Alpharetta is located in metropolitan Atlanta, approximately twenty-five miles north of the city in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains. The Alpharetta area was first part of Cherokee County and then, for almost seventy-five years, part of Milton County, which in turn became part of Fulton County in the early 1930s. In earlier years the rural citizens around Alpharetta thrived on cotton production, and the townspeople on family businesses and shops.

This amateur radio gear is typical of the 1925-30 era and is more sophisticated in the transmittal of sound than the earliest equipment built around 1900. Courtesy of Michael H. McDougald The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print. All requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource must be submitted to the rights holder.

This 1962 cartoon by Clifford H. "Baldy" Baldowski comments on the election of Leroy Johnson to the Georgia legislature. The overturn of Georgia’s county unit system resulted in the creation of a predominantly Black senate district in Fulton County. Leroy Johnson, a prominent attorney and advisor to Atlanta’s civil rights movement, won the seat in 1962 and became the first African American to serve in the legislature since 1907. He was also the first African American elected to public office in the Southeast that year.

In 1849 George W. Crawford, a former governor of Georgia, joined U.S. president Zachary Taylor's cabinet as secretary of war. From left, Reverdy Johnson, William M. Meredith, William B. Preston, Zachary Taylor, Crawford, Jacob Collamer, Thomas Ewing, and John M. Clayton. ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qLHOq56imZWjsLqvy6innpyZlnuwvsZoq6iomZjAcK3NrZybnZyhwq55xaKerqqVqHw%3D

In the 1920s a cherubic child in a red-and-white hat hawked the quintessential Christmas treat—the peppermint candy cane—to Albany natives in an advertisement for a local candy company. Some sixty years later, that family-owned company, known as Bobs Candies, commemorated its place in the national candy and snack-food world by producing the world’s largest candy cane, an eight-foot-long crook that weighed more than 100 pounds. In 2005 the company’s founding family, the McCormacks, decided to sell the organization to a larger, diversified candy manufacturer in order to keep the family legacy alive.