Before it was East Cobb, the Mt. Bethel community was home for Poss family

As a girl in the early 1960s, Gail Poss Towe would sit in front of her family home and count the number of cars passing by on what was called South Roswell Road, or Route 3.

“There was nothing going on,” she recalls of a much slower pace of life.

During those days, the Posses lived in a community that was called Mt. Bethel, named after the Methodist church then located on Johnson Ferry Road, and a school, community center and baseball field across the road.

Gail’s younger sister, Cherie Poss Chandler, remembers cows from the family farm wandering down what had become known as Lower Roswell Road, and into a new development of homes and a golf course called Indian Hills.

By then, the early 1970s, the name “East Cobb” was rolling off the tongues of newcomers moving into a rapidly suburbanizing part of metro Atlanta.

The Posses still called their surroundings Mt. Bethel, but they could see what was coming. While they welcomed newer schools and more conveniences, they also knew that their community would never be the same.

“When Indian Hills opened, that was a huge caveat to a changing community,” said Chandler, the fifth of the Poss children.

“That’s when it went from being Mt. Bethel to East Cobb.”

Memories of another time

Gail and Cherie and their brother Mark, the youngest of six children of Arthur and Evelyn Poss, were childhood witnesses to a stunning transformation of a community that went from rural to suburban within the space of a generation.

Although the Posses never moved, their children went to three different high schools. The oldest, Betty Poss Smith, Linda Poss Webster and Marion Arthur Poss Jr. earned diplomas from Sprayberry, when it was still located on the current campus of The Walker School on Cobb Parkway at Allgood Road.

Gail graduated from Wheeler, and Cherie and Mark from Walton.

Unlike the suburban kids who were becoming their schoolmates, they fed chickens and did other farm chores before school.

Believe it not, they played kickball in Johnson Ferry Road, and walked down the corner of Johnson Ferry and Lower Roswell to the Johnny Perkins and Fred Sauls stores, both country groceries, to spend their allowance money on gum and candy.

Betty was a lifeguard at the private pool at the Parkaire airfield. Cherie recalls a fire station on the current site of the Chick-fil-A on Johnson Ferry. What’s now Merchants Walk Shopping Center was the Porter farm, run by an influential family.

In those days, the intersection of Johnson Ferry and what was called Upper Roswell Road was dubbed Five Points.

“I can’t remember what the fifth road was called,” Towe said.

When the Posses were kids, there wasn’t a nearby police station. In 1980, the old Mt. Bethel Community Center—originally built as Mt. Bethel Elementary School—became the first home for Cobb Police Precinct 4, opened by the county at Arthur Poss’ urging.

The first captain there, Bob Hightower, was good friends with Arthur Poss and later would become Cobb’s first public safety director. The center was the hub of local life, the spot for turkey shoots in the fall, cake walks and Friday community suppers.

Further down Woodlawn Drive was another farm owned by a prosperous businessman, Atlanta car dealer Walter Boomershine, who retired there to raise cows and Tennessee walking horses.

The Posses lived on 10 acres at what is now the southwest intersection of Lower Roswell and Woodlawn Drive. Behind the home, where the current Mt. Bethel Community Center stands, were chicken coops. Black Angus and white Hereford cows roamed in the back, as did quail and bird dogs.

Off to the side was an area called “the onion bed” where vegetables and fruits were grown, and included a grapevine lush with muscadines. Arthur Poss also kept honeybees.

“He came from a long line of farmers,” Chandler says of her father. “He farmed because he loved the land, and he wanted us to learn to grow things.”

Their closest neighbor was Wilce Frasier, who lived on the opposite corner Lower Roswell and Woodlawn in a family home dating back to the late 1890s, where he cultivated a small garden.

“He was just so sweet,” Chandler said.

“His house was fabulous,” added Towe. “There were antiques and flowers everywhere.”

Coming back home to Mt. Bethel

Marion Arthur Poss Sr. was raised on another farm in Mt. Bethel. His grandparents, David and Nancy Poss, settled on some land on what is now known as Johnson Ferry Road, near Post Oak Tritt Road, after the Civil War.

His parents also had land on Johnson Ferry, on the current site of the River Hill subdivision, then moved to the present location of the Johnson Ferry Animal Hospital below Lower Roswell.

That’s where Arthur grew up before living in Brookhaven as a young man. When he returned to Mt. Bethel in the early 1940s, he brought with him his bride Evelyn Barfield Poss, a city girl from Atlanta. In 1947, they moved to a house he built at 4608 South Roswell/Route 3—then a dirt road—and raised their family.

At the time, they used coal to heat the house—there was no natural gas—and Propane tanks to keep the chicken houses warm. Their water supply came from a well.

Arthur made his living as a master plumber, traveling around Atlanta on jobs that included Crawford Long Hospital, as well as businesses and other institutions.

In his soul, however, he was a farmer, and in his spare time he ran a 50-acre spread on South Roswell. In the 1950s, Cobb County government wanted most of his land to build a wastewater treatment plant, and condemned 40 acres.

That’s where the James E. Quarles Water Treatment Plant, completed in 1952 as the first facility of the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority, sits today.

In the 1980s, the land fronting the plant on Lower Roswell became the site for the East Cobb Government Service Center, including the current headquarters for Precinct 4 and Cobb Fire Station 21.

As their children were growing up, Arthur and Evelyn were heavily involved in community life. He served as president of the Mt. Bethel Community Center for 16 years and after retiring as a plumber was a court bailiff.

Another of Arthur’s good friends was former Cobb Sheriff Bill Hutson, and they were regular hunting companions.

Evelyn served on PTA boards at Mt. Bethel Elementary and East Side Elementary and was a devoted member and president of the Sope Creek Garden Club, winning ribbons at the Cobb County Fair for her hydrangeas and other flowers she tended at home.

“She was sweetest lady ever,” Chandler said of her mother.

Subdivided and suburbanized

By the time the Poss children were grown, most markers of the old Mt. Bethel community had been swept away.

The community center was torn down in 2000, when Johnson Ferry was widened to six lanes, and the church was relocated years before across from the East Cobb government center.

While the church cemetery still lines Johnson Ferry near the new Northside medical complex, Perkins and Sauls were replaced by the likes of CVS, Zaxby’s and Tijuana Joe’s. The Parkaire airport gave way to what is now Parkaire Landing Shopping and the Marietta Ice Center.

The U.S. Postal Service wanted to buy the Poss land, prizing the location at the Lower Roswell-Woodlawn intersection.

“Dad turned it down,” Towe said. “He just wouldn’t sell. That’s why the post office (located just down Lower Roswell next to Mt. Bethel United Methodist Church) is where it is now.”

Arthur Poss died in 1990; Evelyn Poss stayed in the home until her death in 1999. The house and the property were sold in 2001.

The current Mt. Bethel Community Center is the home to Aloha to Aging, a non-profit senior services agency, and counseling services provided by Mt. Bethel UMC.

Chandler said that some years before, her father wanted to build a subdivision on the back of the land and have streets named after each of his children, “but Cobb County had a different idea.”

Today, what was the Poss farmstead is now the Whitehall subdivision (below).

The Poss children scattered into adulthood, but not too far away. Betty and Linda, both retired, are still in East Cobb. Cherie lives in Roswell and is a substitute teacher at Roswell High School. Gail and Mark reside in Woodstock. Their brother Marion, who settled in Douglasville, died in 2014 at the age of 68.

Cherie says when she comes back through East Cobb with her son, she’ll find herself pointing to a development and say “that was a pasture,” and offering other such recollections.

The Poss siblings say these things without passing judgment, understanding the nature of the changes they experienced. They did sound bittersweet upon learning of the demolition of the Frasier home earlier this year (previous East Cobb News story here), realizing that truly was the last standing memory of the world they had known as Mt. Bethel.

They were also thinking about what their father thought of what had come to be known as East Cobb, and how it’s growing still.

“For him to see the land turned into buildings, that was just sad to him,” Chandler said.

“He loved the land, and he just loved the Mt. Bethel community.”

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