March 23, 2026 • 38 mins
Peters is responsible for many of the institutions that make up the identity of the city of Atlanta. And as a man from Pennsylvania, he had unique position regarding the U.S. Civil War.
Research:
- “Atlanta’s Suburb.” The Atlanta Journal. April 1, 1884. https://www.newspapers.com/image/968900463/?match=1&terms=Richard%20Peters
- Black, Nellie Peters. “Richard Peters, his ancestors and descendants. 1810-1889.” Atlanta. Foote & Davies. https://archive.org/details/richardpetershis00blac/page/n21/mode/2up
- Carlson, Leonard R. “Richard Peters: Champion of the New South.” (Book Review.) The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 2, The Tasks of Economic History (Jun., 1986), pp. 564-565. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2122214.pdf
- “EDWARD C. PETERS HOUSE.” City of Atlanta Online. https://web.archive.org/web/20080820103941/http://www.atlantaga.gov/government/urbandesign_petershouse.aspx
- “Edward C. Peters House.” National Register of Historic Places. Jan. 20, 1972. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/1f64f313-3aa7-445c-ba1b-2cb6d3a1735f
- “Encyclopedia of Pennsylvania Biography.” Volume 13. Lewis Historical Publishing Company. 1921-. Accessed online: https://books.google.com/books?id=xAI9AAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
- Falkenberg-Hull, Eileen. “Georgia's State Capitals (1868- present).” Explore Georgia. https://exploregeorgia.org/blog/georgias-state-capitals-1868-present
- “Hessians Auxiliaries,” American Battlefield Trust. July 29, 2021. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/hessians-auxiliaries
- “Rare Reminiscences.” Atlanta Journal. August 24, 1885. https://www.newspapers.com/image/968897469/?match=1&terms=Richard%20Peters
- “Richard Peters Founder of Atlanta and Midtown.” Midtown Neighbors Association. Feb. 9, 2012. https://midtownatlanta.org/richard-peters-founder-of-atlanta-and-midtown/
- “Richard Peters Will.” Atlanta Constitution. Feb. 14, 1889. https://www.newspapers.com/image/26867020/?match=1&terms=Richard%20Peters
- Shingleton, Royce. “Richard Peters: Champion of the New South.” Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press. 1985.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Hey, guess what this
episode is thanks to the Atlanta Airport. So funny to me,
sort of, I think I have also had Atlanta Airport
(00:24):
episode ideas. Listen, the Atlanta Airport has a lot of
art and history exhibits in various places. Some of them
are wonderful and really beautifully curated. Some of the sky
clubs have really good art exhibits. There's just a lot
of good stuff going on in the Atlanta Airport. Listen.
It's my hub. But I also like it. So I
(00:46):
wrote Richard Peters down as a topic years and years
and years ago. And then recently I was walking through
the airport because I don't want to take plane train,
so I'll walk from Concourse to Concourse, and I walked
through the exhibit on the history of Atlanta, and I
was like, oh, yeah, he is again, there he is.
Richard Peters is really interesting for a few ways, not
(01:07):
just because he really is responsible for a lot of
institutions that kind of make up the identity of the
city of Atlanta. Although he is responsible for those things,
he's interesting to me because he has this really unique
position regarding the US Civil War that we will talk about.
(01:27):
He's also interesting for all of that other stuff. I
also have some theories about him and why he was
the person he was that are for behind the scenes.
So get ready for me to psychoanalyze a person without
any skill in that arena. But I see you, Richard Peters.
I know what you're doing. He is sometimes called the
father of Atlanta. You could argue that one way or
(01:50):
the other, but he really was responsible for a lot
of things. He worked in railroads, he developed a lot
of the firsts of Atlanta in terms of like transportation
and various other institutions. And he was really hugely influential
in the city's rebuilding efforts following the Civil War. So
(02:10):
that's who we're talking about today. Richard Peters was born
on November tenth, eighteen ten, in not anywhere in Georgia
or even the South. Nope, Nope, Germantown, Pennsylvania, which is
now a suburb of Philadelphia. His father, Ralph Peters, was
a merchant but lost his whole fortune on bad deals.
(02:32):
His mother, Catherine Cunningham, was of Irish descent, and Peters
noted in his autobiography that that spelling of his mother's
family name changed multiple times, including to basically look like Cunningham,
very English spelling, but also in a much more Irish
spelling that has the middle letters as in y nngh,
(02:58):
not the configuration that you might exc back to see
for Cunningham her father. So, Richard's grandfather worked in shipping
and did pretty well until Privateers captured his entire fleet
because of Ralph Peters's business faltering, Richard's grandfather, Judge Richard Peters,
supported the family just almost entirely financially. Judge Peters was
(03:20):
very closely tied to the beginning of the United States
as a country, and was appointed judge of the United
States District Court for the District of Pennsylvania in seventeen
ninety two by George Washington. Richard had numerous siblings. There
were four brothers, Ralph, John, William, and Edward, and then
four sisters, Sally, Ann, Mary, and Nelly. When Richard was five,
(03:45):
he was enrolled in public school. He changed schools when
he was seven and the family moved to Belmont Pennsylvania.
Not long after that move, Richard, who loved looking out
the upstairs windows of their new home at the view
of the city of Philadelphia, night fell from one of
those windows and he broke his arm, and that injury
actually bothered him for the rest of his life. He
(04:07):
later said of it quote, it was badly set by
doctor Chapman afterwards, the celebrated surgeon of Philadelphia, and has
been crooked at the elbow to this day. That was
a statement he gave in his seventies last stayed mad
about it. The family's time in Belmont went poorly financially
as well. Richard's father, Ralph, started a dairy there to
(04:28):
make butter and to sell milk. Neither of those things
went well. Soon Richard's grandfather had become so frustrated with
Ralph that the family had to move away to the country,
where Judge Peters gave his son a job managing undeveloped land.
The family kept moving around a lot, as Ralph Peters
seemed to just make one bad decision after another. Richard's
(04:52):
education continued, although it was disjointed because of all of
these changes in schools. He was very at math, but
did so poorly in Latin that it resulted in what
he said was the only thrashing he ever received from
his father. Yeah, that thrashing sounded quite bad in the
description I read. In Richard's early teens, it was decided
(05:16):
that he was going to go to Philadelphia to be
enrolled in private school. This was going to be paid
for by his paternal grandfather, and he was going to
live with his maternal grandfather in the city while he
attended classes. Peter later described this transition in his life
this way. Quote, A family council had been held when
it was decided that I was becoming too fond of
(05:37):
the wild country life, and that I had some talent
in me worthy of being cultivated. Therefore, they captured me
and took me off in their carriage. And he mentions
being captured and characterizing it that way because when he
got an inkling that this plan was happening, he actually
ran away from home into the woods. One of the
(05:57):
interesting asides that comes up in Peters's account of his
youth is his reference to some of the men who
worked for his grandfather. Peters quote the old gardener Henry,
who was deaf as a post in the Fanner a
man of seventy were Hessians. They were called Redemptionists and
had been made prisoners during the Revolutionary War. Grandfather bought
(06:19):
them under the agreement that they should redeem themselves by
their labor. So during the Revolutionary War, an estimated quarter
of the troops who fought for Britain were Germans who
had been hired or forced into service to bolster Britain's numbers.
We have an episode on these Hessian soldiers in the archive,
(06:39):
but it is from twenty thirteen, so so long ago
that it's not even in all the players. Now. These
Hessian soldiers were known for their skill, but they often
bore the brunt of blame for the British losses. Some
of them deserted during the war, but a lot of others,
including ones who had been prisoners of war, stayed in
North America after the war or was over, in part
(07:01):
because they did not have a clear way back to Europe.
So it seems that Peter's benefited from this misfortune by
using some of these displaced Germans as indentured servants. Yeah,
I want to mention that because other ways that labor
is used in kind of dicey and questionable manners comes
(07:24):
up later. And also we don't have a firm sense
of where Richard Peters stood on all of this, but
we'll talk about it some more if it were not
already sort of obvious from just the pieces we've relayed.
When Richard Peters shared stories about his father, they were
not exactly glowing. He very clearly blamed his father, Ralph,
(07:48):
for the misfortunes of the family, and specifically for the
impact that it had on his education. He recounted the
end of his time in private school in Philadelphia this
way quote. At the close of my two years of
schooling in the city, for which grandfather became very tired
of paying, I returned to the Bradford County farm for
a year. It was at this time Judge Peters needed
(08:10):
one thousand acres of land to my father in trust
for me to provide for my college education. But through
carelessness and neglect, the deed was not recorded and the
land was sold for taxes without having done me the
good that was intended. The first income Richard had was
through the production of maple sugar from trees on the
(08:32):
family property during that year after private school, with the
help of one of the hired hands. He did everything
from making the troughs to draining and collecting the sap
and boiling the sap down. He made twelve dollars and
he said of it quote, it was the first money
I had ever made. I was very proud of it.
He also credited that year with preparing him for his career,
(08:54):
writing quote, the country life and healthful exercise prepared me
well to make a success. Subsequently as a civil engineer.
My rugged constitution was formed there, and I could outwalk
and outwork any of the assistant engineers when in the field,
and my services were always in demand. And the way
(09:14):
he became interested in that career was really accidental. We're
going to talk about that and more after a sponsor break.
When Richard Peters was selling his maple sugar in Tiwanda, Pennsylvania,
(09:35):
he ran into an old schoolmate who told him that
he was making a dollar fifty a day to work
as a rodman on a survey team. Peters did not
think this former classmate was very smart, so he thought, well,
if he can make that much money, I can make
more if I get into that area of work. And
then soon thanks to his family connections, Richard had a
(09:55):
meeting with architect William Strickland to try to get into
something in that arena, but Richard's handwriting was quite poor,
and Strickland told him to take a year to study drawing,
mathematics and writing and then come back and talk to
him again. Peters enrolled at the Franklin Institute and after
a year and a half of study there, he met
with Strickland once again, and this time he was given
(10:17):
a job making the working drawings of various projects that
the firm was working on, but Peters realized that he
didn't really have the talent to make it as an architect.
He talks about like comparing himself to other people who
he thought were not that educated, who could just whip
out these beautiful drawings much faster than him, and he
kind of realized, like, this isn't a great spot for me.
(10:40):
So he asked Strickland if he could move into a
civil engineering role, which he did, but he left that
after six months because he didn't feel like at the
architecture firm he was really learning as much as he could,
and he thought he could learn the job much better
if he was in a different position elsewhere. The next
position Peters was able to get once again through family connections,
(11:02):
was working on a survey as a rodman, collecting measurements
for what would become the Camden and Amboy Railway. This
actually ties back to our recent episode on George Stevenson
in the early days of railways. Peters notes that quote
as one location was made in the years eighteen thirty
and eighteen thirty one, before it had been ascertained positively
(11:23):
that locomotives could be employed. To advantage the line of
road was constructed for horsepower, with six hundred foot curves
put in wherever one hundred dollars could be saved. Peters
was eventually promoted and put in charge of a viaduct
along the line in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. This is different from
the current Coastville Viaduct, which was built in nineteen oh two. Yeah,
(11:46):
that is a historical viaduct. I didn't want anybody to
be confused. In late eighteen thirty four, that project was
completed and Richard Peters returned to Philadelphia, and there he
spent his entire savings, as he put it, quote paying
my board and frolicking with the boys. But he also
had the good fortune to have a new job turn
(12:07):
up just as his money ran out, and this was
to take him away from Pennsylvania and into the South,
as he was hired to work as chief engineer on
the Georgia Railroad that was planned to run between Augusta
and Athens, Georgia. This was one of those roads that
we also discussed in our George Stevenson episode that was
to be a road that was a road as we
(12:28):
would think of a road that also had a reel
running on it, literally a railroad, so that horse carts
or locomotives could use it as needed. Before he went,
he spent a week visiting his mother and siblings, and
then he headed to Georgia to start work. Because he
had used up all of his money, he did have
to sell some things and he had to get a
loan from a relative to make the trip, but once
(12:50):
he arrived he got in advance on his salary and
then he paid that money back immediately. The trip to
Georgia started in February eighteen thirty five, during a brutal winter.
Peters traveled by steamer to Charleston and then from there
by rail to Augusta. That winner was one of the
coldest ever on record for a lot of the South.
(13:11):
It destroyed most of the citrus groves in Florida. So
even once Peter got some more southern parts of the country,
there was just really no relief from this cold. Yeah.
It was literally like one of the worst moments in
human history that you could pick to make a trip
like this given the technology of the day. But once
he got to work on the railroad, it became very
(13:32):
apparent that his knowledge base was a lot more expansive
than other engineers on the project, and Peters was promoted
to principal assistant to the railroad superintendent. In eighteen thirty seven,
he was promoted again, this time to the role of superintendent,
and he got that news while he was in a
survey camp in Greensboro, Georgia, and he had to immediately
(13:53):
leave and make his way to his new office in Augusta.
Because his pay had increased dramatically, Peters was able to
start building wealth through investment. He bought a lot of
stock in the company, purchased a sawmill, and also bought
tracts of land that had pine growing on them. He
was conscientious enough to be very careful never to let
his personal investments and his work cross over. He would
(14:17):
never make a business deal with any company that had
any ties to his lumber business. During these years, Peters
was also pretty inventive. He came up with a rudimentary
headlight system for train engines. This is completely low tech,
but it's also kind of ingenious. He installed a wooden
shelf over the smokestack of the engine, and the shelf
(14:38):
held a tray of sand, and on top of the
sand they would put pine knots that were burned, and
those burning pine knots would create light. So I'm presuming
this is not so much about throwing light ahead all
that much as letting people know there's a train coming,
because I can't imagine that's really that illuminating to the
surrounding area. But that was it, And this was really
(14:59):
an necessity for the Georgia Line because it was the
first railroad to run at night. Peters later reported that
they had fewer accidents at night than they did during
the daytime. This may have been because of illumination, but
it was also likely because there were no other trains
running then. By eighteen forty five, Peters was ready to
focus entirely on his entrepreneurial interests and resigned from the
(15:23):
railroad to run a stage coach that ran from Madison, Georgia,
to Montgomery, Alabama. This was not a business that he
started from scratch. The railroad company had established it and
he purchased it. He was also not the sole owner
of the business. He and the rest of the owners
made a lot of money, and he mentioned that traffic
and profits increased significantly during the Mexican American War, which
(15:46):
started in eighteen forty six. Once the railroad had been completed, though,
this stage line started running exclusively in Alabama between Montgomery
and Mobile, and Peters was back in the railroad superintendent position.
His stage line became a carrier for the US mail
and remained so until the start of the Civil War.
(16:07):
Also in eighteen forty six, as the Georgia Railroad was completed,
it ended in the city of Marthasville. That city had
been named by Charles Garnett, a civil engineer. It had
been named in honor of the daughter of Governor Wilson Lumpkin,
who served as governor of Georgia from eighteen thirty one
to eighteen thirty five. Before that, when it was really
(16:29):
just a railroad construction site, it was called Terminus, but
Marthasville was apparently just too long a name for the railroad.
According to Peters quote, when the Georgia Road was completed
to this terminus, I consulted our chief engineer, mister J.
Edgar Thompson about changing the name of Marthasville because it
was so long to write. After several letters on the subject,
(16:51):
he proposed the name Atlanta to designate the terminus of
the Western and Atlantic Road. This he referred to in
his letter thus Atlantic masculine, Atlanta feminin, a coined word,
but well adapted. I accepted it at once and issued
circulars by the thousand for distribution throughout the country from
(17:12):
Augusta to Tennessee, stating the fact of the completion of
the Georgia Railroad, giving the rates a freight and passage,
the passenger rate being five cents a mile, the freight
fifty cents per hundred pounds. The headlines read completion of
the Georgia Railroad from Augusta to Atlanta. The name gave
universal satisfaction except to my friend Garnett, who was very
(17:34):
much annoyed. But he could not overcome the popular move,
and at the next meeting of the legislature, a charter
was granted to Atlanta. So two railroad guys just decided
to change the city's name for the sake of brevity
and keeping railroad logs, and that works. I love that
they're like, between the two of us, we're just gonna
(17:56):
do this right. We're just gonna rename it. If we
put out enough flyers, everybody will leave it. As superintendent
of the Georgia Railroad, Peters was often required in Atlanta
for business, and while there he boarded with doctor Joseph Thompson,
and Richard fell in love with Thompson's daughter, Mary Jane.
They got married on February eighteenth, eighteen forty eight, and
(18:19):
moved into a home in Atlanta on the corner of
Mitchell and forsythe In his memoir, Peters says that he
quote never had any reason to regret my choice, and
talks about what a wonderful wife she had been, how
their family together is one that he's proud of. The
couple had seven children who lived to adulthood, Richard, Nellie, Ralph, Edward,
(18:41):
Catherine Quintard, and may As well as two children who
died when they were babies, Joseph and Stephen. Yeah. Also,
I feel compelled to say that we reference his memoir
a couple times. It's it's not an official memoir in
the traditional sense. It's recorded a recorded oral history that
(19:02):
one of his relatives did was and he was getting
up in age, so it's like his memoir, but it's
definitely dictated to someone else, just in case there's confusion.
The year before he married Mary Jane, Richard invested in
the Atlanta area the same way that he had done
in other places. He purchased a farm north of the
city where he bred livestock, and he also purchased additional
(19:22):
property adjacent to his home in the city so that
he could graze cows there. In his recollections about his life,
Peters is always really quick to point out how much
he purchased plots of land for and then how much
he later sold them for, to illustrate how much they
appreciated in value, perhaps bolster the fact that he was
very smart and savvy. Unlike his father, Richard was really
(19:46):
good at identifying investments that would eventually pay off. Even
his livestock breeding was done with an eye towards making money.
His animals routinely won prizes and he was able to
sell them for very high prices to others. He also
had his own horticultural program on the farm, where he
developed new varieties of plants, again with a mind toward money,
(20:08):
because he wanted to be able to sell seed. Horticulture
was something he would talk about for decades because he
worried that Southern farmers were not being savvy and they
were just not diverse enough in their crops. Cotton was,
of course, a huge driver for the Southern economy, and
Peters was always encouraging growers to try other crops. He
(20:29):
himself refused to grow cotton because he felt like if
cotton failed for any reason, it would just paralyze a
lot of finances throughout the region. But not all of
his efforts were successful Right out of the gate. He
opened a flour mill in eighteen fifty six, which was
the first steam powered factory in the city, but it
could not compete with another mill, Atawa Mill, which was
(20:51):
selling its flour at a really low rate, allegedly less
than cost. But Peters, who initially lost twenty thousand dollars
in this mill was savvy enough to find a way
out of it that was also a benefit to him.
He explained it plainly this way quote. I held the
mill for a year or two, and finally sold the engines,
(21:12):
at more than their cost for gold, to the Confederate
Government for their powder mills. At Augusta. The lot upon
which the mill stood, costing six hundred dollars, was sold
to the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company for twenty thousand dollars,
thus paying my losses in the mill, the other stockholders
having sold out their interest to me, and the end
(21:34):
this venture proved very profitable, as I had bought in
order to secure firewood to run the engine, four hundred
acres of land on Peachtree Street, paying for it five
dollars an acre. Portions of this land have been sold
for one to two thousand dollars an acre. That land
(21:54):
is what makes up the area downtown today from Third
Street to Eighth Street, so that the land that the
Fox Theater and Georgia Tecker now built on, yeah among
other mainstays of Atlanta. The hotel I used to stay
at when I would come down there, and the office
was in a different place yeah, all right. There, we
(22:18):
will talk about the Civil War and Atlanta after it burned,
after we take a break to hear from the sponsors
that keep the show going. Being in Atlanta in the
eighteen fifties meant that Richard Peters was right in the
(22:38):
thick of the growing conflict that would lead to the
US Civil War. And he was in this rather unique
position because while he had grown up in the North,
he had made his home in the South. In his writing,
he doesn't take a clear stance on the issue of slavery,
although he does seem to understand it as a problem.
(22:59):
It is all so known that he did sometimes use
hired enslaved labor, paying their enslavers on his railroad projects,
as he found that cheaper than hiring white men to
do that work. So he definitely benefited from the system
of enslavement. But here's how he described his Civil War experience,
which really frames a lot of it in ways that
(23:19):
are not commonly mentioned. This really jumped out to me
as an interesting point of view on it. Quote in
eighteen sixty to sixty one, I took an active part
in trying to prevent the secession movement. My opposition to
the measure being based on the fact that failure and
the blotting out of slavery would be the result. Very
(23:39):
few of the Southern people were conscious of the power
of the North. They had been kept in perfect ignorance
by politicians and were not aware that the whole civilized
world opposed slavery, more especially the English nation. My lifetime
old friend, Judge John P. King of Augusta, was a
union Man at the start and at the end. He
(24:01):
prophesied the failure of the Southern cause and wrote daily
able articles against se session. A large majority of the
thoughtful people of Georgia agreed with his views and were
union men, but the hot heads of the South carried
their point, South Carolina taking the lead by bombarding Fort Sumter,
thus forcing the other Southern states to fall in line.
(24:23):
From this time to the end, I never again altered
my opinions of the ultimate result, but tried to shave
my course so as to save our property. When the
crash came. Peters wanted to save what was his and
make money, and to that end he worked with what
he called a blockading scheme to work with the Confederate
government to help supply cotton coffee and other supplies. He
(24:48):
along with his partners, founded two shipping companies with ships
that just ran the Union blockades, and they did well,
even though some of their ships were lost. Unsurprisingly, estimated
that the venture had made quote something like three million
dollars by the time the war ended. He also noted
(25:08):
that the huge shipping venture had meant that his family
and those of the other investors in the blockade running
business had a lot of supplies that a lot of
other people did not. According to Peters, they shared those
supplies with other families who were not as lucky, and
Mary Jane routinely ran supplies to the hospitals. As General
(25:29):
Sherman neared Atlanta, Richard's family got out on the last
train to Augusta, although he initially stayed behind to keep
an eye on the railroads. He has some interesting stories
about like trying to run to various places in the
city and being told like you got to get out
of here. He did manage to get out of the
city as it was captured, and he described this as
a narrow escape that was at the end of eighteen
(25:51):
sixty four. The family remained in Augusta until the end
of the war. The following spring, when Peters returned to Atlanta,
he looked at all the destruction and he immediately started
planning ways to rebuild. He started working on repairing and
rebuilding the Georgia Railroad first, so that there would be
a way to get supplies into the city and a
way that benefited him financially as well. I think that
(26:16):
that destruction goes way beyond like just the fallout of
a conflict, if folks are not aware, like Sherman ordered
the destruction of anything the Confederates could use. So it
was like the industrial district had been completely destroyed, the
railroad tracks had been torn up, there had been a
(26:37):
huge fire that had spread like way beyond any of that.
So it was immense, an immense amount of destruction. In
April of eighteen sixty seven, Union General John Pope was
made governor of the Third Military District That was one
of five regional entities established by the Union military to
(26:57):
oversee the post war activities in the South. The headquarters
for the Third, which was tasked with overseeing Georgia, Florida,
and Alabama, was in Atlanta. Peter saw this as an
opportunity and encouraged other citizens to join him in welcoming
the general to Atlanta. He was very clearly in favor
of reconciliation with the North and with the country's leadership.
(27:21):
He understood that just bucking against the North after losing
the war would hurt the city and the state and
the whole region. Although of course not everybody agreed with
him or did that. Yeah, there were apparently some very
heated discussions about, uh, what the heck are you doing, dude.
This move to welcome the head of the Third's military
(27:42):
district not only gave Peters though the benefit of Pope's
favor because he led this delegation to welcome him, it
also meant that he was able to influence state matters
through that favor. Since eighteen oh seven, the town of
Millageville had been Georgia's state capital, but when it was
time for a state constitutional convention, under Pope's command, that
(28:04):
convention was held in Atlanta. This has been described as
being a problem of Millageville innkeepers not allowing black delegates
to stay there. It has also been attributed to Richard
Peters and other businessmen in his circle convincing Pope that
Atlanta was more central. Both geographically and as the seat
of industry. By the spring of eighteen sixty eight, after
(28:27):
city officials had made their case, Atlanta became the new
capital of Georgia. Peters served briefly on the city council
so that he could help guide the city through reconstruction,
and Peters once again did not waste any time identifying
how he could help the city grow and how he
could make money in the process. He started to subdivide
(28:48):
the huge tracts of land he had purchased and created
neighborhoods and streets. A lot of the streets in the
city today, like Juniper, Myrtle, and Cyprus, were named by him.
These were the name that he gave to streets that
ran north and south. More or less, Peachtree Road had
already been named, and so these tree names were in
keeping with that theme, although he did also include penn
(29:12):
Avenue as a nod to his home state. The streets
that ran east to west were given numbers. Over time,
these subdivisions were sold off for huge sums of money,
far more Peters would happily point out than what he
had paid for that land initially, but some of it
he also gave away. He donated several acres for the
(29:32):
founding of the new school in eighteen eighty five, called
the Georgia School of Technology, which today is better known
as Georgia Tech. Peters also developed a lot of businesses
that have continued to be part of the identity of
Atlanta right up to the present day. He established a
trolley company in the city, the Atlanta Street Railway Company.
There are some people who will sort of say, like,
(29:53):
this is the pre pre pre pre precursor to our
current mass transit system. That seems like a kind of
a long walk to me. Then make the case that
was though the first public transport in the city. He
also worked to build a hotel that would be worthy
to host any visiting dignitary or government official. He built
the first professional baseball field in the city. It had
(30:16):
a policy that I think they charged twenty five cents
for men, and women could come in for free. It's
really interesting to me when you read this list of
things that he built and developed, both in terms of
infrastructure and businesses, that a Northerner was so deeply crucial
to the rebuilding and economic success of Atlanta after the
Civil War, and all of the things that a lot
(30:38):
of people will be like, this is Southern culture from
Philadelphia of my friends. Yeah, especially since he was a
Northerner who was already there, rather than someone who after
the fact is like, let me come down there, see
what I can do. In eighteen eighty one, after more
than thirty years in the home they had shared from
(31:00):
the beginning of their marriage and where they raised their children,
Richard and Mary Jane moved into a newly built home
on Peachtree Street between Fourth and Fifth that's not standing today.
It was later torn down. Yeah. I think Atlanta History
Center is where I saw it. They have a photograph
of it, and it's quite beautiful. It's like this beautiful
Victorian situation that just looks gorgeous. In his seventies, Richard
(31:24):
Peters was still making business deals. A write up in
the Atlanta Journal from April first, eighteen eighty four, mentions
that he sold one hundred and ninety eight acres to
developer H. I. Kimball, noting that that was the largest
sale of one body of land ever made in the city.
On July twenty sixth, eighteen eighty eight, seventy seven year
(31:45):
old Peters wrote a will It's not clear if there
was a previous will that this replaced, but it was timely.
He died the following year, on February sixth, eighteen eighty nine,
and his will was very brief and very clear. Jane
was to get the house, and after any debts had
been settled, what remained of the nearly one million dollar
(32:05):
estate was to be split evenly among his wife and children.
He was buried in Oakland Cemetery and you can visit
his grave there. Sometimes he also appears as a character
to talk about his life at special events hosted by
the Historic Oakland Foundation. I shar did love going to
those back when I lived in Atlanta. Oakland is great. Yeah,
(32:29):
Richard Peter's fascinating dude. So much to talk about on Friday,
But right now I'm going to talk about coffee, Okay,
because I never tire of talking about coffee. This is
from our listener, Gary, who writes Dear Holly and Tracy,
I listened to your Melita episode today while doing yard work.
Spring is breaking out here in Oregon this week, although
we haven't had much of a winter. Thanks for this episode.
(32:51):
I had no idea that Melita products were named after
a real person. And while I was sad to hear
of the company's ties to the Nazi regime, I also
grew up driving Vulga wagons and I'm sure using many
other products made by companies with complicated histories. Well before
the end of the podcast, I was craving a cup
of coffee, but that is nothing unusual for me. My mom,
(33:11):
born in nineteen twenty two to immigrant parents from Norway
and Denmark, introduced me to coffee early, at about age five.
As near as I can recall me too, I've been
a huge coffee fan all my life and always drink
it black. I don't do that. I grew up drinking
Folgers from an electric cornerwear percolator, which I had learned
how to operate by the age of ten or so.
(33:32):
I don't remember if it was before or after the percolator,
but my mom also used a stovetop corneringwear drip, a
later coffee pot that had a metal compartment for the
grounds between the ceramic pot below and a glass globe
above into which you'd pour the hot water, which dripped
down over the grounds via a small holed sieve. You
can find these in a Google image search. I remember those.
I used to like watching them do the little Perkley Parkley.
(33:56):
I arrived at the University of Oregon just in time
for the flowering of what known as second wave coffee
in the early nineteen seventies, when Eugene was one of
the epicenters of West Coast coffee culture, along with the
Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle. My favorite hangout was on
the second floor of the Smeed, an old downtown hotel
that had been converted into a bunch of counterculture cafes
(34:18):
and businesses. Here you could get pour over coffee made
in single cup melita China cones with fresh ground country
origin coffee in white melita filters. The coffee had exotic
names like Mocha Java, Mocha Java, Sumatra, and Ethiopia, as
well as Columbia, Brazil, and some Central American countries. You
could also buy your own cones, filters and coffees whole
(34:40):
bean or ground. No more Folgers for me. When third
wave coffee came along in the two thousands, again centered
in the Northwest, I enthusiastically jumped on that bandwagon. I've
pretty much made my own coffee a cup at a
time with cones, and filters since the seventies, although there
were a few years when I either lived where fresh
beans weren't available or I could didn't afford them. These days,
(35:01):
I use unbleached filters instead of the white ones. I'm
now lucky enough to live in a town where there
are several small roasters that sell fair trade coffee beans
from individual farmers throughout the world's coffee growing regions. Over
the past decades, there have been periods when health issues
meant I can only drink decaf and sometimes couldn't drink
coffee at all, but those seem to be resolved for
the moment, although I do limit myself to one big
(35:23):
mug in the morning, with an occasional decalf in the evening.
I have lately been watching a Danish via PBS show
called Seaside Hotel and reading the Swedish Police Procedural books
by Henning Mankel and get a huge kick out of
how much coffee my fellow Scandinavians drink. Every time someone
enters a room, they're offered a cup of coffee, which
they almost always accept. I get it. Here's for my
(35:45):
pet tacks. Here is Juno wondering why I'm pulling weeds
instead of petting her. Juno looks like a standard poodle
or a poodle mix in a puppy clip and is
the cutests. I would kiss that snout thirty seven times
a day minimum. I loved all of this coffee talk
because for Season's one, I just say it brings back
(36:06):
a lot of good memories. As a kid of the seventies,
I just remember watching my parents make coffee in a
variety of ways, and I love all of it too.
I influenced myself because after our Melita episode, I bought
a Melita porcelain drip and then I'm still making my
French Press in the morning. Uh huh. But I can
(36:28):
make a Melita cup fast while I wait for my
French Press to that that's funny because I'm a junkie.
I'm telling you, it makes it that much quicker that
I have a cup of coffee in my hand. And
then I'm not like sitting there in the kitchen like
white knuckling the countertop watching the French Press try to
like finish its stuff upright because it doesn't care about
(36:49):
me or time. No, it's French Press, even though it's
our two D two it's really cute. Anyway. I love this.
Thank you so much for writing this email. I love
talking about coffee. As I said, I'm not a kind
of I just love it all. But I understand the
move from Folgers to all of the good stuff, and
I feel like I lived in the Pacific Northwestern I
was a kid. My siblings have lived there, and my
(37:12):
oldest sister is the one that actually did start when
she would come and visit my parents, introducing me to
all of the coffee culture that had come from there.
And that's really where I became an addict. Yeah, do
not wish to see treatment. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at a history
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We also have all of
(37:34):
our show notes available at mistonhistory dot com in case
you want to look up any of the sources we
have used. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast,
you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
(37:54):
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Hey, guess what this
episode is thanks to the Atlanta Airport. So funny to me,
sort of, I think I have also had Atlanta Airport
(00:24):
episode ideas. Listen, the Atlanta Airport has a lot of
art and history exhibits in various places. Some of them
are wonderful and really beautifully curated. Some of the sky
clubs have really good art exhibits. There's just a lot
of good stuff going on in the Atlanta Airport. Listen.
It's my hub. But I also like it. So I
(00:46):
wrote Richard Peters down as a topic years and years
and years ago. And then recently I was walking through
the airport because I don't want to take plane train,
so I'll walk from Concourse to Concourse, and I walked
through the exhibit on the history of Atlanta, and I
was like, oh, yeah, he is again, there he is.
Richard Peters is really interesting for a few ways, not
(01:07):
just because he really is responsible for a lot of
institutions that kind of make up the identity of the
city of Atlanta. Although he is responsible for those things,
he's interesting to me because he has this really unique
position regarding the US Civil War that we will talk about.
(01:27):
He's also interesting for all of that other stuff. I
also have some theories about him and why he was
the person he was that are for behind the scenes.
So get ready for me to psychoanalyze a person without
any skill in that arena. But I see you, Richard Peters.
I know what you're doing. He is sometimes called the
father of Atlanta. You could argue that one way or
(01:50):
the other, but he really was responsible for a lot
of things. He worked in railroads, he developed a lot
of the firsts of Atlanta in terms of like transportation
and various other institutions. And he was really hugely influential
in the city's rebuilding efforts following the Civil War. So
(02:10):
that's who we're talking about today. Richard Peters was born
on November tenth, eighteen ten, in not anywhere in Georgia
or even the South. Nope, Nope, Germantown, Pennsylvania, which is
now a suburb of Philadelphia. His father, Ralph Peters, was
a merchant but lost his whole fortune on bad deals.
(02:32):
His mother, Catherine Cunningham, was of Irish descent, and Peters
noted in his autobiography that that spelling of his mother's
family name changed multiple times, including to basically look like Cunningham,
very English spelling, but also in a much more Irish
spelling that has the middle letters as in y nngh,
(02:58):
not the configuration that you might exc back to see
for Cunningham her father. So, Richard's grandfather worked in shipping
and did pretty well until Privateers captured his entire fleet
because of Ralph Peters's business faltering, Richard's grandfather, Judge Richard Peters,
supported the family just almost entirely financially. Judge Peters was
(03:20):
very closely tied to the beginning of the United States
as a country, and was appointed judge of the United
States District Court for the District of Pennsylvania in seventeen
ninety two by George Washington. Richard had numerous siblings. There
were four brothers, Ralph, John, William, and Edward, and then
four sisters, Sally, Ann, Mary, and Nelly. When Richard was five,
(03:45):
he was enrolled in public school. He changed schools when
he was seven and the family moved to Belmont Pennsylvania.
Not long after that move, Richard, who loved looking out
the upstairs windows of their new home at the view
of the city of Philadelphia, night fell from one of
those windows and he broke his arm, and that injury
actually bothered him for the rest of his life. He
(04:07):
later said of it quote, it was badly set by
doctor Chapman afterwards, the celebrated surgeon of Philadelphia, and has
been crooked at the elbow to this day. That was
a statement he gave in his seventies last stayed mad
about it. The family's time in Belmont went poorly financially
as well. Richard's father, Ralph, started a dairy there to
(04:28):
make butter and to sell milk. Neither of those things
went well. Soon Richard's grandfather had become so frustrated with
Ralph that the family had to move away to the country,
where Judge Peters gave his son a job managing undeveloped land.
The family kept moving around a lot, as Ralph Peters
seemed to just make one bad decision after another. Richard's
(04:52):
education continued, although it was disjointed because of all of
these changes in schools. He was very at math, but
did so poorly in Latin that it resulted in what
he said was the only thrashing he ever received from
his father. Yeah, that thrashing sounded quite bad in the
description I read. In Richard's early teens, it was decided
(05:16):
that he was going to go to Philadelphia to be
enrolled in private school. This was going to be paid
for by his paternal grandfather, and he was going to
live with his maternal grandfather in the city while he
attended classes. Peter later described this transition in his life
this way. Quote, A family council had been held when
it was decided that I was becoming too fond of
(05:37):
the wild country life, and that I had some talent
in me worthy of being cultivated. Therefore, they captured me
and took me off in their carriage. And he mentions
being captured and characterizing it that way because when he
got an inkling that this plan was happening, he actually
ran away from home into the woods. One of the
(05:57):
interesting asides that comes up in Peters's account of his
youth is his reference to some of the men who
worked for his grandfather. Peters quote the old gardener Henry,
who was deaf as a post in the Fanner a
man of seventy were Hessians. They were called Redemptionists and
had been made prisoners during the Revolutionary War. Grandfather bought
(06:19):
them under the agreement that they should redeem themselves by
their labor. So during the Revolutionary War, an estimated quarter
of the troops who fought for Britain were Germans who
had been hired or forced into service to bolster Britain's numbers.
We have an episode on these Hessian soldiers in the archive,
(06:39):
but it is from twenty thirteen, so so long ago
that it's not even in all the players. Now. These
Hessian soldiers were known for their skill, but they often
bore the brunt of blame for the British losses. Some
of them deserted during the war, but a lot of others,
including ones who had been prisoners of war, stayed in
North America after the war or was over, in part
(07:01):
because they did not have a clear way back to Europe.
So it seems that Peter's benefited from this misfortune by
using some of these displaced Germans as indentured servants. Yeah,
I want to mention that because other ways that labor
is used in kind of dicey and questionable manners comes
(07:24):
up later. And also we don't have a firm sense
of where Richard Peters stood on all of this, but
we'll talk about it some more if it were not
already sort of obvious from just the pieces we've relayed.
When Richard Peters shared stories about his father, they were
not exactly glowing. He very clearly blamed his father, Ralph,
(07:48):
for the misfortunes of the family, and specifically for the
impact that it had on his education. He recounted the
end of his time in private school in Philadelphia this
way quote. At the close of my two years of
schooling in the city, for which grandfather became very tired
of paying, I returned to the Bradford County farm for
a year. It was at this time Judge Peters needed
(08:10):
one thousand acres of land to my father in trust
for me to provide for my college education. But through
carelessness and neglect, the deed was not recorded and the
land was sold for taxes without having done me the
good that was intended. The first income Richard had was
through the production of maple sugar from trees on the
(08:32):
family property during that year after private school, with the
help of one of the hired hands. He did everything
from making the troughs to draining and collecting the sap
and boiling the sap down. He made twelve dollars and
he said of it quote, it was the first money
I had ever made. I was very proud of it.
He also credited that year with preparing him for his career,
(08:54):
writing quote, the country life and healthful exercise prepared me
well to make a success. Subsequently as a civil engineer.
My rugged constitution was formed there, and I could outwalk
and outwork any of the assistant engineers when in the field,
and my services were always in demand. And the way
(09:14):
he became interested in that career was really accidental. We're
going to talk about that and more after a sponsor break.
When Richard Peters was selling his maple sugar in Tiwanda, Pennsylvania,
(09:35):
he ran into an old schoolmate who told him that
he was making a dollar fifty a day to work
as a rodman on a survey team. Peters did not
think this former classmate was very smart, so he thought, well,
if he can make that much money, I can make
more if I get into that area of work. And
then soon thanks to his family connections, Richard had a
(09:55):
meeting with architect William Strickland to try to get into
something in that arena, but Richard's handwriting was quite poor,
and Strickland told him to take a year to study drawing,
mathematics and writing and then come back and talk to
him again. Peters enrolled at the Franklin Institute and after
a year and a half of study there, he met
with Strickland once again, and this time he was given
(10:17):
a job making the working drawings of various projects that
the firm was working on, but Peters realized that he
didn't really have the talent to make it as an architect.
He talks about like comparing himself to other people who
he thought were not that educated, who could just whip
out these beautiful drawings much faster than him, and he
kind of realized, like, this isn't a great spot for me.
(10:40):
So he asked Strickland if he could move into a
civil engineering role, which he did, but he left that
after six months because he didn't feel like at the
architecture firm he was really learning as much as he could,
and he thought he could learn the job much better
if he was in a different position elsewhere. The next
position Peters was able to get once again through family connections,
(11:02):
was working on a survey as a rodman, collecting measurements
for what would become the Camden and Amboy Railway. This
actually ties back to our recent episode on George Stevenson
in the early days of railways. Peters notes that quote
as one location was made in the years eighteen thirty
and eighteen thirty one, before it had been ascertained positively
(11:23):
that locomotives could be employed. To advantage the line of
road was constructed for horsepower, with six hundred foot curves
put in wherever one hundred dollars could be saved. Peters
was eventually promoted and put in charge of a viaduct
along the line in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. This is different from
the current Coastville Viaduct, which was built in nineteen oh two. Yeah,
(11:46):
that is a historical viaduct. I didn't want anybody to
be confused. In late eighteen thirty four, that project was
completed and Richard Peters returned to Philadelphia, and there he
spent his entire savings, as he put it, quote paying
my board and frolicking with the boys. But he also
had the good fortune to have a new job turn
(12:07):
up just as his money ran out, and this was
to take him away from Pennsylvania and into the South,
as he was hired to work as chief engineer on
the Georgia Railroad that was planned to run between Augusta
and Athens, Georgia. This was one of those roads that
we also discussed in our George Stevenson episode that was
to be a road that was a road as we
(12:28):
would think of a road that also had a reel
running on it, literally a railroad, so that horse carts
or locomotives could use it as needed. Before he went,
he spent a week visiting his mother and siblings, and
then he headed to Georgia to start work. Because he
had used up all of his money, he did have
to sell some things and he had to get a
loan from a relative to make the trip, but once
(12:50):
he arrived he got in advance on his salary and
then he paid that money back immediately. The trip to
Georgia started in February eighteen thirty five, during a brutal winter.
Peters traveled by steamer to Charleston and then from there
by rail to Augusta. That winner was one of the
coldest ever on record for a lot of the South.
(13:11):
It destroyed most of the citrus groves in Florida. So
even once Peter got some more southern parts of the country,
there was just really no relief from this cold. Yeah.
It was literally like one of the worst moments in
human history that you could pick to make a trip
like this given the technology of the day. But once
he got to work on the railroad, it became very
(13:32):
apparent that his knowledge base was a lot more expansive
than other engineers on the project, and Peters was promoted
to principal assistant to the railroad superintendent. In eighteen thirty seven,
he was promoted again, this time to the role of superintendent,
and he got that news while he was in a
survey camp in Greensboro, Georgia, and he had to immediately
(13:53):
leave and make his way to his new office in Augusta.
Because his pay had increased dramatically, Peters was able to
start building wealth through investment. He bought a lot of
stock in the company, purchased a sawmill, and also bought
tracts of land that had pine growing on them. He
was conscientious enough to be very careful never to let
his personal investments and his work cross over. He would
(14:17):
never make a business deal with any company that had
any ties to his lumber business. During these years, Peters
was also pretty inventive. He came up with a rudimentary
headlight system for train engines. This is completely low tech,
but it's also kind of ingenious. He installed a wooden
shelf over the smokestack of the engine, and the shelf
(14:38):
held a tray of sand, and on top of the
sand they would put pine knots that were burned, and
those burning pine knots would create light. So I'm presuming
this is not so much about throwing light ahead all
that much as letting people know there's a train coming,
because I can't imagine that's really that illuminating to the
surrounding area. But that was it, And this was really
(14:59):
an necessity for the Georgia Line because it was the
first railroad to run at night. Peters later reported that
they had fewer accidents at night than they did during
the daytime. This may have been because of illumination, but
it was also likely because there were no other trains
running then. By eighteen forty five, Peters was ready to
focus entirely on his entrepreneurial interests and resigned from the
(15:23):
railroad to run a stage coach that ran from Madison, Georgia,
to Montgomery, Alabama. This was not a business that he
started from scratch. The railroad company had established it and
he purchased it. He was also not the sole owner
of the business. He and the rest of the owners
made a lot of money, and he mentioned that traffic
and profits increased significantly during the Mexican American War, which
(15:46):
started in eighteen forty six. Once the railroad had been completed, though,
this stage line started running exclusively in Alabama between Montgomery
and Mobile, and Peters was back in the railroad superintendent position.
His stage line became a carrier for the US mail
and remained so until the start of the Civil War.
(16:07):
Also in eighteen forty six, as the Georgia Railroad was completed,
it ended in the city of Marthasville. That city had
been named by Charles Garnett, a civil engineer. It had
been named in honor of the daughter of Governor Wilson Lumpkin,
who served as governor of Georgia from eighteen thirty one
to eighteen thirty five. Before that, when it was really
(16:29):
just a railroad construction site, it was called Terminus, but
Marthasville was apparently just too long a name for the railroad.
According to Peters quote, when the Georgia Road was completed
to this terminus, I consulted our chief engineer, mister J.
Edgar Thompson about changing the name of Marthasville because it
was so long to write. After several letters on the subject,
(16:51):
he proposed the name Atlanta to designate the terminus of
the Western and Atlantic Road. This he referred to in
his letter thus Atlantic masculine, Atlanta feminin, a coined word,
but well adapted. I accepted it at once and issued
circulars by the thousand for distribution throughout the country from
(17:12):
Augusta to Tennessee, stating the fact of the completion of
the Georgia Railroad, giving the rates a freight and passage,
the passenger rate being five cents a mile, the freight
fifty cents per hundred pounds. The headlines read completion of
the Georgia Railroad from Augusta to Atlanta. The name gave
universal satisfaction except to my friend Garnett, who was very
(17:34):
much annoyed. But he could not overcome the popular move,
and at the next meeting of the legislature, a charter
was granted to Atlanta. So two railroad guys just decided
to change the city's name for the sake of brevity
and keeping railroad logs, and that works. I love that
they're like, between the two of us, we're just gonna
(17:56):
do this right. We're just gonna rename it. If we
put out enough flyers, everybody will leave it. As superintendent
of the Georgia Railroad, Peters was often required in Atlanta
for business, and while there he boarded with doctor Joseph Thompson,
and Richard fell in love with Thompson's daughter, Mary Jane.
They got married on February eighteenth, eighteen forty eight, and
(18:19):
moved into a home in Atlanta on the corner of
Mitchell and forsythe In his memoir, Peters says that he
quote never had any reason to regret my choice, and
talks about what a wonderful wife she had been, how
their family together is one that he's proud of. The
couple had seven children who lived to adulthood, Richard, Nellie, Ralph, Edward,
(18:41):
Catherine Quintard, and may As well as two children who
died when they were babies, Joseph and Stephen. Yeah. Also,
I feel compelled to say that we reference his memoir
a couple times. It's it's not an official memoir in
the traditional sense. It's recorded a recorded oral history that
(19:02):
one of his relatives did was and he was getting
up in age, so it's like his memoir, but it's
definitely dictated to someone else, just in case there's confusion.
The year before he married Mary Jane, Richard invested in
the Atlanta area the same way that he had done
in other places. He purchased a farm north of the
city where he bred livestock, and he also purchased additional
(19:22):
property adjacent to his home in the city so that
he could graze cows there. In his recollections about his life,
Peters is always really quick to point out how much
he purchased plots of land for and then how much
he later sold them for, to illustrate how much they
appreciated in value, perhaps bolster the fact that he was
very smart and savvy. Unlike his father, Richard was really
(19:46):
good at identifying investments that would eventually pay off. Even
his livestock breeding was done with an eye towards making money.
His animals routinely won prizes and he was able to
sell them for very high prices to others. He also
had his own horticultural program on the farm, where he
developed new varieties of plants, again with a mind toward money,
(20:08):
because he wanted to be able to sell seed. Horticulture
was something he would talk about for decades because he
worried that Southern farmers were not being savvy and they
were just not diverse enough in their crops. Cotton was,
of course, a huge driver for the Southern economy, and
Peters was always encouraging growers to try other crops. He
(20:29):
himself refused to grow cotton because he felt like if
cotton failed for any reason, it would just paralyze a
lot of finances throughout the region. But not all of
his efforts were successful Right out of the gate. He
opened a flour mill in eighteen fifty six, which was
the first steam powered factory in the city, but it
could not compete with another mill, Atawa Mill, which was
(20:51):
selling its flour at a really low rate, allegedly less
than cost. But Peters, who initially lost twenty thousand dollars
in this mill was savvy enough to find a way
out of it that was also a benefit to him.
He explained it plainly this way quote. I held the
mill for a year or two, and finally sold the engines,
(21:12):
at more than their cost for gold, to the Confederate
Government for their powder mills. At Augusta. The lot upon
which the mill stood, costing six hundred dollars, was sold
to the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company for twenty thousand dollars,
thus paying my losses in the mill, the other stockholders
having sold out their interest to me, and the end
(21:34):
this venture proved very profitable, as I had bought in
order to secure firewood to run the engine, four hundred
acres of land on Peachtree Street, paying for it five
dollars an acre. Portions of this land have been sold
for one to two thousand dollars an acre. That land
(21:54):
is what makes up the area downtown today from Third
Street to Eighth Street, so that the land that the
Fox Theater and Georgia Tecker now built on, yeah among
other mainstays of Atlanta. The hotel I used to stay
at when I would come down there, and the office
was in a different place yeah, all right. There, we
(22:18):
will talk about the Civil War and Atlanta after it burned,
after we take a break to hear from the sponsors
that keep the show going. Being in Atlanta in the
eighteen fifties meant that Richard Peters was right in the
(22:38):
thick of the growing conflict that would lead to the
US Civil War. And he was in this rather unique
position because while he had grown up in the North,
he had made his home in the South. In his writing,
he doesn't take a clear stance on the issue of slavery,
although he does seem to understand it as a problem.
(22:59):
It is all so known that he did sometimes use
hired enslaved labor, paying their enslavers on his railroad projects,
as he found that cheaper than hiring white men to
do that work. So he definitely benefited from the system
of enslavement. But here's how he described his Civil War experience,
which really frames a lot of it in ways that
(23:19):
are not commonly mentioned. This really jumped out to me
as an interesting point of view on it. Quote in
eighteen sixty to sixty one, I took an active part
in trying to prevent the secession movement. My opposition to
the measure being based on the fact that failure and
the blotting out of slavery would be the result. Very
(23:39):
few of the Southern people were conscious of the power
of the North. They had been kept in perfect ignorance
by politicians and were not aware that the whole civilized
world opposed slavery, more especially the English nation. My lifetime
old friend, Judge John P. King of Augusta, was a
union Man at the start and at the end. He
(24:01):
prophesied the failure of the Southern cause and wrote daily
able articles against se session. A large majority of the
thoughtful people of Georgia agreed with his views and were
union men, but the hot heads of the South carried
their point, South Carolina taking the lead by bombarding Fort Sumter,
thus forcing the other Southern states to fall in line.
(24:23):
From this time to the end, I never again altered
my opinions of the ultimate result, but tried to shave
my course so as to save our property. When the
crash came. Peters wanted to save what was his and
make money, and to that end he worked with what
he called a blockading scheme to work with the Confederate
government to help supply cotton coffee and other supplies. He
(24:48):
along with his partners, founded two shipping companies with ships
that just ran the Union blockades, and they did well,
even though some of their ships were lost. Unsurprisingly, estimated
that the venture had made quote something like three million
dollars by the time the war ended. He also noted
(25:08):
that the huge shipping venture had meant that his family
and those of the other investors in the blockade running
business had a lot of supplies that a lot of
other people did not. According to Peters, they shared those
supplies with other families who were not as lucky, and
Mary Jane routinely ran supplies to the hospitals. As General
(25:29):
Sherman neared Atlanta, Richard's family got out on the last
train to Augusta, although he initially stayed behind to keep
an eye on the railroads. He has some interesting stories
about like trying to run to various places in the
city and being told like you got to get out
of here. He did manage to get out of the
city as it was captured, and he described this as
a narrow escape that was at the end of eighteen
(25:51):
sixty four. The family remained in Augusta until the end
of the war. The following spring, when Peters returned to Atlanta,
he looked at all the destruction and he immediately started
planning ways to rebuild. He started working on repairing and
rebuilding the Georgia Railroad first, so that there would be
a way to get supplies into the city and a
way that benefited him financially as well. I think that
(26:16):
that destruction goes way beyond like just the fallout of
a conflict, if folks are not aware, like Sherman ordered
the destruction of anything the Confederates could use. So it
was like the industrial district had been completely destroyed, the
railroad tracks had been torn up, there had been a
(26:37):
huge fire that had spread like way beyond any of that.
So it was immense, an immense amount of destruction. In
April of eighteen sixty seven, Union General John Pope was
made governor of the Third Military District That was one
of five regional entities established by the Union military to
(26:57):
oversee the post war activities in the South. The headquarters
for the Third, which was tasked with overseeing Georgia, Florida,
and Alabama, was in Atlanta. Peter saw this as an
opportunity and encouraged other citizens to join him in welcoming
the general to Atlanta. He was very clearly in favor
of reconciliation with the North and with the country's leadership.
(27:21):
He understood that just bucking against the North after losing
the war would hurt the city and the state and
the whole region. Although of course not everybody agreed with
him or did that. Yeah, there were apparently some very
heated discussions about, uh, what the heck are you doing, dude.
This move to welcome the head of the Third's military
(27:42):
district not only gave Peters though the benefit of Pope's
favor because he led this delegation to welcome him, it
also meant that he was able to influence state matters
through that favor. Since eighteen oh seven, the town of
Millageville had been Georgia's state capital, but when it was
time for a state constitutional convention, under Pope's command, that
(28:04):
convention was held in Atlanta. This has been described as
being a problem of Millageville innkeepers not allowing black delegates
to stay there. It has also been attributed to Richard
Peters and other businessmen in his circle convincing Pope that
Atlanta was more central. Both geographically and as the seat
of industry. By the spring of eighteen sixty eight, after
(28:27):
city officials had made their case, Atlanta became the new
capital of Georgia. Peters served briefly on the city council
so that he could help guide the city through reconstruction,
and Peters once again did not waste any time identifying
how he could help the city grow and how he
could make money in the process. He started to subdivide
(28:48):
the huge tracts of land he had purchased and created
neighborhoods and streets. A lot of the streets in the
city today, like Juniper, Myrtle, and Cyprus, were named by him.
These were the name that he gave to streets that
ran north and south. More or less, Peachtree Road had
already been named, and so these tree names were in
keeping with that theme, although he did also include penn
(29:12):
Avenue as a nod to his home state. The streets
that ran east to west were given numbers. Over time,
these subdivisions were sold off for huge sums of money,
far more Peters would happily point out than what he
had paid for that land initially, but some of it
he also gave away. He donated several acres for the
(29:32):
founding of the new school in eighteen eighty five, called
the Georgia School of Technology, which today is better known
as Georgia Tech. Peters also developed a lot of businesses
that have continued to be part of the identity of
Atlanta right up to the present day. He established a
trolley company in the city, the Atlanta Street Railway Company.
There are some people who will sort of say, like,
(29:53):
this is the pre pre pre pre precursor to our
current mass transit system. That seems like a kind of
a long walk to me. Then make the case that
was though the first public transport in the city. He
also worked to build a hotel that would be worthy
to host any visiting dignitary or government official. He built
the first professional baseball field in the city. It had
(30:16):
a policy that I think they charged twenty five cents
for men, and women could come in for free. It's
really interesting to me when you read this list of
things that he built and developed, both in terms of
infrastructure and businesses, that a Northerner was so deeply crucial
to the rebuilding and economic success of Atlanta after the
Civil War, and all of the things that a lot
(30:38):
of people will be like, this is Southern culture from
Philadelphia of my friends. Yeah, especially since he was a
Northerner who was already there, rather than someone who after
the fact is like, let me come down there, see
what I can do. In eighteen eighty one, after more
than thirty years in the home they had shared from
(31:00):
the beginning of their marriage and where they raised their children,
Richard and Mary Jane moved into a newly built home
on Peachtree Street between Fourth and Fifth that's not standing today.
It was later torn down. Yeah. I think Atlanta History
Center is where I saw it. They have a photograph
of it, and it's quite beautiful. It's like this beautiful
Victorian situation that just looks gorgeous. In his seventies, Richard
(31:24):
Peters was still making business deals. A write up in
the Atlanta Journal from April first, eighteen eighty four, mentions
that he sold one hundred and ninety eight acres to
developer H. I. Kimball, noting that that was the largest
sale of one body of land ever made in the city.
On July twenty sixth, eighteen eighty eight, seventy seven year
(31:45):
old Peters wrote a will It's not clear if there
was a previous will that this replaced, but it was timely.
He died the following year, on February sixth, eighteen eighty nine,
and his will was very brief and very clear. Jane
was to get the house, and after any debts had
been settled, what remained of the nearly one million dollar
(32:05):
estate was to be split evenly among his wife and children.
He was buried in Oakland Cemetery and you can visit
his grave there. Sometimes he also appears as a character
to talk about his life at special events hosted by
the Historic Oakland Foundation. I shar did love going to
those back when I lived in Atlanta. Oakland is great. Yeah,
(32:29):
Richard Peter's fascinating dude. So much to talk about on Friday,
But right now I'm going to talk about coffee, Okay,
because I never tire of talking about coffee. This is
from our listener, Gary, who writes Dear Holly and Tracy,
I listened to your Melita episode today while doing yard work.
Spring is breaking out here in Oregon this week, although
we haven't had much of a winter. Thanks for this episode.
(32:51):
I had no idea that Melita products were named after
a real person. And while I was sad to hear
of the company's ties to the Nazi regime, I also
grew up driving Vulga wagons and I'm sure using many
other products made by companies with complicated histories. Well before
the end of the podcast, I was craving a cup
of coffee, but that is nothing unusual for me. My mom,
(33:11):
born in nineteen twenty two to immigrant parents from Norway
and Denmark, introduced me to coffee early, at about age five.
As near as I can recall me too, I've been
a huge coffee fan all my life and always drink
it black. I don't do that. I grew up drinking
Folgers from an electric cornerwear percolator, which I had learned
how to operate by the age of ten or so.
(33:32):
I don't remember if it was before or after the percolator,
but my mom also used a stovetop corneringwear drip, a
later coffee pot that had a metal compartment for the
grounds between the ceramic pot below and a glass globe
above into which you'd pour the hot water, which dripped
down over the grounds via a small holed sieve. You
can find these in a Google image search. I remember those.
I used to like watching them do the little Perkley Parkley.
(33:56):
I arrived at the University of Oregon just in time
for the flowering of what known as second wave coffee
in the early nineteen seventies, when Eugene was one of
the epicenters of West Coast coffee culture, along with the
Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle. My favorite hangout was on
the second floor of the Smeed, an old downtown hotel
that had been converted into a bunch of counterculture cafes
(34:18):
and businesses. Here you could get pour over coffee made
in single cup melita China cones with fresh ground country
origin coffee in white melita filters. The coffee had exotic
names like Mocha Java, Mocha Java, Sumatra, and Ethiopia, as
well as Columbia, Brazil, and some Central American countries. You
could also buy your own cones, filters and coffees whole
(34:40):
bean or ground. No more Folgers for me. When third
wave coffee came along in the two thousands, again centered
in the Northwest, I enthusiastically jumped on that bandwagon. I've
pretty much made my own coffee a cup at a
time with cones, and filters since the seventies, although there
were a few years when I either lived where fresh
beans weren't available or I could didn't afford them. These days,
(35:01):
I use unbleached filters instead of the white ones. I'm
now lucky enough to live in a town where there
are several small roasters that sell fair trade coffee beans
from individual farmers throughout the world's coffee growing regions. Over
the past decades, there have been periods when health issues
meant I can only drink decaf and sometimes couldn't drink
coffee at all, but those seem to be resolved for
the moment, although I do limit myself to one big
(35:23):
mug in the morning, with an occasional decalf in the evening.
I have lately been watching a Danish via PBS show
called Seaside Hotel and reading the Swedish Police Procedural books
by Henning Mankel and get a huge kick out of
how much coffee my fellow Scandinavians drink. Every time someone
enters a room, they're offered a cup of coffee, which
they almost always accept. I get it. Here's for my
(35:45):
pet tacks. Here is Juno wondering why I'm pulling weeds
instead of petting her. Juno looks like a standard poodle
or a poodle mix in a puppy clip and is
the cutests. I would kiss that snout thirty seven times
a day minimum. I loved all of this coffee talk
because for Season's one, I just say it brings back
(36:06):
a lot of good memories. As a kid of the seventies,
I just remember watching my parents make coffee in a
variety of ways, and I love all of it too.
I influenced myself because after our Melita episode, I bought
a Melita porcelain drip and then I'm still making my
French Press in the morning. Uh huh. But I can
(36:28):
make a Melita cup fast while I wait for my
French Press to that that's funny because I'm a junkie.
I'm telling you, it makes it that much quicker that
I have a cup of coffee in my hand. And
then I'm not like sitting there in the kitchen like
white knuckling the countertop watching the French Press try to
like finish its stuff upright because it doesn't care about
(36:49):
me or time. No, it's French Press, even though it's
our two D two it's really cute. Anyway. I love this.
Thank you so much for writing this email. I love
talking about coffee. As I said, I'm not a kind
of I just love it all. But I understand the
move from Folgers to all of the good stuff, and
I feel like I lived in the Pacific Northwestern I
was a kid. My siblings have lived there, and my
(37:12):
oldest sister is the one that actually did start when
she would come and visit my parents, introducing me to
all of the coffee culture that had come from there.
And that's really where I became an addict. Yeah, do
not wish to see treatment. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at a history
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We also have all of
(37:34):
our show notes available at mistonhistory dot com in case
you want to look up any of the sources we
have used. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast,
you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
(37:54):
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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