3. Atlanta was previously known as Canebreak, Terminus, and Marthasville
Atlanta is one of the US cities that has an interesting story to learn about! The Creek people were an indigenous group that lived in the region that would later become Atlanta for hundreds of years. Following the Creek people’s forcible land transfer to the US government in 1821, European settlers started to arrive in the region the following year.
The region was once known as Canebreak by the early inhabitants, but in 1837 the name was changed to Terminus. The reason Abbot Hall Brisbane picked this name for the location was because it signified the train line’s endpoint.
The town was legally founded as Marthasville on December 23, 1842, after Lumpkin’s (former governor Wilson Lumpkin) child, Martha Atalanta. A couple of years later, it was proposed that the name be changed to honor Lumpkin’s daughter and the railroad that had made the nascent city a transit center in the American South. This is how Marthasville officially became Atlanta on December 29, 1847.
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New Bedford, Massachusetts, once the ‘Whaling Capitol of the World’, & now the leading port of the nascent US Offshore Wind Energy, was once known as ‘Bedford’ until it was learned that Massachusetts already had a city/town known as Bedford in the upper part of the state.