A Look Back at the Early Days of Georgia Tech and The Flats, by Rod Arroyo, FAICP, Master of City Planning (1982)
I am departing from my regular posts about Detroit history to add a bit of history from my alma mater, Georgia Tech. I have always been fascinated by the school and the history of the area surrounding it.
I decided to prepare an overview that explores the history of Tech, its football program, and places known as Tech Flats and Techwood Flats. The first segment briefly highlights key dates and events from Tech’s early days to the early 1900s. In the following segments, I dive deeper into the land, topography, and other stories of this part of Atlanta.
Early Timeline[1]
1882: Nathaniel Harris, a Macon attorney, was instrumental in creating Georgia Tech. He first learned of European technological schools from Major John F. Hanson, President of the Central of Georgia Railroad. Hanson convinced Harris that Georgia needed a school of technology. Harris successfully ran for a seat in the Georgia General Assembly and eventually became Governor of Georgia.
1885: Inspired by Nathaniel Harris’s vision, a bill authorizing a new technological school was signed into law on October 13, 1885.
1886: Atlanta won the battle to host the Tech campus over Athens, Macon, Penfield, and Milledgeville. Three sites in the City of Atlanta were considered for the school: one on Boulevard, one near the end of Capital Avenue, and Peters Park. The Peters Park site was selected, as Edward C. Peters, son of Richard Peters, donated four acres and agreed to sell some adjacent land at $2,000 per acre.[2] Figure 1 below shows the extent of Peters land holdings in the surrounding area in 1894.
1888: In the fall of 1888, the first two buildings at Georgia Tech opened (see Fig. 2). These included the first Academic Building (now the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Administration Building), with the tower that still stands today, and the Shops building, which also had a tower of complementary design and height. The Georgia School of Technology started with 129 students that year. During its early years, each county in Georgia could send the same number of students to Tech as it had representatives in the State Legislature. In-state tuition was free.
1890: The first Tech baseball game was played (Tech versus University of Georgia). H.D. Cutter, Class of 1842 recalled, “A classmate of mine (A.D. “Duke” Black) pitched and we brought home the bacon, and I know the “Ramblin’ Wreck” was sung by our boys at the time.”
1892: Football came to Tech when the team played three games under Coach Ernest E. West. In the early years, the team was called the Blacksmiths or Smithies and sometimes the Techity Techs. They played at Piedmont Park prior to the establishment of Tech Flats and Grant Field.
1892: A fire destroyed the Shops building, and it was rebuilt without the tower. This second Shops building was demolished in 1968.
1893: On November 4, 1893, Tech football played the University of Georgia for the first time, and “clean, old-fashioned hate” was on full display. Tech won the game played in Athens by a score of 28-6, and Athens fans reportedly threw rocks at Tech players during the game. Tech was accused of having a “ringer” in the game, Leonard Wood, who enrolled at Tech as a sub-apprentice two days before the game.
1903: John Heisman becomes the school’s first full-time football coach. He was hired away from Clemson and offered $2,250 per year and 30 percent of the gate. He was the first-ever paid college football coach in the country.
1905: Coach Heisman hires prison workers to level a playing field for football and baseball, known as The Flats or Tech Flats (see fig. 3). The first games are played there in April (baseball), and Heisman also coached the baseball team. Students designed and built wooden bleachers for the site.[3]
1905: On October 29, 1905, an article in the Atlanta Constitution announced that Coach John Heisman and the Tech team wanted to be referred to as the Yellow Jackets.[4] On November 5, 1905, the Atlanta Journal reports that the Yellowjackets defeated Tennessee 45-0. This was likely the first game for Tech as the Yellowjackets (which was later changed to Yellow Jackets).
1908: The lyrics to the Georgia Tech fight song, “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech,” first appeared in The Blueprint, its first year of publication. Also, the Tech band first played the song to the tune of an old drinking song, “The Son of a Gambolier.”
1913: Tech Trustee John W. Grant donates $15,000 in memory of his deceased son Hugh Inman Grant to establish Grant Field.[5]
1913: Tech, originally an all-male school, admits women to the Evening School of Commerce. Women weren’t admitted on a full-time basis until 1952. Women were not allowed access to all programs and could not live on campus until 1968.
1916; On October 7, 1916, Georgia Tech football wins the most lopsided football game in college history, defeating Cumberland 222-0 at Grant Field.
1917: The undefeated Georgia Tech football team beats Penn at home to win its first national championship. That year, they outscored their opponents 491-17 and became the first team from the South to ever win a football national championship.
1918: Tech sign was added to all four sides of the first Academic building, now known as Tech Tower.
The Land and Topography
The bird’s-eye view image of the Georgia Tech campus from 1892 shows topography in the area, with land sloping towards the Tanyard Creek, which initially started from a spring in downtown Atlanta and flowed north until emptying into the Peachtree Creek in Buckhead (see fig. 4). The map shows the main branch of Tanyard Creek highlighted in blue. Note the Georgia Tech campus’s two towers before the Shops Building fire. The creek area to the right is where Bobby Doddy Stadium at Hyundai Field sits today. Figure 5 shows the campus in plan view in 1899.
Tanyard Creek is named after the Atlanta Tanning Company (specializing in tanning of animal hides), which used to be located south of this area, just northwest of downtown Atlanta (Simpson Street and Orme Street). The general area around the Creek was known as Tanyard Bottom, and many low-wage employees lived there. More about this later.
The bird’s eye view shows that the area now referred to as The Flats was all but flat; it was part of a watershed with slopes draining to the Tanyard Creek. When Coach John Heisman wanted a football field, land was filled in 1905. This is the same general area now known as Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field (former Grant Field). The fill created a level playing field for sports teams. Culverts were used to divert the creek water around and under the field. The name Tech Flats emerged in newspaper articles during this time to describe the area.
A different Tanyard Creek also flows under Sanford Stadium at the University of Georgia in Athens. It was also named for a nearby tanning operation.
The rendering below by architect Ten Eyck Brown shows what Grant Field and the Tanyard Bottoms area looked like in 1917 (see fig. 6). Note the change of elevation south of North Avenue and the culvert running under North Avenue towards Grant Field. This area was described as a shanty town and was also racially diverse.
Grant Field
As noted above, a playing field was developed at Georgia Tech during Coach Heisman’s initial tenure as head football coach. Although the area was used for baseball and football, the Atlanta Journal (May 1, 1911) reported unsafe field conditions at the Flats forcing the baseball team to consider moving to Ponce De Leon Park. In April 1913, Tech Trustee John W. Grant donated $15,000 in memory of his deceased son, Hugh Inman Grant, to establish Grant Field, and this set the stage for a new and improved sports venue. The ground in this area was unstable fill, and construction techniques were modified to use reinforced concrete to provide stability for the stands.[6] Also, Tech students contributed labor to build the 5,600-seat concrete west stands, which were completed in 1913. The east stands were completed in 1924, and the south stands followed a year later, bringing the total capacity to 30,000 in 1925. The west stands were rebuilt in 1944, but rather than remove the original concrete stands below, they were built above them (see fig. 7). The stadium has a current capacity of 51,913, and it is the oldest on-campus stadium in NCAA Division I – FBS.
The Flats and Tanyard Bottom
The area feeding into Tanyard Creek, starting from the north edge of downtown Atlanta to the Georgia Tech campus has been referred to as Tanyard Bottom and Techwood Flats. Also, some newspaper articles refer to the general area around North Avenue, not just Tech campus property, at The Flats. Between the 1880s and 1920s, the area south of campus was a racially integrated neighborhood comprised low-income workers and laborers working in nearby industrial areas, including the Atlanta Tanning Company, from which the name Tanyard is derived. This de facto integrated neighborhood was not typical in the South. Whites and African-Americans lived in the same neighborhood out of economic necessity. Dwellings were comprised of one-story shacks and two-story shanties, and there was an open sewer and active tannery in the neighborhood. Conditions were overcrowded, and some families had to share one room. High rates of disease, death, and infant mortality were found here.[7]
The 1911 Sanborn Company base map shown below (Figure 8) was stitched together from approximately 30 individual maps. I created this to show the approximate boundaries of the general area of Tanyard Bottom and Techwood Flats. Low-income housing was generally located south of North Avenue and north of Cain Street, and bordered by Williams Street on the east and Marietta on the west. This area was also labeled as a “slum area” by the Atlanta Housing Commission in the mid-1930s (see Figure 9).
Atlanta real estate developer Charles F. Palmer was the first to propose a new housing development in the Techwood Flats area, south of North Avenue. He owned substantial properties in downtown Atlanta and was looking to increase value by improving the housing stock to the northwest. Palmer organized a group of like-minded business and institutional leaders to propose that the federal government take on a public housing project. The demolition of a portion of Tanyard Bottom for Techwood Homes, the first public housing development in the United States, began in June 1933. The Public Works Administration was responsible for construction, which was made possible by the post-Depression New Deal and associated government funding projects. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the project in 1935, and he delivered remarks at Grant Field in November 1935.
The Techwood Public Housing project originally contained 604-units of public housing and a 300-student dormitory for Georgia Tech, McDaniel Dormitory, the first building completed in September 1935. This dorm was demolished in 1993, and the rest of Techwood was demolished by 1996 for the Olympic Games and was named Centennial Place.
The New Deal that funded Techwood Homes was influenced by policies that reflected de jure segregation. Harold Ickes, President Roosevelt’s first public housing director, established a “neighborhood composition rule” that stated that public housing should not disturb the pre-existing racial composition of the existing neighborhoods.[8] The Underwriting Manual of the Federal Housing Administration, issued in 1935, had similar policies effectively requiring segregation for federal loan guarantees for housing. The federal government explicitly called for segregation. These practices helped to ensure that segregated areas would remain segregated and African-Americans would be excluded from booming White neighborhoods.
Tanyard Bottom was an exception in the social fabric in much of the country because it was racially integrated. Techwood Homes could have been an example of a racially diverse public housing project and the first in the country, potentially leading the way for more like it elsewhere. Instead of the Public Works Administration (PWA) following the neighborhood composition rule in principle, which would have made Techwood Homes racially mixed, similar to Tanyard Bottom pre-1930s, it was restricted to Whites only. A separate housing project, University Homes, was built for African-Americans around the same time. University Homes with 675 units was completed in 1937. The majority of University Homes was demolished in 2009. It is being replaced by Scholars Landing, a mixed-use, mixed-income development.
Clark-Howell Homes, a 630-unit, low-rent housing project next to Techwood Homes, was completed in 1940. It was also a White-only development until 1968. It was also removed for Centennial Place in the 1990s.
At the time of the development of Techwood Homes, Georgia Tech did not admit African-American students. So if the PWA chose to make Techwood an integrated development, the McDaniel Dormitory and the rest of the Tech campus would have remained White only. In 1961, Georgia Tech became the first school in the Deep South to admit African-American students without the use of a court order.
Georgia Tech City Planning Program
As an alumnus of the Graduate City Planning Program, I am compelled to include a brief history of this program, which was instrumental in my life and career. The program was created in 1950 and bolstered by a $251,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Howard Menhinick was hired from the Tennessee Valley Authority to become Regents Professor and the first Program Director. Menhinick had previously been Director of the United Nations Headquarters planning staff and editor of Planners Journal. His colleagues at Tech included Malcolm Little, one of my professors, who joined Tech in 1953.
Thera Richter (MCP ‘ 59) was the first female graduate of the Graduate City Planning Program and the first woman to earn any graduate degree at Georgia Tech.
Arthur Campbell (MCP ’70) was the first African-American graduate of the program.
The program started as part of the College of Architecture and became part of the College of Design in 2016. It has frequently been ranked in the top ten of planning programs in the United States.
Georgia Tech now offers Masters and Ph.D. programs in city and regional planning. This fall, it will offer a new Bachelor of Science in Urban Planning and Spatial Analytics.
Conclusion
I prepared this post to share highlights of the early days of Georgia Tech and Tanyard Bottom, and to reflect upon the many changes that have led to the place that once included and drained into the Tanyard Creek, northwest of downtown Atlanta. Tanyard Bottom / Techwood Flats and The Flats of Georgia Tech have undergone many changes. Tanyard Creek in this area is underground and no longer visible in the neighborhood. Low-lying land has been filled and replaced by modern development. One of the few remaining symbols of the late 1800s is Tech Tower (Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Administration Building), and the campus has expanded in all directions from this origin point.
Demographics have also changed dramatically. When it was founded, Georgia Tech was all-male and all White. The fall 2024 undergraduate enrollment reflected 60 percent male and 40 percent female. The class included 36.4 percent Asian, 33.3 percent White, 8.3 percent Hispanic, 8.1 percent Black / African-American, 7.9 percent International, 4.6 percent with two or more ethnicities, and 1.3% other/unknown.
The Georgia Tech campus is one of the most beautiful in the country, and Tech is leading the way in innovation, research, education, and much more. It is ranked the 4th best undergraduate engineering program, and all engineering programs are ranked in the top ten. As noted above, the graduate planning program is ranked in the top ten. Many other top ten rankings have been awarded to Tech, including a top ten public school in the country. It is also ranked the second-highest for innovation in the country. There is much history to reflect upon when attending a football game, enjoying a cultural event, studying, or spending time on campus.
[1] Most of the information in this Early Timeline is based on Griessman, B. Eugene, Sarah Evelyn Jackson, and Annibel Jenkins, Images & Memories – Georgia Tech: 1985-1985, 1985, Georgia Tech Foundation
[2] The Atlanta Constitution. February 2, 1937
[3] https://www.livinghistory.gatech.edu/s/1481/45-lh/index.aspx?sid=1481&gid=45&pgid=9968
[4] https://www.livinghistory.gatech.edu/s/1481/45-lh/index.aspx?pgid=10024&gid=45&cid=20699
[5] Atlanta Journal, April 13, 1913
[6] Atlanta Journal, May 14, 1913.
[7] https://sites.gsu.edu/historyofourstreets/2022/04/11/techwood-homes/
[8] ibid and www.epi.org
For rankings, see https://www.gatech.edu/about/rankings