by Sara Logue, Research and Public Services Archivist, MARBL
Before I move into the Civil War period, I wanted to make sure readers of Discovering Atlanta had a good sense of what was going on in the decade before. It can be difficult to process just how small Atlanta was in the 1850s, and how things changed so rapidly. While it was moving swiftly, it was still a modest town prior to the Civil War. The changes which occurred in this decade can be seen most clearly in maps of the era and through comparing contemporary population demographics with historical city data.
