid of place names now considered racially offensive. But other states said it is almost unheard of to see hundreds of communities given the boot in a single year.
In Texas, few of the 2,076 cities and towns are ever deleted because of strict standards that weigh whether a spot is along a state highway, has a post office or boasts a population of 50 or more.
Rand McNally, North America's biggest commercial mapmaker, is not going to follow Georgia's example. It said a change of even just a dozen place names on its state maps is rare.
"We won't take a town off the map if we can confirm there's still a landmark--even if there's no people there," said Joel Minster, the company's chief cartographer.
Because of the complaints in Georgia, transportation officials said they will take another look at their guidelines for what constitutes a "community."
Some, though, do not seem to mind that their hometowns have vanished.
"There's not even a flashing traffic light here," Kelly Wiggins, who lives near Chattoogaville, said with a laugh.
source:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0612090076dec09,1,2248854.story
Such really surprises me, even a town of 1,000 inhabitants! (page 3, Chicago Tribune, print edition)
Here, in Germany, even small places with less than 30 inhabitants - like the hamlet my anchestors founded in 13th century - are still on all maps:
For whatever it's worth, Walter, Rand McNally and others often times add little towns to nail down copyright infringements. I'll admit, I've never heard of them leaving one off for the same reason.
This was just some bureaucrat's idea for saving a buck.
Bet he's never ridden his bike through Red Bird, Oklahoma on a hot August afternoon. There's about a hundred folks who live there and if you sit in front of the only bar/cafe/store sipping a Mountain Dew in your bike shorts and helmet half of them will come out in the heat to say "Howdy"
Joe(that's small town living)Nation
There's a town near here with a population of about three. There is a paintless two-story structure that at one time, probably back in the thirties, was a bustling grocery store/saloon/gathering place and on the other side of the street is a house so dilapitated that is has begun to collapse on one side.
The funny thing is the house has been in that state of collapse for thirty years or more. It hasn't changed. Every time I drive by I mean to stop and take a peek inside to see if there are hidden support beams or something in place that is holding that house in such a state of disrepair.
The thing, by all the laws of physics, should have collapsed 25 years ago.
The other two corners are occupied by a cemetery and a vacant lot. What the lot was for is beyond me. Just a slab of tar with a multitude of cracks which make handy exit points for the plethora of weeds bursting through.
The town has a name but who the hell knows why. As you leave town, heading north, you will see a small, nondescript white house with a complete absence of foliage. No trees, no bushes, no plants of any kind. Only this simple white house sitting on the exposed foundation. Inside are the three occupants of the town, probably watching tv.
Pisses me off the way yanks think any town uner 10,000 is a small town.
Hey, DP, 10,000 is a small town, but t'was Georgia (BULLDOGS! BULLDOGS!) mapmakers who were taking the little bitty places off the maps, not yanks.
Yankees have a real appreciatation for the small town. New England (and I have to say here that there ain't nobody a real Yankee unless they come from the confines of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut or the States of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Even those suckers in pinstripes playing 80 billion dollar ball in the Bronx aren't Yankee Doodle Dandys.)
Ahem. New England is littered with small towns and in each, on a monthly or semi-monthly, basis, is held the New England Town Meeting, still the most democratic (small d) institution amongst the vast wasteland we call American politics. In each of those small towns (not a pejorative term in the slightest) they have to do all the things the huge cities have to do for their citizens. There has to be a supply of water, both for drinking and for sanitation, there has to be some kind of protection against fire and crime, someone has to keep track of who owns what piece of ground and whether or not they have paid their proper taxes.
It is not easy being a small town and even harder to be a tiny one. Ask the people in Bellows Falls, Vt. They've got a police chief that wants to put up sixteen security cameras. Have you evah?
On my little street which runs from 184th to 191st in Washington Heights New York City, the census says there are 32,312 persons. I know about twenty of 'em including my wife.
Joe(There are no Yankees in Ohio)Nation
Yanks is a generic term joe applied equally to all north Americans without fear or favour.
10,000 is a big town. My town has 2000 people and services a district population of around 6000. I know most of them.
Dad(traffic lights scare me)pad
gustavratzenhofer wrote:There's a town near here with a population of about three. There is a paintless two-story structure that at one time, probably back in the thirties, was a bustling grocery store/saloon/gathering place and on the other side of the street is a house so dilapitated that is has begun to collapse on one side.
The funny thing is the house has been in that state of collapse for thirty years or more. It hasn't changed. Every time I drive by I mean to stop and take a peek inside to see if there are hidden support beams or something in place that is holding that house in such a state of disrepair.
The thing, by all the laws of physics, should have collapsed 25 years ago.
The other two corners are occupied by a cemetery and a vacant lot. What the lot was for is beyond me. Just a slab of tar with a multitude of cracks which make handy exit points for the plethora of weeds bursting through.
The town has a name but who the hell knows why. As you leave town, heading north, you will see a small, nondescript white house with a complete absence of foliage. No trees, no bushes, no plants of any kind. Only this simple white house sitting on the exposed foundation. Inside are the three occupants of the town, probably watching tv.
Hey Gus is the lot for lease? Maybe we could put up a brothel /karaoke bar....
In the meantime, the "peasant revolt" brought back all those 400-somthing names: they will be again on the maps.
Every bureaucracy of this sort should be subject to periodic ruthless trauma and triage to limit the self-serving complacency that makes ideas such as this look good to them.
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