Marietta was supposed to have been Atlanta. Established as a white settlement on Cherokee land in the 1830s, the seat of Cobb County was originally intended to be a hub for the Western & Atlantic Railroad. But a political fracas led to the construction of a major terminus twenty miles to the south and to the invention of Atlanta. Hidden away for years in a downtown garage, the zero mile marker that once defined the city of Atlanta is a museum piece now, an orphaned origin-story in marble in a city pathologically un-fascinated with its own origins. Atlanta no longer possesses any single identifiable benchmark for distance, but Marietta does, in the form of a 56-foot high, eye-rolling mechanical steel hen known locally as “The Big Chicken.”
The Birds of Marietta
The Birds of Marietta
The Birds of Marietta
Marietta was supposed to have been Atlanta. Established as a white settlement on Cherokee land in the 1830s, the seat of Cobb County was originally intended to be a hub for the Western & Atlantic Railroad. But a political fracas led to the construction of a major terminus twenty miles to the south and to the invention of Atlanta. Hidden away for years in a downtown garage, the zero mile marker that once defined the city of Atlanta is a museum piece now, an orphaned origin-story in marble in a city pathologically un-fascinated with its own origins. Atlanta no longer possesses any single identifiable benchmark for distance, but Marietta does, in the form of a 56-foot high, eye-rolling mechanical steel hen known locally as “The Big Chicken.”