It’s The Road TO Roswell, Georgia - An Antebellum NOT Alien Town

This is a "special guest blog" written by Mary Williams.

I love working for the Historic Roswell Convention and Visitors Bureau. It’s a small operation, so we all have a chance to answer the phones. One of things that I do every day is to tell folks how to get from wherever they are to the historic sites in Roswell. I love to say that I have a job where I can tell people where to go and they appreciate it. If they tell me that they’re on Roswell Road, I learned very quickly to find out if they’re coming from Marietta (Hwy. 120) or from Atlanta (Hwy. 9). Both roads are named Roswell Road until you reach the city of Roswell where they change names to Marietta Hwy. and Atlanta Street, respectively. That’s where the confusion really starts.

If you’re coming from Buckhead (Atlanta), Hwy. 9 is called Roswell Road. In Roswell, alone, it becomes Atlanta Street, Alpharetta Street, and then Alpharetta Hwy. Once you’re in Alpharetta, it becomes Main Street and then Cumming Hwy. when you get north of downtown. At the Forsyth County line, it becomes Atlanta Hwy.

This all makes perfect sense to me – each time the road name changes, generally you’ve driven into or out of a city jurisdiction and the road name changes to reflect that it’s either the road TO or the road FROM whatever city name it now carries. This is very confusing to those from out of town, especially those from towns where a road carries the same name from beginning to end.

I’ve found out that this road name changing can even be confusing to others in the tourism industry. One day, I received a phone call from a tourist, looking for Chastain Park. She’d called Atlanta and they’d given her our number because they were sure that since Chastain Park is off of Roswell Road that it must be in Roswell. I explained that Roswell Road is the road TO Roswell, not a road in Roswell, and that Chastain is a city of Atlanta park.

I thought this was an isolated event, until I received a phone call a couple of weeks later from someone who works for Atlanta, asking about Chastain Park. She insisted that it was in Roswell, so I patiently explained that no, it was in Atlanta. She told me that that was impossible, because it was on Roswell Road so I got to explain, once again, that Roswell Road is the road TO Roswell and not a road in Roswell.

I also receive phone calls where folks ask what exit number are we off of I-75 or GA 400. Exit numbers don’t do anything for me. I visualize roads by their name. I see Hwy. 92 (the road from I-75, through Woodstock which becomes Woodstock Road, Crossville Road, and eventually Holcomb Bridge road before you get to GA 400) instead of an exit off of I-75. Maybe that’s a northern thing??? I can remember my trips to New Jersey on business where all directions were given as exit numbers off the New Jersey turnpike. When I’d ask what the road name was, up there, I’d get a blank stare.

Probably the most amusing geography anomaly that we have is the name of the city, itself. Roswell Georgia is an antebellum (before the Civil War) town, just north of Atlanta. During the Civil War, the only structures that were burned were our cotton and woolen mills

Roswell is more of a common town name than I’d realized. One day, a young man came into the Visitors Center. His name was Roswell and he had a goal to visit each of the towns in the United States that had that name and to get a souvenir from each. I can’t remember the exact number of Roswells that he told me, but it was over 20.

Each year, Roswell, New Mexico holds their alien festival. In the months that lead up to that event, we receive quite a few phone calls that ask about our alien festival. It’s happened so frequently that I think we need to design a t-shirt that shows an alien in antebellum dress with the title “Roswell – antebellum, not alien” on the shirt. So far, no one has agreed with me.

Thank you for letting me guest-host a blog on my amusing (well, to me, it’s amusing) experiences with the geographically-challenged public.

NOTE FROM STEVE:

Mary and I have been married for nearly 3 1/2 years, and she has worked for the Historic Roswell CVB for nearly 5 years.

Mary has been very supportive of my "roadgeeking" and I was quite pleased when she offered this "special guest blog" for posting.

I hope you have enjoyed reading it and thank you for doing so. Please come back again.