East Cobb News

Tom Cousins, the influential Atlanta real estate mogul and philanthropist who developed the Indian Hills subdivision in East Cobb, has died.

Cousins died Tuesday at the age of 93, and left a major imprint on residential and commercial development in the Atlanta area.

Indian Hills, which opened in the early 1970s as a planned, staged development with golf courses and a country club, is considered the key development in the transformation of East Cobb.

Cousins also helped bring professional sports to Atlanta in the late 1960s as the ower of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and the Atlanta Flames, a hockey franchise.

Along with architect John Portman, Cousins during his career included developing many of the landmark buildings of the Atlanta skyline, including CNN Center and the Omni sports arena, as well as the 191 Peachtree Tower.

In addition to redeveloping the famed East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Cousins turned his eyes in the late 1960s to a new kind of development in the Atlanta suburbs.

Until then, most of Cousins’ residential development had been in the Augusta area, where he built prefabricated homes, and was the largest homebuilder in the state of Georgia according to a history of Indian Hills.

He came to Atlanta seeking more opportunities, initially building apartment complexes.

Cousins set his sights on building out roughly 1,000 acres of farmland several miles east of the city of Marietta between Lower Roswell Road and what was then called Upper Roswell Road (now just Roswell Road).

Linking those two roads was Gray Road, which traversed hills that dropped down to Bishop Creek. That became the heart of a planned community with homes and golf courses, the first such development of its kind that far out from the city of Atlanta.

As the development progressed, other changes came about. Gray Road was renamed Indian Hills Parkway. Lots were laid out and sold for as little as $7,000 (in late 1960s money).

But an economic downturn cast doubt on the Indian Hills project, and Cousins had to be talked into finishing the work, according to the Indian Hills history (you can read it at this link).

Lot sizes were reduced and size of the golf clubhouse was also cut down to raise the funding to build out Indian Hills, which was regarded as a very experimental project.

Hal Adams, who worked with Cousins and bought a home in Indian Hills, said in the Indian Hills history that sales were slow at first, but school busing plans in the city of Atlanta resulted in many residents moving to Cobb County.

(Cobb schools began desegregation in the late 1960s, but without a busing program.)

Cousins also had to build a temporary sewage treatment facility at Indian Hills to accommodate the development until Cobb could construct its sewer lines to the East Cobb area.

For the final phase of Indian Hills in the early 1970s, Cousins purchased 3oo more acres of land, built out 350 residential units—including condominiums—as well as a third nine-hole golf course.

By the mid 1970s, growth in East Cobb was exploding, with the opening of Walton High School and other schools in the Johnson Ferry corridor.

Cherie Poss Chandler, who grew up on a farm on Lower Roswell Road at Woodlawn Drive, said the opening of Indian Hills changed everything about the community.

“That’s when it went from being Mt. Bethel to East Cobb,” Chandler said a 2018 interview with East Cobb News.

She said that while she and her siblings still had farm chores to do before going to school—their cows sometimes wandered onto the Indian Hills golf course—their new schoolmates had very different backgrounds.

To promote Indian Hills, Cousins and his team also built tennis courts and swimming pools. The golf course was showcased as the venue for a stop on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour.

The development was sold in 1978 to Futren Hospitality, a private club management that continues to operate Indian Hills today.

Today Indian Hills has more than 1,680 homes on around 2,000 acres. Many of the small, single-story ranch homes that Cousins built are being torn down for mega-mansions selling for well above $1 million.

You can read more about how Indian Hills came to be at this link. The information was compiled by a special committee created in 2008 to collect documents and conduct interviews with residents and key players in the creation of Indian Hills.

Related stories:

• RaceTrac proposed on site of former McAfee House in NE Cobb
• Plans for children’s camp at Paper Mill Road home withdrawn
• Editor’s Note: Apartments and the future of Cobb schools

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