It’s hard to imagine the East Cobb we live in now being mostly farmland not that long ago. But going back in history turned out to a delightful departure from current news cycle for many of our readers after we published a story this summer about a family that remembered the community when it was called Mt. Bethel.
Read the story
As the siblings of a prominent Mt. Bethel family told us, the changes have been rather recent: They were among the first graduates of Walton High School in the late 1970s, attending classes with suburban peers while they grew up on a farm on Lower Roswell Road at Woodlawn Drive.
Some of their cows occasionally wandered into a new planned community with a golf course that changed the area for good.
“When Indian Hills opened, that was a huge caveat to a changing community,” said Cherie Chandler, the fifth of the six Poss children. “That’s when it went from being Mt. Bethel to East Cobb.”
Her sister Gail Poss Towe saw a story we published in May about the demolition of a home near theirs belonging to Wilce Frasier, and was eager to share stories about a very different time.
We sat down with the three youngest children of Arthur and Evelyn Poss, who threw themselves into family and community life with eagerness and impact.
The response from readers to this story was heartwarming: More local history, please! While we haven’t been able to do that as much as we had hoped, we’ve got some ideas along those lines heading into 2020.
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My parents moved us to East Cobb in 1986 and I remember the playing in what my friends and I called “the meadow”, which is now Baldwin Farms off of Timber Ridge. Roswell Road (1-20) was two lanes and I still call it Upper Roswell because there was Lower Roswell and then Upper Roswell Rd. Rick’s Farmers Market used to be where we bought pine straw and fresh tomatoes where Trader Joe’s is now. I even vaguely remember Parkaire Ice Skating being somehow connected to Kroger and getting our first dog, Daisy, from the Humane Society in a hallway there. I love East Cobb history because it reminds me of my childhood and it is so hard to picture the farms that were still around as I entered Middle School. I’d love to hear other people’s memories and/or see photographs from the early 80’s through the 90’s .